Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora

Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora

Johnson, Jasmine E.

Paperback

DanceGeneral SociologyPerformance Art

ISBN10: 0190496053
ISBN13: 9780190496050
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: May 5 2026
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.43 Width: 6.26 Depth: 9.22
Language: English
At the intersection of diaspora theory, dance studies, performance studies, and critical ethnography, Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora explores the relationship between West African dance, race, gender, and sexuality in the United States and Guinea. In this book, Jasmine E. Johnson reveals the power of dance in shaping participants' individual and collective identities through the premise of African connectedness. By considering the relationship between movement, diaspora, and belonging, Johnson offers a study of multiple West African dance and drum contexts, including dance classes in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, dance and drum workshops in Guinea, and the North American Broadway stage.

Johnson explores the ways people with various lengths of experience with West African dance make use of movement to confer self, community, and diasporic membership. Revealing the ways practices of pleasure are enmeshed in the operations of power, intimacy, and difference, Rhythm Nation shows how dance links the symbolic and physical dimensions of diaspora: the imaginative work that fosters diasporic connectedness and the physical motion through and across space that has, and continues to, yield variegated African diasporic communities. Rhythm Nation asserts that West African dance both widens the circle of African diasporic we and interrogates its ever-shifting boundaries of belonging.

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