Description
Book SynopsisDancing Black, Dancing White: Rock ''n'' Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s offers a new look at the highly popular phenomenon of the televised teen dance program. These teen shows were incubators of new styles of social and popular dance and both reflected and shaped pressing social issues of the day. Often referred to as dance parties, the televised teen dance shows helped cultivate a nascent youth culture in the post-World War II era. The youth culture depicted on the shows, however, was primarily white. Black teenagers certainly had a youth culture of their own, but the injustice was glaring: Black culture was not always in evident display on the airwaves, as television, like the nation at large, was deeply segregated and appealed to a primarily white, homogenous audience. The crux of the book, then, is twofold: to explore how social and popular dance styles were created and disseminated within the new technology of television and to investigate how the show
Table of ContentsForeword Introduction 1. Rock and Roll Dance and the TV Experiment 2. Transgressing Boundaries: Restraint and Rebellion in the Teen Dance Shows 3. "'Movin' and Groovin'": Black Teen Dance Shows of the 1950s and Early 1960s 4. Rock and Roll Dances and the Africanist Aesthetic 5. Girl Power: Youth Culture and Female Fandom 6. Storming the Sixties: From Teen Dances to Shindig! Epilogue: Soul Train Notes Index
