Kinethic California: Dancing Funk and Disco Era Kinships

Kinethic California explores the emergence of new black social and vernacular dance styles in 1970s California, focusing on techniques and practices of first-generation dancers. It argues that dance is a form of kinetic kinship formation, reorienting dancers toward continuity in black dance lineages despite disappearance and loss. The book highlights the aesthetic sociality and geographic movement of young artists, providing materials for collective study and creative play.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 242 pages
Publication date: 31 May 2024
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press

Kinethic California: Dancing Funk and Disco Era Kinships is a book that explores the emergence of new forms of black social and vernacular dance in 1970s California, which are embedded in local cultural histories but also connected to the contemporary global culture of hip hop/streetdance. The book uses interviews and ethnographies of first-generation (1960s-70s) dancers of strutting, boogaloo, robotting, popping, locking, waacking, and punking styles to advance a theory of dance as kinetic kinship formation. The term "kinethic" is used to bring attention to motion at the core of black aesthetics that generate dances as forms of kinship beyond blood relation. Kinethics reorient dancers toward kinetic kinship in ways that give continuity to black dance lineages under persistent conditions of disappearance and loss. As dancers engage kinethics, they reinvent gestural vocabularies that describe worlds they imagine into knowing-being.

The stories in Kinethic California attend to the aesthetics of everyday movement, seen through the lens of young artists who listened to their family's soul and funk records, observed the bent-leg strolls and rhythmic handshakes of people moving through their neighborhoods, and watched each other move at house parties, school gyms, and around-the-way social clubs. Their aesthetic sociality and geographic movement provided materials for collective study and creative play. Bragin attends to such multidirectional conversations between dancer, community, and tradition, by way of which California dance lineages emerge and take flight.

Weight: 502g
Dimension: 150 x 228 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780472056415