Street Dance and the Dream of Freedom

This chapter provides the capstone of the book’s overall argument, suggesting that participatory dance occurring in contested spaces, especially that which originates in disenfranchised subaltern communities, has been a tool, deployed with previously unremarked consistency, across four centuries of North American cultural history. It reiterates the complex disciplinary resources that provide effective analytical methodology and interpretive frames. The chapter also emphasizes contemporaneity, and the “ongoing” nature of street dance as a political tool, in a comparison of two twenty-first-century examples of movement politics: 2012’s “Occupy” and 2013’s Taksim Gezi Park protests (Istanbul) and finds in these two contemporary examples further evidence of the resiliency and revolutionary political power of bodies moving in space and sound. The chapter and the manuscript conclude with an articulation of the essentiality of multidisciplinary social historiography, as a means of recovering and “voicing” subaltern communities that have been omitted from dominant-culture narratives, but whose contributions--especially in the participatory idioms of music and dance--have been essential in the ongoing story of New World expressive culture.