Baring Unbearable Sensualities: Hip Hop Dance, Bodies, Race, and Power

By: Rosemarie A. Roberts

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Synopsis: Baring Unbearable Sensualities brings together a bold methodology, an interdisciplinary perspective and a rich array of primary sources to deepen and complicate mainstream understandings of Hip Hop dance, which have generally reduced it to a set of techniques divorced from social contexts. Drawing on close observation and interviews with Hip Hop pioneers and their students, Rosemarie A. Roberts proposes a framework that opens up new theoretical space for considering collective knowledge formations and collective knowledge production. Roberts argues that the historical, cultural and social experiences of marginalized black and brown bodies materialize in and through Hip Hop dance from the streets of the South Bronx and other urban centers to contemporary worldwide expressions. An Afro-diasporic dance form, Hip Hop dance, she argues, is a provocative and sentient process of resisting oppressive manifestations of race and power. A companion web site contains over 30 video clips referenced in the text.