Waltzing in the dark : African American vaudeville and race politics in the swing era /

Gottschild (a cultural historian at Temple Univ.) paints a poignant portrait of black vaudeville ballroom dance team Margot and Norton, who played a significant but silent role within the African American community during the swing era. With insight and honesty, the author reveals careers limited by racial oppression in the pre-Civil Rights-era US. Even though they were prevented from performing in white venues, the team masked its blackness in a repertory based in ballet training, training atypical among African Americans and which served as both "a deception and a protection." Writing in a scholarly, deeply penetrating, yet relaxed and entertaining style, Gottschild focuses on Harlem as the center of the swing era among blacks; appropriation without acknowledgment of black music and dance by the dominant white culture; the parallel decline of swing and of Norton and Margot's career; and the relationship of modernism and the African American swing aesthetic. Rigorous scholarship and enlightened interpretation of race in the context of dance history, cultural studies, and performance studies make this well-written, well-organized analysis of "race as performance politics or performance as race politics" a candidate for all academic and public collections. C. T. Bond; Goucher College