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This chapter examines the dynamics of the white cross-cultural engagement with the Lindy Hop, which is at times a conscious intention and at other times something that goes on without any awareness at all. It considers these engagements through three dominant modalities: minstrelsy, whitewashing, and commodification. These modes of engagement show how the negotiation of everyday cultural practices often leads to a complex and contradictory set of positions that serves as mechanisms of racial domination. In order to draw out the “in the moment” dynamics of dancing, the notions of expression and skill are foregrounded, as well as the tensions and contradictions that emerge in direct relation to the general unawareness of the racial origins and associations of the Lindy Hop.

This chapter highlights the lived immediacy of dancing leading to both a simultaneous investment in mastery of those embodied practices and an obliviousness to how those interactions erase the historical conditions of those cultural forms. By mapping out the dominant discourses through which the dance is conceptualized and articulated, it shows how the very discourses through which people understand their actions are always subject to those who wield the most power over them. Here, the theme of cultural appropriation in relation to the specificities of the Lindy Hop revival allow the dance to be openly embraced as a cultural form since it has no current grounded racial identity in popular culture. As a result, these discourses provide a window into understanding how the dominant racial logic of American society circulates even in the most apparently innocuous cultural practices.

Through an exposition of learning how to dance, this chapter dramatizes the bridge between the dance as a cultural category and the processes of embodiment and inculcation of dance as practice. It demonstrates how even the most “natural” expressions are undergirded by bodily labor. By dissecting four major components of the Lindy Hop (choreography, leading and following, improvisation, and style) the chapter illuminates the centrality of performance in relation to cultural embodiment and racial identities. It concludes by discussing those moments of mastery in which the dance becomes seamless and transparent, to the point of seeming instinctual to the outside observer as well as to the dancers themselves.

This chapter examines the history of the Lindy Hop and what its revival says about the ongoing story of our struggles with “American” cultural identity. It relates the Lindy Hop scene to the social dance world of Steppin' in order to understand the Lindy Hop in relation to race, identity, and contemporary American society. It discusses the need to shift the study of race and ethnicity back onto whiteness and the ways in which the privileges of whiteness are institutionalized and naturalized; Ralph Ellison's thoughts on African American culture; and the carnal sociology approach. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter reflects on the limitations of cultural appropriation as a viable way to come to a sociological explanation for cross-cultural engagement. It offers some possible alternative orientations that could potentially open up common ground and hybrid space for new possibilities of racial engagement, interaction, and connection that emerge through “positive” racial representations. This is not just an avenue of analysis for the Lindy Hop, but a model for exploring racial interactions at their localized level of engagement beyond the realm of dance, in all spheres of cultural-racial intersections.

This chapter discusses the author's immersion into the worlds of Lindy Hop and Steppin'. He participated in all aspects of the Lindy Hop dance culture and became a regular social dancer in the Chicago Steppin' world. The present volume is a confluence of three narratives: (1) an historical narrative of his immersion in and passage through the Lindy Hop and Steppin' worlds; (2) a personal narrative of his own development as a student of dance, as a scholar, and as an individual; and (3) a theoretical and methodological narrative that develops his experiences and approaches in the field to larger studies of race, culture, and identity.

This chapter presents the author's own reflections as an embedded and embodied ethnographer in relation to the craft he mastered and the worlds he traveled through on the way to that mastery. This reflection takes stock of his doubly transformative odyssey as both carnal sociologist and Lindy Hopper/stepper. In doing so, this reflection considers ways to establish new inroads into the interconnections between race and culture at both theoretical and empirical, as well as intellectual and practical, levels in relation to the allegory of dance as a racial-cultural dynamic working itself out within the larger context of American society.

This chapter focuses on the hot-swing numbers that the Clouds of Joy recorded in the period between March 1936 and July 1941. It shows that despite evident qualities of the hot-jazz styles of New York and Kansas City, the swing records of Kirk’s band display a comparatively restrained but elegant character. Unlike other black swing bands, the Clouds of Joy do not impress with rhythmic drive, unusual sonorities, or sheer volume. Their swing style is more subtle, unobtrusive, and refined. So, this chapter asks, how can we account for the distinctively restrained-but-elegant quality in the swing recordings of the Clouds of Joy? This central question is addressed with reference to social dancing, but it is as much about race as style: Kirk and his band continued to develop a black-jazz style that ensured their music appealed to Decca’s race-records market while also Signifyin(g) stereotypes of blackness associated with swing music in a subversive way.

This chapter draws upon iconography, film studies, and semiotics in two examples of electronically mediated masking that intentionally subvert the voyeuristic white gaze. It investigates the descriptions of Lindy Hop in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1966) and the blackface in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000), which intentionally juxtapose explicitly racist caricature and performative virtuosity, reading those passages for their cultural/political subtextual discussions. It argues that Malcolm X and Spike Lee--as cultural commentators from within the African American community--use dance as a means to problematize the paradox of black creativity’s virtuosity as it has flourished “behind the minstrel mask.”