FOR THE WEBSITE
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo15612828.html
American Journal of Sociology
“Hancock’s American Allegory represents the first book-length meditation on how the
neoswing renaissance, and its ahistorical cross-cultural engagement with ‘African
American cultural forms,’ sustains racial domination. . . . Hancock’s prose is…inspired. .
. . . Allegory deserves a readership beyond well-credentialed white liberals committed to
more expansive forms of self-loathing and would be a vital addition to syllabi in courses
on racialization, culture, and methodology. Like the protagonist of Invisible Man,
Hancock’s hunger for justice remains unabated, I figure, and I look forward to his next
excavation of the remaining riddles in the American vernacular.”
Journal of American Culture
"Hancock critically engages the racial imagination surrounding the expressive nature of
dancing and how black and white bodies are coded differently. His argument is an
important expansion of scholarship in American culture because Hancock posits the body
as a site of cultural memory. . . . An important piece of scholarship on racial
displacement, expressive culture, and the residue of racial segregation in urban spaces
and places. The author makes an original contribution to American culture by the honesty
and bravado he displays by writing a genealogy of the Lindy Hop and the complications
of race that influence the dance from the 1920s to the present day Steppin', which is
performed today."
Jive-Talk.com
"You will be glad to have come across this study. It keeps a good balance between
academic study and cultural practice 'as told by an insider' who carefully investigates an
art form both intellectually and physically."
Andrew Deener, author of Venice: A Contested Bohemia in Los Angeles
“In American Allegory, Black Hawk Hancock has written a rich and intricately detailed
ethnography of the distinct worlds of lindy hop and steppin'. Here, readers are offered a
guide to the ways in which cultural expressions have come to occupy separate racial and
spatial realms and how this apparent segregation of race, culture and identity is practiced
in the United States today.”
John L. Jackson, Jr., author of Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity
“Black Hawk Hancock provides a fascinating dance ethnography situation within the
larger context of Chicago’s segregated social landscape. By deploying Bourdieu’s notion
of ‘habitus’ as a recurring conceptual hook in a ‘carnal sociology’ reminiscent of Loic
Wacquant’s, Hancock offers an entertaining and valuable new perspective in the ongoing
debates about the organization and reproduction of America’s racial order. American
Allegory is a fluent and nuanced piece of scholarship.”