Social Ghosts and Collective Bodies in Rosemarie Roberts’ Baring Unbearable Sensualities: Hip Hop Dance, Bodies, Race, and Power

Abstract

Baring Unbearable Sensualities: Hip Hop Dance, Bodies, Race, and Power offers a profoundly insightful and necessary contribution to the growing scholarship of Hip Hop dance and performance. This first book by Rosemarie Roberts extends key points in her previous research on embodied pedagogies, dancing with social ghosts, and Black and Brown bodies as sites of knowledge. Through an interdisciplinary approach of social psychology, anthropology, and dance studies, Roberts analyzes dance and movement to problematize the ways in which the body is seen and written. In particular, her work challenges how the fields ranging from dance to anthropology have set limitations on the power of the body, in particular on collective bodies, and more specifically on Black and Brown bodies. Roberts draws from the works of dance and performance studies scholars Randy Martin, Deidre Sklar, Thomas DeFrantz, and Imani Kai Johnson, among others, and centers her ethnographic research on The School at Jacob’s Pillow’s 2009 Hip Hop Continuum which featured Hip Hop dance practitioners Rennie Harris, Moncell Durden, Mr. Wiggles, Marjory Smarth, Ynot, and West African dance practitioner Cachet Ivey. The strengths of Roberts’ book are her critique of the objectifying white gaze and her expanded sensorial approach that (re)contextualizes Black and Brown bodies. In Hip Hop dance, as in other Afro-diasporic dance forms, Black and Brown bodies carry their racialized histories and sensualities that can be “seen” by moving beyond an ocularcentric approach, that is, an approach that privileges the sense of sight.