![]() In the jook, Hazzard-Gordon explains, an immeasurable amount of core black culture including food, language, community fellowship, mate selection, music, and dance found a sanctuary of expression when no other secular institution flourished among the folk. Jook houses emerged during the Reconstruction era and can be viewed as a cultural response to freedom. Focusing on ten African-American dance arenas from the period of enslavement to the mid-twentieth century, this book explores the jooks, honky-tonks, rent parties, and after-hours joints as well as the licensed membership clubs, dance halls, cabarets, and the dances of the black elite. In northern cities, some aspects of black dance became integrated into white culture and commercialized. Like the blues, these secular dance forms and institutions were brought north and urbanized by migrating blacks. Beginning with the effects of African slaves’ middle passage experience on their traditional dances, she traces the unique and virtually autonomous dance culture that developed in the rural South. ![]() Katrina Hazzard-Gordon offers the first analysis of the development of the jook-an underground cultural institution created by the black working class-together with other dance arenas in African-American culture. ![]()
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