ABSTRACT
The history of African American dance has been especially rich, offering a potent area of inquiry that has aided the students in rethinking the development of US performance traditions. It briefly defines the contours of African American dance, articulate several imperatives for studying this history and outlines the ways in which African American dance can be read into mainstream narratives about American concert dance traditions. The ultimate goal is to encourage readers to expand the centre of their inquiry in dance history and to complicate dominant readings of that history by becoming familiar with and conversant in the work of African American dancers and choreographers. A critical point: the execution or performance of African American dance does not depend necessarily on the presence of African American bodies. Such movement vocabularies have been danced by bodies that claim other sociocultural identities.
