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Reflections on the Hearing to “Designate the Square Dance as the American Folk Dance of the United States”: Cultural Politics and an American Vernacular Dance Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Extract

“Dance in its sociopolitical aspects,” one theme of the ICTM Ethnochoreology Sub-Group Symposium at which this paper was presented, was a timely one immediately following, as it did, the Los Angeles riots of spring 1992. At that time, one could open the arts section of a newspaper or magazine to find debate raging over such concepts as multiculturalism and diversity. Such controversy within the arts community might have seemed merely a sideshow to the profound interracial, -ethnic, and -class conflicts that erupted then in Los Angles into some of the largest American civil unrest of the century, but the social and political struggle over diversity in our country is a dispute with serious implications for those engaged in arts research as well as for activists and advocates in the public sector.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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References

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