Synopses & Reviews
“Perhaps,” wrote Ralph Ellison more than seventy years ago, “the zoot suit contains profound political meaning; perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindy-hop conceals clues to great potential power.” As Ellison noted then, many of our most mundane cultural forms are larger and more important than they appear, taking on great significance and an unexpected depth of meaning. What he saw in the power of the Lindy Hop—the dance that
Life magazine once billed as “Americas True National Folk Dance”—would spread from black America to make a lasting impression on white America and offer us a truly compelling means of understanding our culture. But with what hidden implications?
In American Allegory, Black Hawk Hancock offers an embedded and embodied ethnography that situates dance within a larger Chicago landscape of segregated social practices. Delving into two Chicago dance worlds, the Lindy and Steppin, Hancock uses a combination of participant-observation and interviews to bring to the surface the racial tension that surrounds white use of black cultural forms. Focusing on new forms of appropriation in an era of multiculturalism, Hancock underscores the institutionalization of racial disparities and offers wonderful insights into the intersection of race and culture in America.
Review
"[R]eveals a remarkable ethnographic and theatrical eye...a model account of a personal, embodied sociology..." --American Journal of Sociology
"Body and Soul not only sets a new standard for scholarly research and writing on sport. It is a virtuoso performance that could--if properly read and disseminated and emulated--put the study of sport at the center of all sociological theorizing and analysis." --Social Forces
"[A] sociological tour de force...sure to be widely used as an exemplar of how to conduct participant observation research.... It is packed with fruitful conceptual and theoretical discussions." --Qualitative Sociology
"A fresh and authoritative treatment." --The Ring: The Bible of Boxing
"Body and Soul will pull you into the deep rhythms of boxing and should certainly earn a place in the canon of literature in the ring." --Los Angeles Times
"[R]eveals a remarkable ethnographic and theatrical eye...a model account of a personal, embodied sociology..." --American Journal of Sociology
"...a provocative, exhilarating, maddening, and profoundly idiosyncratic effort." --Contemporary Sociology
"Body and Soul not only sets a new standard for scholarly research and writing on sport. It is a virtuoso performance that could--if properly read and disseminated and emulated--put the study of sport at the center of all sociological theorizing and analysis."--Social Forces
"[A] sociological tour de force...sure to be widely used as an exemplar of how to conduct participant observation research.... It is packed with fruitful conceptual and theoretical discussions." --Qualitative Sociology
"A fresh and authoritative treatment." --The Ring: The Bible of Boxing
"Body and Soul will pull you into the deep rhythms of boxing and should certainly earn a place in the canon of literature in the ring." --Los Angeles Times
"Loic Wacquant's Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer is perhaps the best yet sociology of the body---its theorizing is less explicit than is the acuteness of the observations." --Contemporary Sociology
Review
“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.”
Review
“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.”
Review
"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."
Review
"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."
Review
“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.”
Synopsis
When French sociologist Loïc Wacquant signed up at a boxing gym in a black neighborhood of Chicago's South Side, he had never contemplated getting close to a ring, let alone climbing into it. Yet for three years he immersed himself among local fighters, amateur and professional. He learned the Sweet science of bruising, participating in all phases of the pugilist's strenuous preparation, from shadow-boxing drills to sparring to fighting in the Golden Gloves tournament. In this experimental ethnography of incandescent intensity, the scholar-turned-boxer fleshes out Pierre Bourdieu's signal concept of
habitus, deepening our theoretical grasp of human practice. And he supplies a model for a "carnal sociology" capable of capturing "the taste and ache of action."
Body and Soul marries the analytic rigor of the sociologist with the stylistic grace of the novelist to offer a compelling portrait of a bodily craft and of life and labor in the black American ghetto at century's end.
Synopsis
When French sociologist Loïc Wacquant signed up at a boxing gym in a black neighborhood of Chicago's South Side, he had never contemplated getting close to a ring, let alone climbing into it. Yet for three years he immersed himself among local fighters, amateur and professional. He learned the Sweet science of bruising, participating in all phases of the pugilist's strenuous preparation, from shadow-boxing drills to sparring to fighting in the Golden Gloves tournament. In this experimental ethnography of incandescent intensity, the scholar-turned-boxer fleshes out Pierre Bourdieu's signal concept of
habitus, deepening our theoretical grasp of human practice. And he supplies a model for a "carnal sociology" capable of capturing "the taste and ache of action."
Body and Soul marries the analytic rigor of the sociologist with the stylistic grace of the novelist to offer a compelling portrait of a bodily craft and of life and labor in the black American ghetto at century's end.
About the Author
"As serious about the sweet science of boxing as Wacquant is practiced in the craft of sociology, Body and Soul not only sets a new standard for scholarly research and writing on sport. It is a virtuoso performance that could - if properly read and disseminated and emulated - put the study of sport at the center of all sociological theorizing and analysis."--Social Forces
"... a well-written, insightful and above all fascinating account which draws the reader in, combining sociological insight with good stories about strong characters.... this is a great book, which I recommend to anybody with even a vague interest in embodiment, sport, or boxing."--The Sociological Review
"A fresh and authoritative treatment."--The Ring: The Bible of Boxing
"Here is tough-minded social realism standing against a popular neoromanticism, each essential and unavoidable in an ethnography that poses as literature of public truth. Through this clash emerges a model account of a personal, emobodied sociology, depicting how pain and effort become integral to, and constitutive of, the establishment of tightly held group bonds."--Gary Alan Fine, American Journal of Sociology
"Body and Soul will pull you into the deep rhythms of boxing and should certainly earn a place in the canon of literature in the ring."--L.A.Times
"A remarkable, even amazing, sociological study, probably one of the most impressive of its type since Charles Keil's Urban Blues, about blues life and performance in Chicago in the 1960s, or Elliot Liebow's Talley's Corner, about black street-corner men. The sheer mass of detail about the life and trade of boxing in the context of black inner-city life, the richness of its characters, the drive of the narrative... are simply stunning, making for compelling, absorbing reading."--Gerald Early, The Chicago Tribune
"...Body and Soul brings to boxing literature a fresh, gritty and remarkably readable voice. Pound for pound, Wacquant appears to be ready to go the distance with big-name authors in the canon -- even such heavies as Norman Mailer and the late George Plimpton."--San Francisco Chronicle
"Body and Soul is a closely observed and ultimately moving tour through an outpost of a vanishing world, where boxing's codes of masculine honor and monastic self-discipline struggle to overcome the familiar inner-city seductions of drugs, gangs and street crime."--The Washington Post
"...a provocative, exhilarating, maddening, and profoundly idiosyncratic effort."--Contemporary Sociology
"Body and Soul is a gem, destined for a life of classics like Street Corner Society (though much fleshier and juicier and denser), studied over and over again as a pattern to follow, though defying the ability, imagination, and, indeed, humanity of the would-be followers. An act impossible to match. A poem in prose, a work of love and wisdom rolled into one: this is how ethnography should be written, were the ethnographers capable of writing like that." --Zygmunt Bauman, author of Liquid Modernity
"Here is original-minded social science research, carefully done and knowing documentary field work, become something else: an absorbing personal journey of experience, observation, and understanding, compellingly and instructively narrated. Body and Soul is a book that will enliven its readers, acquaint them with a whole world of ambition, purpose, and vulnerability, and live in their minds long thereafter." -- Robert Coles, author of Doing Documentary Work
"This remarkable and courageous book gives life to Pierre Bourdieu's adage that we 'learn by body'. A Frenchman in Chicago sets out to learn about the black ghetto but not through detached observation: he joins the local gym and labors to become a boxer for whom, as for his buddies, 'fighting is my life, my woman, my love'. Though he yearns to become a pro, he never loses sight of the sociology in his quest. Bravo for sticking with science, for this book spells out a stunning lesson in the carnal sociology of where we are and what we are doing." --Jerome Bruner, author of Making Stories
"Body and Soul is a dazzling renewal of the endangered craft of narrative, participant sociology. Wacquant's taut rendering of the tension between the haven of the gym and the engulfing ghetto forms the backdrop for an absorbing exploration of the opposition between the manly discipline of the gym and the short, nasty brutalities of the ring. The result is a truly unique and powerful document that successfully translates the gritty routines and grim dignities of social existence without destroying or demeaning its subject." --Orlando Patterson, author of Rituals of Blood
"A truly exceptional, even historic, piece of research. Brilliantly conceived, beautifully written, personally impassioned and, on multiple levels -- sociological theory, social policy, ethnographic methodology -- an inspiring book. It gives a bittersweet appreciation of what young black men born in 20th-century urban American ghettos might have become on a larger scale, were they given not an easier route but a more challenging, institutionally honored and indigenously supported rite of passage to adulthood."--Jack Katz, author of Seductions of Crime
"With a sociological imagination inspired by Bourdieu and writing that is electric, Wacquant brings to life the pain, sweat, and discipline of boxing, as well as the vivid language, small triumphs, and gritty masculine comraderie of those who devote themselves to it in rundown gyms on Chicago's South Side. With respect and affection for those who mentored him, he takes us into a lifeworld that offers to some an alternative to the deadly streets of urban wastelands."--Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Veiled Sentiments
Table of Contents
The Taste and Ache of Action Preface to the U.S. Edition
Prologue
The Street and the Ring
An Island of Order and Virtue
"The Boys Who Beat the Street"
A Scientifically Savage Practice
The Social Logic of Sparring
An Implicit and Collective Pedagogy
Managing Bodily Capital
Fight Night at Studio 104
"You Scared I Might Mess Up 'Cause You Done Messed Up"
Weigh-in at the Illinois State Building
An Anxious Afternoon
Welcome to Studio 104
Pitiful Preliminaries
Strong Beats Hannah by TKO in the Fourth
Make Way for the Exotic Dancers
"You Stop Two More Guys and I'll Stop Drinkin'"
"Busy" Louie at the Golden Gloves
List of Illustrations
A Note on Acknowledgments and Transcription
Index