Going Off! The Untold Story of Breaking's Birth

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dc.contributor.advisorWoehrel, Mary
dc.contributor.authorAprahamian, Seroui Hagop
dc.date.accessioned2021-07-06T12:50:27Z
dc.date.available2021-07-06T12:50:27Z
dc.date.copyright2021-04
dc.date.issued2021-07-06
dc.date.updated2021-07-06T12:50:27Z
dc.degree.disciplineDance Studies
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractWhen breaking first emerged in The Bronx, New York, of the 1970s, it was a dance practiced almost exclusively by African American teenagers. Yet, most scholarly accounts of the dance have focused on Latino/a youth and media narratives from the 1980s onwards to contextualize the form. As a result, much like jazz, rock n roll, or disco dancing before it, one can refer to dominant discourse on breaking today and find almost no mention of the African Americans who ushered it in. I address this invisibilization of breakings African American founders by analyzing the overlooked accounts and experiences of its earliest practitioners from the 1970s. Utilizing a wide array of non-traditional primary sources, untapped archival material, first-hand interviews, and movement analysis, I offer a revisionist account of the social dynamics and systemic factors that led to the creation of breaking as a distinctly working-class African American expression and its subsequent marginalization and misrepresentation in academia. Given the significant discrepancy between the testimony of pioneering breakers and what has been reproduced in academic writings, I also utilize such testimonies to disrupt prevailing assumptions within the field of hip-hop studies. As part of this process, I emphasize the largely overlooked role breaking played in shaping hip-hops musical development, as well as the impact youth socialization and alternative identity formation had on the cultures emergence. Central to this research is my contention that the non-normative aesthetics and principles of early hip-hop practices were shaped by the underground, working-class dance spaces in which the movement arose, forming part of a broader tradition of cultivating expression within the African American jook continuum.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/38478
dc.languageen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectMusic
dc.subject.keywordsbreaking
dc.subject.keywordship-hop
dc.subject.keywordsb-girl
dc.subject.keywordsb-boy
dc.subject.keywordsb-girling
dc.subject.keywordsb-boying
dc.subject.keywordsbreakdancing
dc.subject.keywordsbreak dance
dc.subject.keywordsurban dance
dc.subject.keywordsstreet dance
dc.subject.keywordsjook continuum
dc.titleGoing Off! The Untold Story of Breaking's Birth
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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