lo s
a n g e l e s
into the city, or the stroll down Lennox Avenue, choreography was an art, a practice of moving even when there was nowhere else to go, no place left to run. It was an arrangement of the body to elude capture, an effort to make the uninhabitable livable, to escape confinement of a four cornered world, a tight, airless room. Tumult, upheaval, flight — it was the articulation of living force, or at the very least trying to, it was the way to insist I am unavailable for servitude. I refuse it.
r e v i e w
o f
b o o k s
Black life, especially as rendered by the social sciences that predicted the inevitability of Black extinction in the early 20th century. For Hartman, the range of Black movement from migration to dank dance halls to the chorus line to the palpable sexual energy that courses through the women in the text is life, expectation, hope. It is a different kind of movement, certainly distinguished from the motion required to “strive,” where all is succumbed to the movement up or down an imagined social ladder. How does this connect with Hartman’s description of Black women as progenitors of the modern? There are Freedom, here, is not a specific desti- two ways to understand this. The first is nation or a single thing that can be gath- through the recognition that moderniered by way of a document or a prom- ty is a highly contingent and cumulaise. Freedom is self-determination and tive expression of the previous epoch. In self-possession. It is the ability to move in other words, the supposed new world the world free of economic, political, so- of American Progressivism stood high cial coercion. It is the ability to say, “yes” upon the shoulders of the society it was — or “no” — and mean it; it is relaxation; intended to replace: its prehistory was it is: absolutely central to its 20th-century emergence. If the “rosy dawn” of capi[t]he swivel and circle of hips, the talism, as Marx called it, came dripping nasty elegance of the Shimmy, into existence with the blood and dirt of the changing-same of collective slavery and genocide, then its maturamovement, the repetition, the tion — measured in the innovations of improvisation of escape and subwar, imperialism, industrialization, and sistence, bodied forth the shared urbanization — were only possible bedream of scrub maids, elevator cause of the exploitation and abuse of boys, whores, sweet men, steveBlack women’s bodies. The resistance to dores, chorus girls, and tenement this order could also be read through the dwellers — not to be fixed at the violent thrashing of Black women’s bodbottom, not to be walled in the ies against the new order, boundaries and ghetto. Each dance was a rehearsborders that distinguished the supposed al for escape. modern age. Hartman invokes this paradigm when she describes how social reHartman is consumed with the move- formers dismissed Black women and girls ment, the physical locomotion and literal as “ungovernable” or when she describes vibration of Black people as a rejoinder to the sonic upheaval of young Black womthe stasis and supposed predictability of en who resisted their imprisonment with 174
