Review of "American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination"

American Allegory uses lindy hop—a social dance invented in the 1920s by black youth in Harlem and now practiced mostly by white dancers—to gain insight into the relationship between black and white Americans and their cultural forms. It aims to contribute to theory about how superordinate groups manipulate culture to maintain power, while also accounting for cultural change and exchange. On page 204 Hancock begins to ask sophisticated theoretical questions but, by then, it is far too late to answer them. While Hancock’s central premise is one to which I am sympathetic—that the community of primarily white people who dance lindy hop today are participating in an appropriation of black culture—he’s never able to move past his premise to a useful contribution.