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2026 Dance Studies Association de la Torre Bueno First Book Award Shortlist Finalist

A Beautiful Fight examines the potentials and limits of capoeira Angola to cohere a multiracial community committed to antiracist struggle. Capoeira, a musical fight-game that originated among enslaved Africans in Brazil, holds special significance for Black Brazilian activists as a spiritual and political practice that affirms the value of Black lives, thus countering anti-Black violence sanctioned by the Brazilian state. However, many capoeira groups count more white practitioners than Black, especially groups of the politicized, Afrocentric style capoeira Angola, raising debates about appropriation of Black culture that resonate across the Americas. A Beautiful Fight addresses these tensions. Drawing on ethnographic research with a multiracial capoeira Angola group in Brazil’s Bahian sertão or backlands, Esther Viola Kurtz explores diverse group members’ understandings of capoeira’s spiritual and political meanings and considers how white participation impacts capoeira’s antiracist politics. A Beautiful Fight argues that white practitioners occupying space in capoeira divert attention from Black members’ concerns and reproduce racist and colonialist ideologies, albeit unintentionally. In this way, the book complicates claims that shared music and dance bridge differences and facilitate cross-racial unity, yet Kurtz proposes that capoeira still transmits knowledge and tools that, when used with intention, commitment, and care, can be wielded to collaboratively contest racism and imagine a more just world.

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books.

The second volume, A Buyer’s Market (1952),finds young Nick Jenkins struggling to establish himself in London. Amid the fever of the 1920s, he attends formal dinners and wild parties; makes his first tentative forays into the worlds of art, culture, and bohemian life; and suffers his first disappointments in love. Old friends come and go, but the paths they once shared are rapidly diverging: Stringham is settling into a life of debauchery and drink, Templer is plunging into the world of business, and Widmerpool, though still a figure of out-of-place grotesquerie, remains unbowed, confident in his own importance and eventual success. A Buyer’s Market is a striking portrait of the pleasures and anxieties of early adulthood, set against a backdrop of London life and culture at one of its most effervescent moments.

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."--Chicago Tribune

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."--Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”--Kingsley Amis

A Guru's Journey provides an ethnographic study of the dance form in the San Francisco Bay Area community formed by Das. Sarah Morelli, a kathak dancer and one of Das's former students, investigates issues in teaching, learning, and performance that developed around Das during his time in the United States. In modifying kathak's form and teaching for Western students, Das negotiates questions of Indianness and non-Indianness, gender, identity, and race. Morelli lays out these issues for readers with the goal of deepening their knowledge of kathak aesthetics, technique, and theory. She also shares the intricacies of footwork, facial expression in storytelling, and other aspects of kathak while tying them to the cultural issues that inform the dance.

Whether in the private parlor, public hall, commercial "dance palace," or sleazy dive, dance has long been opposed by those who viewed it as immoral--more precisely as being a danger to the purity of those who practiced it, particularly women. In Adversaries of Dance, Ann Wagner presents a major study of opposition to dance over a period of four centuries in what is now the United States.

Wagner bases her work on the thesis that the tradition of opposition to dance "derived from white, male, Protestant clergy and evangelists who argued from a narrow and selective interpretation of biblical passages," and that the opposition thrived when denominational dogma held greater power over people's lives and when women's social roles were strictly limited.

Central to Wagner's work, which will be welcomed by scholars of both religion and dance, are issues of gender, race, and socioeconomic status.

Aesthetics of Displacement centers the embodied aesthetic practices of Afro-Colombian people and their experiences, asking readers to reassess Colombian national history, legacies of colonialism and racism, politics of memory, and the inheritances of violence related to the Colombian armed conflict. Through a theoretical frame of destierro or “displacement” and an examination of the Afro-Colombian philosophy vivir sabroso or “to live harmoniously,” Aesthetics of Displacement focuses on how theatre-makers, choreographers, filmmakers, activist groups, and photojournalists create an embodied Colombian perspective informed by decolonial practices and thinking that rely on movement as a strategy for existence and that counter European hegemonic aesthetics as the major foundations of taste and value. This approach not only enhances our understanding of contemporary Colombian culture, but also highlights the importance of performance as a means of resistance and identity formation.

African Performance Arts and Political Actspresents innovative formulations for how African performance and the arts shape the narratives of cultural history and politics. This collection, edited by Naomi André, Yolanda Covington-Ward, and Jendele Hungbo, engages with a breadth of African countries and art forms, bringing together speech, hip hop, religious healing and gesture, theater and social justice, opera, radio announcements, protest songs, and migrant workers’ dances. The spaces include village communities, city landscapes, prisons, urban hostels, Township theaters, opera houses, and broadcasts through the airwaves on television and radio as well as in cyberspace. Essays focus on case studies from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania.

Perpener begins with Hemsley Winfield, a versatile performer and director whose company, the New Negro Art Theatre, launched the careers of Edna Guy, Randolph Sawyer, and Ollie Burgoyne, among many others. Also profiled are Charles Williams, who directed the Hampton Creative Dance Group at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, and Asadata Dafora Horton, a native African who established himself as the preeminent purveyor of African dance and culture in America during the 1930s. Dafora's African Dance Troupe, which at one point came under the umbrella of the WPA Federal Theatre Project, was a focal point of the famous "voodoo" Macbeth, an all-black production set in Haiti and directed by the young Orson Welles.

Stepping onto the path cleared by these early innovators, two important artists combined dance with anthropology to expand the reach and scope of African-American dance. Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus both studied anthropology and engaged in extensive fieldwork that infused their dances with Caribbean and African influences. Dunham founded two ambitious training schools, one in New York and one in East St. Louis, while Primus's projects included an African Arts Center in Monrovia, Liberia, dedicated to collecting dance material, teaching, and organizing professional performances.

Perpener examines the politics of racial and cultural difference and their impact on these early African-American dance leaders. In particular he documents the critical reception of their work, detailing the rigid preconceptions of African-American dance that white critics imposed on black artists. He also surveys important black dancers and choreographers since 1950, including Talley Beatty, Donald McKayle, Alvin Ailey, Eleo Pomare, Rod Rodgers, and Dianne McIntyre, and discusses how they have extended and diverged from traditions established by their predecessors.

While Africans and their descendants have lived in Mexico for centuries, many Afro-Mexicans do not consider themselves to be either black or African. For almost a century, Mexico has promoted an ideal of its citizens as having a combination of indigenous and European ancestry. This obscures the presence of African, Asian, and other populations that have contributed to the growth of the nation. However, performance studies—of dance, music, and theatrical events—reveal the influence of African people and their cultural productions on Mexican society.

In this work, Anita González articulates African ethnicity and artistry within the broader panorama of Mexican culture by featuring dance events that are performed either by Afro-Mexicans or by other ethnic Mexican groups about Afro-Mexicans. She illustrates how dance reflects upon social histories and relationships and documents how residents of some sectors of Mexico construct their histories through performance. Festival dances and, sometimes, professional staged dances point to a continuing negotiation among Native American, Spanish, African, and other ethnic identities within the evolving nation of Mexico. These performances embody the mobile histories of ethnic encounters because each dance includes a spectrum of characters based upon local situations and historical memories.

Spalding analyzes how issues as disparate as industrialization around coal, plantation culture, race relations, and the 1970s folk revival influenced freestyle clogging and other dance forms like square dancing in profound ways. She reveals how African Americans and Native Americans, as well as European immigrants drawn to the timber mills and coal fields, brought movement styles that added to local dance vocabularies. Placing each community in its sociopolitical and economic context, Spalding analyzes how the formal and stylistic nuances found in Appalachian dance reflect the beliefs, shared understandings, and experiences of the community at large, paying particular attention to both regional and racial diversity.

Written in clear and accessible prose, Appalachian Dance is a lively addition to the literature and a bold contribution to scholarship concerned with the meaning of movement and the ever-changing nature of tradition.

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books.

As the fourth book, At Lady Molly’s (1957), opens, the heady pleasures of the 1920s have begun to give way to the austerity and worries of the 1930s. Even so, the whirl of London life continues: friends commit to causes and to spouses, confess adulteries, and fall victim to dissipation and disillusion. As Nick moves ever more comfortably in the worlds of art, culture, and society, Powell’s palette broadens: old friends make appearances, but new ones take places on the stage as well—including Isobel Tolland, whom Nick knows at first sight he’s destined to marry.

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."--Chicago Tribune

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."--Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”--Kingsley Amis