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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.

In Acoustic Colonialism, Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante examines the role of sound in Chilean and Mapuche cultural production over the last two centuries. Cárcamo-Huechante theorizes sound as a territory of racial, patriarchal, and colonial hegemony as well as of Mapuche struggle, agency, and response to what he calls "acoustic colonialism." From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Chilean literature, radio, and other media have exerted a historic role in disseminating distorted visual and sonic representations of the Mapuche. The enduring effects of what Cárcamo-Huechante defines as the colonial ear—the entry point for these misrepresentations—reflect the logic of the Chilean settler nation-state. In response to these aural and sonorous figurations, contemporary Mapuche writers, artists, and activists have produced their own literary, radiophonic, vocal, and musical expressions. The voices, sounds, and discourses of these Mapuche productions contest and disrupt the acoustic colonialism that has dominated the soundscape of the territory designated in present-day cartography as central and southern Chile. 

This book addresses how the Hopi became icons of the followers of alternative spiritualities and reveals one of the major pathways for the explosive appropriation of Indigenous identities in the 1960s. It reveals a largely unknown network of Native, non-Indian, and neo-Indian actors who spread misrepresentations of the Hopi that they created through interactions with the Hopi Traditionalist faction of the 1940s through 1980s. Significantly, many non-Hopis involved adopted Indian identities during this time, becoming “neo-Indians.”

Exploring the new social field that developed to spread these ideas, Hopis and the Counterculture meticulously traces the trajectories of figures such as Ammon Hennacy, Craig Carpenter, Frank Waters, and the Firesign Theatre, among others. Drawing on insights into the interplay between primitivism, radicalism, stereotyping, and identity, Haley expands on concepts from scholars such as Roy Harvey Pearce’s notion of “isolated radicals” and Jonathan Friedman’s observations regarding the ascendancy of primitivism amid global crises. Haley scrutinizes the roles played by non-Hopi actors and the timing behind the widespread popularization of Hopi religious practices.

In 1926, Harold Keltner, a YMCA Boys Work secretary from St. Louis, and Joe Friday, a member of the Canadian Ojibwe First Peoples, channeled white middle-class fascination with Native Americans into what became the Y-Indian Guides youth pro­gram, engaging over a half million participants across the nation at the height of its 77-year history. Intended to soften the stereo­typical stern father, the program traced a complicated thread of American history, touching upon themes of family, race, class, and privilege.

The Y-Indian Guides was a father-son (and later parent-child) program that encouraged real and enduring bonds through play and an authentic appreciation of family. While “playing Indian” seemed harmless to most participants during the pro­gram’s heyday, Paul Hillmer and Ryan Bean demonstrate the problematic nature of its methods. In the process of seeking to admire and emulate Indigenous Peoples, Y-Indian Guide participants often misrepresented American Indians and reinforced harmful ste­reotypes. Ultimately, this history demonstrates many ways in which American culture undermines and harms its Indigenous communities.

 

A groundbreaking exploration of the unexpected intersections between Haudenosaunee oral tradition and Latter-day Saint scripture

In Unsettling Scripture: Iroquois and the Book of Mormon, anthropologist Thomas W Murphy delves into the visions of Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, the epic narratives of the Iroquois Confederacy, and the origin story of the Book of Mormon, revealing surprising parallels between Indigenous and Mormon traditions.

Through ethnohistorical research and decolonizing methodologies, Murphy reexamines how both communities understand their origins, faith, and prophecy. From Handsome Lake’s revelations to Joseph Smith’s seer stone, from ancient sibling rivalries to the Great Peace, this book unsettles traditional narratives while opening new conversations on scripture, identity, and cultural exchange. Drawing from living Indigenous voices, Unsettling Scripture challenges readers to rethink sacred texts and the histories they tell.