2009 Pop Conference Bios/Abstracts

Sherrie Tucker

Sherrie Tucker (University of Kansas–American Studies) is the author of Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s (Duke, 2000) and co-editor, with Nichole T. Rustin, of Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Duke, 2008). She is currently completing a book entitled Dance Floor Democracy: the Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen. She is a member of the "Improvisation, Gender, and the Body" funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is co-editor of the journal American Studies, with David Katzman. She was the 2004-2005 Louis Armstrong Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University.Panel(s):
Dance Floor Democracy
Friday, April 17, 2009, 9:00 - 10:45Abstract:

"''Together But Unequal'': Democratic Dancing at the Hollywood Canteen"
Based on interviews with former social dancers about their visits to the Hollywood Canteen, the famous dance floor where civilian film industry workers jitterbugged with military personnel during World War II, my discussion explores the social geography of Los Angeles of the 1940s alongside the social geography of national memory in the times in which the interviews took place (2000-20 06). Like much of the World War II nostalgia that continues to effectively mobilize Americans in support of the nation-at-war, the "official memory" of the Hollywood Canteen synchronizes notions of national innocence, egalitarianism, and US international benevolence with the sounds of big band swing. Interestingly-- in light of the segregation of the Armed Forces, USO, and Red Cross plasma distribution--the racially integrated dance floor of the Hollywood Canteen has often been celebrated as epitomizing its democratic vision. Yet, in interviews, people who danced on that supposedly integrated dance floor (or who tried to) recall and narrate radically different social geographies.

Rather than taking these conflicting dance floor memories as true or false, Dance Floor Democracy ponders methods for studying the "social geography of memory." The analysis suggested in this paper is less interested in trying to reconstruct "what really happened," than in seeking to understand what we can learn about U.S. nationalism from spatial arrangements that interviewees envisioned, and chose to narrate to me, when asked to remember "what happened" on the dance floor at the Hollywood Canteen sixty years after World War II.

PANEL ABSTRACT:
This roundtable stages a conversation between scholars and cultural producers who chart the embodied pleasures and pains of "union and exclusion" in social sites where vernacular dance and music forms conjure and shape the rhythms of the nation across time and place.