Dance Floor Democracy

Sherrie Tucker is Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s and coeditor of Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, both also published by Duke University Press.

“Dance Floor Democracy is a model for what we might call embodied social and cultural history: works that takes the body (including that of the researcher herself) as a site of knowledge. … Dance Floor Democracy reveals scholarly practice as its own kind of dancing.” - Gayle Wald (Journal of Popular Music Studies) “With its beautiful and clear writing style, this book would be of interest to an audience of general readers, as well as to specialists in dance and jazz. Tucker’s research methodology in this book is applicable to a wide range of interdisciplinary fields, including jazz studies, American studies, African American studies, ethnomusicology, and anthropology.” - Yoko Suzuki (Women and Music) “More than just a straightforward history of the Canteen, Tucker’s smart and sophisticated analysis utilizes this unique wartime institution to understand the variety of ways in which WWII is remembered and memorialized in the present day. … Dance Floor Democracy makes for a thoughtful, eye-opening account of the complexities of the World War II generation, especially given Tucker’s masterful skills as an oral historian.” - Elizabeth R. Escobedo (Western Historical Quarterly) "Tucker contributes here not only to the fields of history, jazz, and American studies but also to the burgeoning field of critical dance studies. Reckoning with dance, in Tucker’s work, is a way to think differently about politics."  - Danielle Goldman (Journal of American History) "Dance Floor Democracy is a valuable and exceptionally well-researched revisionist history of the Hollywood Canteen, critiquing not only the dominant paradigm of a friendly, democratic site, but also giving voice to the ‘others’ whose stories have been eclipsed by the feel-good memory of whom we wish we had been." - Rebecca A. Bryant (Ethnomusicology)

• Acknowledgments vii Prologue. Dance Floor Democracy? xiii Introduction. Writing on a Crowded Dance Floor 1 Part I. On Location: Situating the Hollywood Canteen (and Swing Culture as National Memory) in Wartime Los Angeles 1. Wrestling Hollywood to the Map 25 2. Cruising the Cahuenga Pass(t) 51 3. Operating from the Curbstone 76 Part II. Patriotic Jitterbugs: Tracing the Footsteps of the Soldier-Hostess Dyad 4. Dyad Democracy 107 5. Injured Parties 146 6. Torquing Back 179 Part III. Women in Uniforms, Men in Aprons: Dancing outside the Soldier-Hostess Dyad 7. The Dyad from Without 199 8. The View from the Mezzanine 212 9. Men Serving Men 226 Part IV. Swing Between the Nation and the State 10. (Un)American Patrol: Following the State on the Dance Floor of the Nation 243 11. The Making(s) of National Memory: Hollywood Canteen (the Movie) 281 Notes 321 Bibliography 351 Index 365