DISCO! Music, Image, Dance

DISCO! Music, Image, Dance takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring disco's untold stories--sonic, visual, and kinetic--from its popular heyday to its many afterlives. The book attests to disco's irrepressibility in cultural practices from the 1970s to the 2020s, tracing its histories and instantiations as these traverse geographies, affects, and memories, and exploring the reaches of disco as an expansive field of music, image, and dance.

Illustrating how disco shows up in multiple and surprising ways across its times and spaces, chapters track the ubiquity of disco not only in relation to music and nightlife but also fashion, film, literature, poetry, dance, performance art, digital media, museums, exercise, activism, and community. DISCO! offers an expanded and necessarily ambivalent view of the value of disco-its embrace of both the ridiculous and the sublime, and its involvement in both progressive and reactionary social tendencies.

Stretching disco studies towards a more capacious logic of valuation, contributors reveal disco to be as frivolous as it is urgent, as fanciful as it is (under)grounded, as much to do with oppression as liberation. DISCO! attests to the undisciplined and inclusive attention which disco, as a tentacular global cultural phenomenon, duly deserves and requires.

Mimi Haddon is Associate Professor in Music at the University of Sussex.

Michael Lawrence is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex.

Arabella Stanger is Associate Professor in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Sussex.

Mimi Haddon, Michael Lawrence, and Arabella Stanger
Introduction: DISCO! Music, Image, Dance

Melissa Blanco Borelli
Prelude: “Disco, Divas and Dance Studies”

Section One: Music

Chapter 1: Alex Jeffery, “Cinderella in Eurodiscoland: Donna Summer's Once Upon a Time and the Progressive Rock Connection”

Chapter 2: Barbara LeBrun, “In Defence of Dalida: Nostalgia, Dancing, and Vulgarity in French Disco”

Chapter 3: Jack Parlett, “The First Days of Disco: Nostalgia, Fire Island and Dancer from the Dance”
Chapter 4: Daniel Kane, “The Best Minds of My Generation Go Bang!: On Arthur Russell and Allen Ginsberg”

Chapter 5: Mimi Haddon, “From Disco to Dance: Progressive Urban Contemporary and the Aesthetics of Play”

Chapter 6: Lucy Robinson, “Disco as Community, Space and Memorialisation: Jimmy Somerville fights AIDS in 4 Albums”

Chapter 7: Jaap Kooijman, “Dancing in the Dead Boys' Club: 1990s Retro-Disco and the Memory of AIDS”

Section Two: Image

Chapter 8: Adrian Loving, “Reflections on Aesthetics and Black Excellence in the Disco Era”

Chapter 9: Joe Wlodarz, “'Caught in the Act': Village People and the Crossover of Gay Macho”

Chapter 10: Ryan Powell, “Disco's Suck: Discophobia and the Foreclosure of Blow Job Temporality in Looking for Mr. Goodbar”

Chapter 11: Silpa Mukherjee, “Starry Nights: Disco and 1980s Bombay Film Culture as Contraband”

Chapter 12: Jakub Machek, “Between the Discotheque and the Screen: The Role of Disco in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia”

Chapter 13: Tamara Tomi?-Vajagi?, “Disco as Open Image: Internet Sightings, Cryptic Denotations, and 'Disco Girls'”

Chapter 14: madison moore, “Brown Disco! madison moore in dialogue with Nao Bustamante”

Section Three: Dance

Chapter 15: Keith Gildart and Rosalind Watkiss Singleton, “The English Civil (Disco) War: Northern Soul, Club Culture, and Saturday Night Fever in Wigan and Wolverhampton, 1973-81”

Chapter 16: Ivan Munuera, “Rushin' in the Sky”

Chapter 17: Michael Lawrence, “Burn, Baby, Burn - Disco Aerobics! Working it and Working Out”

Chapter 18: Qian Wang, “All About My Mother: A Family Narrative of Nostalgia and Time-Space in Chinese Disco”

Chapter 19: Arabella Stanger, “Disco Pessimism: A School Disco at Tate Modern”

Chapter 20: Kareem Khubchandani, “'The Land of Disco': Arshia Haq's Insurgent Curation at Discostan”

Thomas F. DeFrantz
Afterword: “Disco! After the Dance”

Index