On With the Dance: Nation, Culture, and Popular Dancing in Britain, 1918-1945.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the evolution, experience, and public understanding of popular dancing in Britain between 1918 and 1945. It argues that this period saw the development of a national dance culture, a phrase which should be understood in specific ways. Due to factors such as the transformation of popular dance forms and the opening of hundreds of affordable public dance spaces, dancing became increasingly accessible to and participated in by the whole of the nation. Dance culture also had a strong influence on the cultivation of ideas about what it meant to be British, through the development of the so-called “English style” of ballroom dancing, as well as the thematic content of popular novelty dances such as the Lambeth Walk. Moreover, in response to the growing influence of the United States on British dancing, cultural producers such as the ballroom dance profession and dance hall industry disseminated defensive definitions of Britishness constructed against a highly racialized American other, while British dancers physically enacted their own meanings and ideas about the nation through the performance of popular dances. In this way, the discussion shows that the development of popular dance culture must be understood within a transnational system of cultural circulation, influenced by continental Europe, Latin America, Britain’s colonies, but especially the United States. This study therefore adds to a developing historiography that suggests that British domestic culture and national imagining were forged and influenced by sites and factors including, but not limited to, the Empire. It is also a major contention that contemporary concerns about Americanization existed in tension with many Britons’ fascination with American dance forms, and that the national dance culture was often an unfinished project. This provided a space for the consideration of issues of national concern, including notions of respectability and sexual morality, as well as for reifying or challenging hierarchies of gender, class, and race. Finally, the dissertation argues that the content, as well as the host of cultural meanings associated with popular dancing, were forged through an ongoing negotiation between the ballroom dance profession, the dance hall industry, and the dancing public.