Disco!: Music, Dance, and Style

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.