Looking for Social Dance in Toronto's Black Population at Mid-century: A Historiography
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The documentation of social dance within the lives of African-Canadians at mid-century is largely undocumented. This dissertation asks the question: Where did Toronto’s black population go to social dance during the 1950s and what is learned about African-Canadians via the lens of social dance? Through archival research I interrogate both sources and methodological approaches applied to social dance and/or African-Canadian historical work. I argue against reading African-Canadian documents and histories through dominant African-American historical narratives, proposing that historical and cultural overlaps are better understood in tandem with moments of departure into African-Canadian specificity. I look to Canadian contexts pertaining to social dance, legislation, trans-cultural exchange via black sleeping car porters on the train, leisure venues and music to inform close readings of photographs, newspapers and oral histories. This work emerges at the intersection of dance studies, Black Studies, performance studies, visual culture and cultural history and historiography. It proposes ways to contextualize doubt in archival research when verification is unavailable due to the systemic exclusion of African-Canadian and other marginalized bodies from Canada’s historical record. Through case studies my research looks at: photographs as a complex tool of equal rights advocacy; text-based documents that reveal the reinforcement of racist stereotypes through language about the black dancing body and repeated reports of discrimination in searches for “negro” and “dance” in mainstream newspapers; and oral histories as both invaluable and troubling documents that at once conceal and expose otherwise undocumented information pertaining to racism, social dance and African-Canadian heterogeneity. Despite shifting municipal, provincial and federal legislation in 1950s Toronto, leisure culture remained segregated. Alternative venues where African-Canadians gathered for social dancing include the Home Service Association, Universal Negro Improvement Association and University Settlement House (USH). While each of these spaces had unique mandates in terms of communities served, social dances at all three venues were attended by both black and non-black populations during the 1950s. These social dances are reported to have played otherwise inaccessible African-American blues and rock and roll music and resulted in repeated and ongoing interracial community gathering that was not otherwise reflected within mainstream culture. Social dance is proven to be a site of revelation about race, class, gender, generation and the African-Canadian population at mid-century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".