Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship by Aimee Meredith Cox, assistant professor of African and African American studies at Fordham (Duke)
In Shapeshifters, Aimee Meredith Cox writes about the young black women she met and came to know during the eight years she spent doing fieldwork at a homeless shelter in Detroit, “arguably one of the most beleaguered U.S. cities.” Cox, a former professional dancer, gives voice to the girls as they and their families struggle to make a living in a service-oriented economy. She focuses on how the girls fight the stereotypes (of race, poverty, and gender) that constrain them, using dance and poetry and other means to “shift the terms” of what it means to be seen as “acceptable or disrespectable citizens, through their own definitions of family, care, love, success, and labor.”
