As the most downloaded social media app of 2020, the video-sharing sensation TikTok exploded beyond its targeted teenage audience into a mainstream phenomenon, bringing short dance challenges into the online lives of millions of users just as in-person activities were being shut down due to the COVID pandemic. In Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok, Trevor Boffone dives into TikTok's lesser-known competition, Dubsmash, to interrogate how this app creates digital space for real-life identity formation through the use of hip-hop music and dance, especially for young Black girls. While not the most popular app, Dubsmash has had a major cultural impact on those Boffone has named “renegades,” artists and everyday kids who make “Dubs” or short dance videos that express their Black youth identity through hip-hop culture. As an of-the-moment study of Zoomers (those born between the mid-1990s to early 2010s), digital interconnectivity, and hip-hop culture, Renegades skillfully addresses the shift to coming of age in a virtual world and smartly observes how young Black women are leading the charge through dance.
Boffone—a white, self-described “nerdy” teacher with a PhD in Latinx theater and literature—teaches Spanish predominantly to youths of color in a large, urban public high school in Houston, Texas. His experiments in learning dance challenges and posting them onto his now viral Instagram account (@dr-Boffone) landed him and the students who perform with him on major news outlets, including Good Morning America. Written with wit and self-effacement, Renegades explores his own experience in the classroom, flipping his position of teacher to one of student and examining the changing power dynamics as he learned from and appeared alongside his own students in the “Dubs.” Unlike the pervasive claims on the dangers of social media, Boffone instead argues that digital spaces like Dubsmash and its experience of dancing together promotes connection over isolation, amplifies Black girl identities, and creates new possibilities for success for those on the margins.
The title Renegades refers to both the popular dance challenge created by Jalaiah Harmon, a Black teenager, and to her and her peers’ positioning as radical cultural producers, choreographing and reclaiming their work from the white world that so often commandeers it. These young Black girls who dominate Dubsmash, and the dances that make them popular, occupy Boffone's short, readable chapters, and he intersperses their case studies with articulate theoretical frameworks ranging from Gwendolyn D. Pough's feminist hip-hop investigations to José Esteban Muñoz's theory of disidentification to Kyra Gaunt's studies of Black girlhood. Boffone brings the “sauce” to his storytelling, writing with equal fluidity in the lingo of the subculture and in scholarly rhetoric, delivering dense thinking in a light package.
His first chapter, “Digital Communities: From Dubsmash to TikTok,” gives an overview of the two apps, explaining not only how they resonate with separate circles of Generation Z but also how they feed off each other. Boffone argues that the dueling and interconnected platforms of Dubsmash and TikTok can be understood through racial politics, claiming Dubsmash as a Black space and TikTok as a white one. He traces Dubsmash's transformation from a celebrity-filled, lip-synching app to one that trades in dance challenges and micro-videos for Black teenagers. His next chapter, “This Bridge Called Dubsmash: Renegades Call It Home,” goes further to assert that social media can be seen as an equalizer for amplification and circulation of marginalized identities, and Dubsmash in particular has been utilized by Zoomers as a tool for community making. Through its democratization of location and culture of stewardship, Boffone offers Dubsmash as a model of Nancy Fraser's “subaltern counterpublics,” or a space alongside the mainstream (aka TikTok) where marginalized youths of color can produce and distribute their distinctive art (41).
The next two chapters dive deeper into the bonds between the Dubsmash ethos and the culture of hip hop, providing case studies that show how anonymous content creators pushed past barriers of cultural appropriation to become viral celebrities. In chapter 3, “The Original Renegade: Dubsmash, Hip Hop Culture, and Sharing Values in a Digital Space,” Boffone outlines how the app is rooted in the ideals of hip hop and is working as a space to counteract white systems of power. Here he reveals Dubsmash as a collective that not only bands together to acknowledge the experience of disenfranchisement but also goes further to rectify misinformation, working to impart the hip-hop values of citation to the larger social media world and ensuring that clout and financial gain is routed to the original creators. In “Gone Viral: Creating an Identity as a Hip Hop Artist,” Boffone follows several young women who navigated the intricacies of creating a social presence, exposing the algorithms that affect virality and popularity. He demonstrates how Black female artists on social media are required to put in a greater effort than their male and/or white counterparts, paralleling systems of the world writ large, yet shows how Dubsmashers are able to overcome these barriers through the viral repetition that bridges this platform to others.
His fifth chapter has the most direct resonance with dance studies. “Moving as One: Unison Dancing, Muscular Bonding, and Hip Hop Padagogy,” examines Dubsmash as a tool of culturally responsive pedagogy, describing how the process of learning dance fosters community and promotes a collective identity at school. Because the dance challenges require learning and performing the dance in unison with the video creator, Boffone describes how choreographic synchronicity is one technique that creates community, as “kinship bonds” are generated through the visceral experience of unison movement (95). The way self-worth, group movement, and digital kinship are formed is threaded through the practice of creating and participating in dance challenges based in hip-hop culture. The final chapter, “When Karen Slides into Your DMs: Race, Language, and Dubsmash,” begins with an interrogation of the disparate feedback to his own video posts. Recognizing a correlation between the import of the critique and racialized points of view on the movement and lyrics, Boffone considers the impact of policing through language on identity formation. Employing critical race theory and sound studies, he calls for a transformative pedagogy in the classroom which refuses surveillance of students but instead welcomes the students’ own cultural realities.
For a book that leans so heavily on dance as the method through which teenage Black youth are able to form community and create an environment in which they thrive, it made me itch for more description of the movement itself. What is the essence of these moves? What makes some challenges more accessible than others, and how are these moves articulated differently by the different influencers who take them on? I found myself pausing in my reading to go online and pull up YouTube videos to see what the challenges to the song “Cookie Shop” looked like, or how the Mop could be translated through individualized stylings. Perhaps that give-and-take between the page and the screen was something that could have been utilized further in the format of the book.
Yet this is a minor critique, and Boffone's work is a strong contribution that answers the need for dance studies to contend with how dance is being produced, circulated, and received online. Scholarship is still developing to look at digital dance both as a tool of innovative expression and as a methodology for interrogation. This book complements the work of other scholars that examine small screen formats, such as Alex Harlig's (Reference Harlig2019) focus on YouTube and online fandom, and also connects more broadly to digital research in dance studies, such as the multiyear project led by Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit (Reference Bench, Elswit, Jimenez-Mavillard, Uzor and Amin2018–2021) that integrates the archival records of Katherine Dunham's tours with digital visualization programs. Boffone literally joined the conversation inside the 2021 special issue of the International Journal of Screendance (Harlig et al. Reference Harlig, Abidin, Boffone, Bowker, Eloi, Krayenbuhl and Oh2021), further interrogating the questions of what is “Now and Next in Dance Onscreen,” giving a taste of how digital dance continues to open the field and its intersections with other areas of study.
From the dance challenges of the Renegade and Donut Shop, to the moves of the mop and the woah, Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok provides a fascinating window into the youth identity formation of Gen Z culture through their predominant lifeline of social media. Engaging across a multidisciplinary modality, Boffone has crafted a book that blurs boundaries, bringing together fields of inquiry that rarely cross paths, thereby engaging with a readership that is wide reaching both in discipline and in digital competence. He deftly writes in a language that is fun and accessible, while still engaging with rich and complex theoretical principles, an accomplishment of remarkable balance. This breadth means it is a book that uses dance as a tool but is not written explicitly for dance scholars; in fact, Boffone would not count himself as one. Yet, in exploring this immensely popular expression of dance, and to have done it so quickly on the heels of its impact through the pandemic, Boffone uses his insider/outsider position to expertly articulate the ways in which dance and social media are being harnessed by Gen Z today, offering dance as the medium to meet Black teenage girls where they have made a home at Dubsmash.
