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In Together, Somehow, Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta examines how people find ways to get along and share a dancefloor, a vibe, and a sound. Drawing on time spent in the minimal techno and house music subscenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin as the first decade of the new millennium came to a close, Garcia-Mispireta explains this bonding in terms of what he calls stranger-intimacy: the kind of warmth, sharing, and vulnerability between people that happens surprisingly often at popular electronic dance music parties.
He shows how affect lubricates the connections between music and the dancers. Intense shared senses of sound and touch help support a feeling of belonging to a larger social world. However, as Garcia-Mispireta points out, this sense of belonging can be vague, fluid, and may hide exclusions and injustices. By showing how sharing a dancefloor involves feeling, touch, sound, sexuality, and subculture, Garcia-Mispireta rethinks intimacy and belonging through dancing crowds and the utopian vision of throbbing dancefloors.
Author: Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta
Paperback Published August 2023 320 pages
“Together, Somehow takes readers past the velvet rope and onto the dancefloors, into the backrooms and bathrooms, and up to the DJ booths at legendary clubs like Berghain and one-off raves in the Midwest. It is one of those joyous books where passion meets erudition on every page, presenting a compelling portrait of the contemporary electronic dance music scene. Giving us in many ways the prehistory of the racial and gender reckoning that nightlife is going through right now, Together, Somehow will stand as one of the essential works on EDM.” — Tavia Nyong’o, author of Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life