A professor of dance at Temple University, Brenda Dixon Gottschild draws upon her expertise in that discipline as a springboard to explore a multifaceted phenomenon: the substantial African and African American intertwining with "dominant" (read white) American culture.
Academics call the phenomenon "subtextual Africanist correspondences," and on a superficial level, everyone knows it as peanut butter, revival meetings, and the Charleston. But the underlying issues here run far deeper, and the questions turn out to be much more complex than either jargon or surface thinking can deal with. This is especially the case as we honestly try to figure out the components of our common culture and seriously attempt to determine what a word we love to use, multiculturalism, really means.
In attempting to peel away the layers, probably the first and central question is: Did Africans bring elements of their cultures with them to the New World, or did the totality and brutality of the slave system destroy their African life and heritage? This debate was articulated some years ago by Melville Herskovits, the Northwestern University anthropologist, and E. Franklin Frazier, the Howard University sociologist. In what now seems a surprising if not ironic twist, it was the white Herskovits who argued, in "The Myth of the Negro Past" (1941), for African retentions--a position scholarship has now entirely vindicated. Prof. Robert Farris Thompson of Yale electrifies many a lecture hall by showing slides of decorated burial grounds in Congo and South Carolina which are astonishingly similar.
It is clear, then, that some important elements of African language, religion, music, and family structure have African origins, and that the distinctive characteristics of African American life are not merely imitative or derivative of substandard European. However, what is equally true -- but not yet widely admitted -- is that all these African elements were present in British North America from the early seventeenth century on -- and they strongly affected the European culture with which they came into constant and creative contact. In other words, the "American" side of the African American equation was itself highly Africanized from the very beginning.
