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.
Blacks and whites lived both separately and together in America, but their cultures were not distinct strands with an occasional rubbing off here and there. In fact, they were interwoven, interpenetrating realities, every aspect of which had already become within: itself a complex cultural synthesis.
The third major point is that this process has never stopped: so much so that Black talk, walk, clothes, music, and especially the “hip” style have all come to define much of modern white middle-class America. Look at and listen to white suburban kids. This process is called Creolization, and there are more examples than can be catalogued. One major white attempt to imitate Black style was the ragtime and Cakewalk craze of the 1890s when the great Black dancer Aida Overton Walker taught Fifth Avenue society matrons how to strut at the same time white Southerners were lynching Black people at the rate of three or four a week. Of course, real Black ragtime was too strong for the white palate. But a homogenized version was appropriated by songsters like Irving Berlin, who became the “King of Ragtime,” while Scott Joplin died in obscurity and poverty.
This is the larger canvas, then, against which Gottschild does her work in Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. She is greatly aided by her sophisticated knowledge of dance since this is a major thread that runs through the cultures she discusses. “On Sundaies in the afternoon, their musick plates and to dancing they go,” Richard Ligon, a Caribbean planter, said of his slaves in 1657.
