Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, Dance and Other Contexts.

Reviewed by

James V. Hatch City University of New York 

In the opening of her book, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, a professor in dance at Temple University, undertakes a large and very important task: "to reach underground and excavate the subtextual Africanist components, correspondences, influences - presences, if you will, that are essentials in defining and shaping Euro-American endeavor in the United States." In a word, American dances, social and concert, are a cultural wedding of African and European art forms. A glance at the American history of denying Africanisms helps to put her endeavor into focus.

By the end of the nineteenth century, eighty years of minstrelsy performance had established the major black stereotypes that would burden our nation's heart and soul for the next one hundred years. When a few perceptive social and cultural historians attempted to refute these negative images of African Americans as a people without culture, the scholars were met with ridicule or, worse, silence. The writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Melville Herskovits, even Zora Neale Hurston had to wait until recent years to win a wide audience. But thanks to the work and persistence of many scholars, black and white, we now know that Africanisms did survive the middle passage and they survived as general American culture. The most obvious of these African "contributions" has been music; however, our other arts, too, have embraced Africanisms. The continued creativity of African Americans in music, dance, sports, and language stems from African aesthetics; that is, their world view. All of this, Dixon Gottschild clearly presents in her book, whose main thesis is that our social dancing, as well as our concert dances - modern, ballet - have been heavily influenced by African aesthetics.

The author approaches her research from both points of view - European and African dance: On the European side, she proves that the African body, mind, and spirit crept into American dance unacknowledged (ballet, Martha Graham). On the African side, she shows that white people flocked to embrace African American dances (Juba, Cakewalk, Charleston, the Fox Trot and Lindy Hop). However, neither of these cultural births has been blessed by an official christening. Dance historians have not been pleased to acknowledge that the American creations boogieing around the world are of ethnically mixed parents. Those critics who still hold that ballet is high art and the boogaloo is low vehemently deny the evidence because the very premise of their lives depends upon maintaining a superior racial and class stance.

Digging is a bold book. The author breaks through barriers of class, gender, and race. Her research, her theories, and her reasoning are carefully set forth with deliberate awareness that her arguments will be challenged. Her prose style is lucid, a triumph for a subject so complex and filled with possibility for hegemony. Eighteen illustrations and historical photographs aid the reader in reconstructing dance history. The text is properly indexed, and the bibliography is useful.

If Balanchine were alive, he might read Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, Dance and Other Contexts and agree with its thesis: The people of the United States have been boogieing to African drums and European strings from the "git-go." As a creative choreographer, Balanchine realized that, if he were to bring new life to an old form, he had to wed his pirouttes to "shake that thing."

Brenda Dixon Gottschild has invited us to celebrate the christening of a new dance form, the child of Africa and Europe. Its name is to be American. We all should attend.