African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry / Edition 1

by Kariamu Welsh Asante, Kariamu Welsh-Asante

Overview

This book is a compilation of essays by distinguished writers, critics, and artists in the field of Dance and African American Studies who address several areas and disciplines of African dance both on the continent and in the diaspora. Sir Rex Nettleford, the distinguished Jamaican choreographer, professor and writer, stresses in the foreword to the book, the continuity between all dances that derive from Africa and the significance of this book. African dance, he argues, is a dominant, pervasive and empowering force in African communities.

The four areas covered in the book are tradition, tradition and continuity, tradition transformed, and tradition contextualized. African, Brazilian, Caribbean and African American scholars each focus on some aspect of African dance which provide the patterns that connect. "African Dance" is text and, as such, it is a document that can be used for historical, philosophical and aesthetic information. Besides Sir Rex Nettleford, other contributors to this book include Pearl Primus, Mawere Opoku, Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Myriam Evelyse Mariani, Cynthia S'thembile West and Omofolabo Soyinka Ajayi.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865431973
Publisher:	Africa World Press
Publication date:	11/28/1995
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	5.49(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

Read an Excerpt

0865431973 TRADITION TRANSFORMED - Dancing Under the Lash: Sociocultural Disruption, Continuity, and Synthesis by Katrina Hazzard-Gordon

Though a sizeable body of literature on dance has been generated in the past two decades, none of it has focused on the socio-historical context from which African-American secular social dance has emerged. An assessment of at least some of these circumstances would be a contribution as important as the body of literature focusing on the structural and functional aspects of the dance. The primary purpose of this paper is to make a contribution in that direction by looking at the transformation process from African ceremonial to African-American secular social dance, and a brief examination of the specific contexts in which that transformation occurred.

Life under slavery, repressive though it was, allowed some opportunity for community and cultural development. In the hostile environment in which Africans found themselves it seems indeed miraculous that any African customs were able to persist. But as antagonistic to African culture as slavery was, it could not exercise total control over all areas of bondsmen's lives. This "unregulated sociocultural space" which existed in the slave quarter and which Africans created for themselves, provided them with at least some latitude in which certain aspects of African culture could survive.

In addition to opportunity provided by this unregulated sociocultural space, at least two other factors seem significant for the survival of African-based traditions: one, that the surviving culture proved functional for the practitioners; two, that it be somehow functional and perceived as relatively non-threatening for the slaveocracy. Once the enslaved Africans left the ship and "settled in," they could begin, with the sociocultural material available to them, to forge a new culture through interaction. As a new African became part of the fabric of slave life, acquaintances and group relationships developed. Though the environment of bondage provided little with which African-Americans could create culture, it could not prevent an African-based cultural tradition in dance and other areas from flourishing as Africans continually sought ways to circumvent restriction

Foreword

The publication of this volume of essays on African dance comes at a time when the world seems willing to search for novel ways of viewing the world, for different ways of knowing, and new bases of social interaction in a world that is fast contracting in its outward reach. This is taking place against a background of old values maintaining their tenacious hold on traditional centers of social, economic, political and cultural power which is still active in the North Atlantic segment of the Planet, even while Japan and the Pacific Rim communities suggest some real shift in economic and technological areas of influence, if not control.

A core feature of the last half millennium, during which time the "modern world" grew up, is the peculiar relationship between Europe and Africa both on the African continent where colonies were settled or forged in conquest, and in the Africa diaspora known historically as "Plantation America", with its history of slavery, but more recently extended to such Western European countries as Britain and France, two of the former great colonial powers.

The lasting consequences of racism and, with it, assumptions about the natural cultural inferiority of "lesser races," continue to plague relations in the changing world despite the cessation of slavery in the nineteenth century and the acceleration of the decolonization process in the twentieth. Cultural resistance and all other forms of struggle against the racism which is still actively denigrating people of African ancestry in Southern Africa, in all of the Americas (including the Caribbean), and more recently in Western Europe, are vital instruments of change in this sense. Armed resistance, polemical self-assertion, cultural action through energetic activity in different branches of the arts (especially performing arts), and even voluntary surrender by way of co-optation or denial of the co-opted's African ancestral origins are among the many strategies of survival employed by the Africans at home and abroad. The systemic study, analysis, interpretation and diffusion of African cultural heritage by Africans themselves has been late in entering the complex of strategies of demarginalization required by persons of African ancestry if they are to retain and maintain human equilibrium in a world that developed in lopsided fashion to Africa's decided disadvantage.