Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery
256
Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery
256eBook
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Overview
In this ambitious project, historian Katrina Thompson examines the conceptualization and staging of race through the performance, sometimes coerced, of black dance from the slave ship to the minstrel stage. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, Thompson explicates how black musical performance was used by white Europeans and Americans to justify enslavement, perpetuate the existing racial hierarchy, and mask the brutality of the domestic slave trade. Whether on slave ships, at the auction block, or on plantations, whites often used coerced performances to oppress and demean the enslaved.
As Thompson shows, however, blacks' "backstage" use of musical performance often served quite a different purpose. Through creolization and other means, enslaved people preserved some native musical and dance traditions and invented or adopted new traditions that built community and even aided rebellion.
Thompson shows how these traditions evolved into nineteenth-century minstrelsy and, ultimately, raises the question of whether today's mass media performances and depictions of African Americans are so very far removed from their troublesome roots.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252096112 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 01/30/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Katrina Dyonne Thompson is an assistant professor of history and African American studies at St. Louis University.
Read an Excerpt
Ring Shout, Wheel About
THE RACIAL POLITICS OF MUSIC AND DANCE IN NORTH AMERICAN SLAVERY
By KATRINA DYONNE THOMPSON
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09611-2
CHAPTER 1
The Script
"Africa was but a blank canvas for Europe's imagination"
Eager to publish in one of the most popular media outlets of his time, Jean Barbot, in 1688, was busily preparing his writings on his experiences and adventurers in West Africa. The Frenchman was attempting to contribute an illustration of Africa and its inhabitants to an inquisitive European and North American audience. As a slaver and author, he well understood how to create a sellable product. He wanted to entertain, thrill, and educate his readers. In order to attract a publisher and potential readers, he added rich detail and vivid scenes to his travel narrative. Purposely attempting to entice an audience, Barbot openly states to his readers, "Sir, I have told you as much as I can about the customs, temperament, occupations and way of life of the peoples of Gold Coast, in general.... I shall now satisfy your request by entertaining you with their dances." Music, song, and dance, cultural traditions often presented in travel narratives, provided not only amusement but also insight into the beliefs and practices of the region.
As the National Geographic of their day, travel narratives often revealed more than simple observations of distant lands and foreign peoples; they also critiqued those societies, and Barbot's writings followed that trend. The slaver richly detailed a scene of music, dance, and debauchery in his narrative, describing men and women "leaping and stamping their feet" while continually "running against each other, breast to breast, knocking bellies together very indecently ... and uttering some dirty mysterious words." The Frenchman described the participants as "more like devils than men" who danced in "strange postures ... as if they were possessed." The entire horrid affair ended as perversely as it started with "someone being murdered," which was only an expression of the lack of "respect" West Africans had toward "their lives" and, analogously, to their morality, according to Barbot.
Music and dance served as more than artistic traditions; in colonial-era travel narratives such as Barbot's those expressions revealed the morality, character, and intellectual capabilities of an exotic people. The repetitive nature of music and dance scenes throughout these writings from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries played a significant role in creating an inauspicious impression of West Africans for Western audiences. This caricature probably comforted many readers; it confirmed the unfavorable assessments of previous writers while supporting the burgeoning racial ideology of Western Europe and North America.
Barbot's description of West African music and dance exists as one example of a larger ideological maneuver in which the white male traveler's perspective contributed to the shaping of blacks as oversexual, immoral, intellectually deficient entertainers fit for enslavement. In this sense, Barbot acted as the spectator who viewed and relayed the customs, physiology, daily activities, and morals of West Africans, according European readers his perspective. His viewpoint subjugated West Africans, categorizing African or black attributes as inferior, especially in comparison to whites. Barbot, similar to his contemporaries, contributed to the cultural trend of objectifying West Africans and distributing their hegemonic perspective through travel literature. The act of Western Europeans and North Americans recording and publishing travel journals about the state of Africa and its inhabitants illustrated the authoritative stance of these writers and allowed readers to gain influence and superiority as they gazed by proxy. Both the producers and the consumers of travel narratives were able to assume dominance within these tales, continually placing themselves as superior to the West African subjects intellectually, morally, and socially.
The intent for visiting the region often contributed to the view reflected within the travel publications. Barbot traveled throughout Africa for his business: slave trading. Barbot's travel narrative, like his trade, was constructed as a commodity, appealing to the longing for human labor, sexual desire, and power through the commodification and eroticization of African bodies. Barbot and his European contemporaries who entered the field of travel writing in the sixteenth century joined a centuries-long legacy of writers using this genre to sculpt their personal ideals, aspirations, and imaginations. These travel journals reveal how Europeans (and, later, North Americans) frequently mischaracterized Africans in order to justify purging their land of resources, converting them to Christianity, or ultimately enslaving them. This pattern persisted through the colonization of the Americas, and even into the nineteenth century.
Because these writings constructed West Africans for public consumption as the "other," their cultures, physiology, skin color, and language were belittled as uncivilized and dysfunctional. Psychologist Perry Hinton argues that three main components assist in defining and understanding the creation of the "other" in society. The first is that a group of persons must be identified by specific characteristics, such as skin color or hair texture. Europe had a long history, prior to the Renaissance era, of associating the color black with evil and other negative attributes. Thus, the skin complexion of Africans set them apart as other or different by European standards. The second element involves developing a set of additional characteristics for the out-group. The traits of savagery, cannibalism, depravity, innate musical and dance abilities, and heathenism were only a few of the characteristics constructed by Europeans to fulfill this component. The last component entails identifying all persons in the out-group as having the assigned characteristics. Hinton recognizes these three factors in the "other;" however, his elements must be furthered to recognize that the "other" may be constructed simply by establishing the controlling society as normal. Europeans situated themselves as the standard, infusing themselves with authority and power over any groups that they determined as different from and therefore subordinate to themselves.
European and, later, North American reports on Africans often were limited to descriptions of their observable physical and cultural characteristics. Music and dance were important cultural expressions throughout West Africa that the majority of Western Europeans and Americans visiting the region witnessed. Travel writers consistently discussed music and dance as a shared cultural expression and also to provide interesting and entertaining scenes within their narratives. As well, the fluidity of music and dance in the region allowed most visitors to witness a performance. And finally, the expression was malleable. The performing arts, if properly understood, can assist in understanding the cultures, lifestyles, and histories of foreign persons. The performing arts held a functional role throughout West Africa. Music and dance were interrelated aspects of West African societies. Together they served recreational purposes or were utilized in the performance of ceremonies or rituals. Although Western Europeans may not have recognized the pivotal and complicated role the performing arts held, they entered the region with contradictory opinions about music and dance. Music, song, and dance being an aspect of every society, including Western Europe, it was a recognizable cultural expression that the readers could relate to and understand. However, by depicting West Africans by their music, song, and dance as exotic, writers distanced themselves and their readers from their African subject.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European travel narratives describing West Africans as an exotic other that still possessed human qualities represented an evolution from earlier travel narratives. Earlier Europeans had a history of describing the others, whether West Africans or any other foreign populations, as inhuman or animalistic. For example, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, a Greek researcher and storyteller from the fifth century BCE, was the first to record observations on the interior of Africa. Herodotus was known as the "Father of History" but equally deserved the title of "Father of Travel Literature." Although his writings have been proven erroneous, they were still quite influential in establishing a basic understanding of the Western perspective of Africa and its inhabitants. Herodotus wrote that Africans "eat locusts and snakes, share wives, and speak no human language, but rather screech like bats." He further claimed that wild animals inhabited Africa, "men who had 'dogs' heads, and those with no heads [had] eyes ... in their chests." The Roman compiler, Gaius Plinius Secundus, also known as Pliny the Elder, uncritically received these fantastic descriptions and continued the mythical images in the first century CE. He contributed to the exoticism of the African that "hath a cloven foot.... His muzzle or snout turneth up: his taile twineth like the bores." These statements prevailed throughout classical works; Africans were not simply exotic but often depicted with nonhuman characteristics. In a similar vein, third-century geographer Gaius Julius Solinus described Africans with "long snouts" and others who possessed "no noses, no mouths, and still others, no tongues." The writings of these three early explorers offered fallacious tales that depicted Africa and its inhabitants as monstrous, mythical creatures. Although erroneous, these tales supplied the groundwork for many longstanding cultural assumptions.
Outside the Greek and Roman sphere, the Islamic world also immensely influenced the image of Africa. A tenth-century traveler, Mutahar Ibn Tahir al Maqdisi, continued the classical tradition with a significant difference: Africans were no longer depicted as inhuman but instead cast as intellectually and morally inferior. "There is no marriage among them; the child does not know his father, and they eat people ... they are people of black color, flat noses, kinky hair, and little understanding or intelligence." For medieval Islamic writers, West Africa afforded a fertile ground for fallacious stories and self-serving ideologies. Music and dance may be seen in these early travel accounts as being a cultural expression that was manipulated to illustrate the deficient and immoral nature of the "others." In the fourteenth century Ibn Khaldun assessed that Africans "are found eager to dance ... due to expansion and diffusion of the animal spirit."
By the fifteenth century, Western Europeans and, later, North Americans replicated many of these Arab and medieval patterns. They ventured to West Africa for three main reasons: missionary pursuits, scientific exploration, and economic interest. Underlying each were entrenched, fallacious stereotypes of Africans' barbarism. Economic and technological advances in Portugal, England, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and other nations spurred their exploration and colonization of the Americas and enslavement of Africans. The Portuguese began to travel to Africa in the fifteenth century, primarily for commercial enterprises and missionary work. They set the standard for the manner in which Europeans would interact with Africans, and they greatly influenced the development of the Atlantic slave trade that continued and flourished in the New World. The Portuguese claimed various regions on the continent "in the name of God, the pope, and the king." As early as 1441, Portuguese adventurer Antam Gonçalvez enslaved a Berber and his West African servant, returning to his homeland with them as gifts. The following decades fostered the capture of hundreds of Africans for servitude in Portugal and Spain. As Catholics, the Portuguese insisted that their pursuits in West Africa were religiously based. Portuguese missionaries recognized slavery as a legitimate and acceptable Christianizing process that permitted Africans to make the transition from "immoral heathens" to Christians. Portugal's dominance in the slave trade lasted throughout the sixteenth century until the Dutch entered the region and became the principal slave traders in the early seventeenth century. England soon entered the Atlantic trade, gaining dominance over the competing nations of France and Spain by the early 1700s. The slave trade was the dominant reason for Western Europeans and North Americans to enter West Africa; however, some of the earlier travel narratives were written by those ostensibly interested in spreading Christianity. The travel accounts of these explorers mischaracterized African music and dance in order to justify purging the land of resources, converting the people to Christianity, and, ultimately, enslaving them. Therefore, their publications consistently supported their religious aspirations.
Travelers who ventured to Africa to spread religious ideology often depicted Africa as savage and pagan in order to support their pursuits. One of the most significant publications that best symbolizes the Christian indoctrination and ideology in the African context was written by Al-Hassan Ibn-Mohammed Al-Wezaz Al-Fasi, commonly known as Johannes Leo Africanus. Although born in the last Muslim stronghold of Granada, Spain, Africanus was raised and formally educated at the University of Al-Karaouine in Fes (or Fez), one of the largest cities in Morocco. He traveled throughout Maghreb and West Africa on diplomatic missions while also taking his El-Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, which was a part of his religious tradition. Due to his extensive travels and education, when captured by Spanish pirates in the early sixteenth century, Africanus was brought to the Vatican. Under Pope Leo X, he studied and converted to Catholicism and was baptized in the Basilica of Saint Peter in 1520. Encouraged by the Pope, this new convert began recording his experiences and observations throughout Africa, specifically the Ghanaian city of Timbuktu. (Africans who were captured and converted to Christianity often were used as guides for Europeans traveling throughout the region.) In 1526, Africanus's travel narrative was published in flawed Italian and later re-released in proper Italian in 1550; with the translation by John Pory in 1600, an English version appeared under the title of A Geographical Historie of Africa.
The values of Leo Africanus are relayed through his writings; however, English translator John Pory added text to relate culturally to a European reading public. Not surprisingly, his narrative discusses the performing arts culture of the region. Designating music and dance as insignificant amusements, he assessed that Africans "addict themseues to nought else but delights and pleasure, feasting often & singing lasciuious songs." Africanus's perspective asserted that Africans had a "corrupt and vile disposition," which caused them to assert "unlawful and filthie lust" as expressed through their music and dance. Africanus's work reflected a culture that was instilled within him based upon European superiority and the desire to support religious and economic pursuits in the region.
A Geographical Historie of Africa offered to the reader a savage land with imprudent inhabitants whose music and dance displayed their overtly sexual and deviant manners. His work was used widely until the eighteenth century in England, well after the initial contact between Africans and Europeans had taken place. At the time of Africanus's travels, music and dance were discussed and debated actively through numerous publications and among religious figures throughout Europe. In 1582, for example, Christopher Fetherston published A Dialogue against light, lewde [sic] and lascivious dancing to assert the dangers of dancing. According to Fetherston, "If dancing were a recreation of the body then it should refresh ... it should make nimble the joints and strengthen the legs ... but dancing is so far from refreshing the body from being weary that it maketh the same more weary." For Fetherston, dancing harms not only the physical body but also the work ethic of the community. He further questions the dangers of dancing by asking, "How many men's servants being set to work do after their dancing days lie snoring in hedges because they are so weary they cannot work, whereby their masters do reap but small gains." According to Fetherston, dance was improperly abused by the public and therefore resulted in physical pain, deformities, and sluggishness. His pamphlet warned against the dangers of excessive dancing and represented the negative commentary present throughout Western Europe on the vices of this social amusement. Also, this morality tract was an elite perspective intended to warn against the more overt, less restrained dancing of the lower classes and commoners of Western Europe. Fetherston identified that "those which have danced one half day for pleasure" are guilty of "sluggishness." Africanus's assessment that African music and dance were an immoral pleasure used to express a lascivious nature paralleled the burgeoning debates and publications in Europe.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ring Shout, Wheel About by KATRINA DYONNE THOMPSON. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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