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Afro-American Core Culture Social Dance: An Examination of Four Aspects of Meaning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Katrina Hazzard-Gordon
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Extract

Most scholarly work on Afro-American social dance has been concerned with its structural aspects, primarily the question of African retentions. The work of Melville Herskovits, Joann Kealiinohomoku, Linda Wharton and Jack L. Daniel, Chadwick Hansen, Robert Farris Thompson, John Q. Anderson, Gertrude P. Kurath, Jan Hertzberg, Lydia Parrish, and others has touched on this issue.

Though this approach to the study of Afro-American vernacular dance is far from exhausted, it ignores certain significant aspects of black dance culture. Once it is established that the structural aspects of Afro-American dance are in fact African-derived, the researcher is free to raise questions concerning the function, meanings, and uses of the dance.

The anthropologist-dancer Katherine Dunham has stated that dance has greater tenacity than any other cultural form and that it is the most permanent cultural link with the past. Certainly the dance of Afro-Americans is identifiable on the basis of its continuity with both traditional and contemporary African movement. Until recently, most Afro-Americans conducted their lives in relative isolation from whites. Isolation rather than inherent tenacity may explain the similarity between their dance forms and those of contemporary Africans.

Type
Articles on Popular Dance in Black America
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , Spring 1983 , pp. 21 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1983

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References

NOTES

1. Herskovits, Melville, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1941)Google Scholar; Herskovits, Melville, “What Africa Has Given America,” The New Republic, September 4, 1935Google Scholar; Kealiinohomoku, Joann, “A Comparative Study of Dance as a Constellation of Motor Behavior among African and United States Negroes,” CORD Dance Research Annual, VII (1975)Google Scholar; Wharton, Linda F. and Daniel, Jack L., “Black Dance: Its African Origins and Continuity,” Minority Voices 1, no. 1 (Fall 1977)Google Scholar; Hansen, Chadwick, “Jenny's Toe: Shaking Dances in America,” American Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, Robert Farris, “Dance and Culture, an Aesthetic of the Cool: West African Dance,” African Forum 2, no. 2 (Fall 1966)Google Scholar; Anderson, John Q., “The New Orleans Voodoo Ritual Dance and Its Twentieth-Century Survivals,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 24, no. 2 (June 1960)Google Scholar; Kurath, Gertrude P., “African Influences on American Dance,” Focus on Dance 3 (1965)Google Scholar; Hertzberg, Jan, “African Religious Survivals in the U.S.” (1977, typewritten)Google Scholar; Parrish, Lydia, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands (New York: Creative Age Press, 1942)Google Scholar.

2. Isaacs, Edith J. R., The Negro in American Theatre (New York: Theatre Arts, Inc., 1947), pp. 72–73Google Scholar.

3. Hurston, Zora Neal, “Characters of Negro Expression,” in Cunard, Nancy, ed., Negro Anthology (New York: Negro Universitites Press, 1969), pp. 39–46Google Scholar.

4. Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina, “Atibas a Comin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in Afro-American Culture” (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1983)Google Scholar.

5. For a more detailed description of these dances see Marshall, and Stearns, Jean, Jazz Dance (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1968), pp. 24, 27, 31, 99, 154, 235–37, 242Google Scholar; see also Georgia Writers' Project, WPA, Drums and Shadows (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940), p. 115Google Scholar.

6. Pasteur, Alfred B. and Toldson, Ivory L. suggest that psychomotor or movement aspects of the personality are necessary for a healthy personality and that blacks demonstrate a predisposition to bodily movement (Roots of Soul [Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982], pp. 237–45)Google Scholar.

7. Malcolm, X with Haley, Alex, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 56Google Scholar.

8. Ibid., p. 57.

9. Angelou, Maya, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 56Google Scholar.

10. Kealiinohomoku, pp. 122-28; Wharton and Daniel, pp. 73-80.

11. Ellison, Ralph and McPherson, James, “Indivisible Man,” The Atlantic, December 1970, p. 50Google Scholar.

12. The concept “core black culture” refers to working-class black: traditions and includes such cultural products as soul music, dance, soul food, black English, and street corner fellowship. See Thomas, Richard W., “Working-Class and Lower-Class Origins of Black Culture: Class Formation and the Division of Black Cultural Labor,” Minority Voices 1, no. 1 (Fall 1977): 81–103Google Scholar.

13. Hare, Nathan, The Black Anglo-Saxons (London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd., 1965), p. 87Google Scholar.

14. Walker, Alice, Meridian (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), p. 148Google Scholar.

15. From conversation with black youths in Cleveland, Ohio, June 1980.

16. Malcolm X, p. 56.

17. Ibid., p. 64.

18. Keiser, R. Lincoln, The Vice Lords (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), p. 52Google Scholar.

19. Walker, p. 148.

20. Malcolm X, p. 57.

21. Cleaver, Eldridge, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell Publishing, 1968), p. 181Google Scholar.

22. All quotations in this section are from Cleaver.

23. For an account of such dancing, see Clark, Sharon Leigh, “Rock Dance in the United States, 1960–1970: Its Origins, Forms and Patterns” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1973)Google Scholar.

24. The concept “cutting” is both familiar and traditional in core black culture to both musicians and dancers. For musicians it has meant unstructured competitive playing. It has a similar meaning for dancers engaged in spontaneous competitive dancing. For an account of “cutting” used by dancers see Hazzard-Gordon, chapter entitled “Block Parties.”

25. For an explanatory account of both block parties and rent shouts, see Hazzard-Gordon.

26. Clark, R. Milton, “The Dance Party as a Socialization Mechanism for Black Urban Pre-Adolescents and Adolescents,” Sociology and Sociological Research 58, no. 2 (1974): 146Google Scholar.

27. Ibid., p. 150.

28. For accounts of black elite lifestyle, see Frazier, E. Franklin, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Free Press of Collier-Macmillan, 1957)Google Scholar; see also Nathan Hare, Black Anglo-Saxons; Majors, Gerri, Black Society (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1976)Google Scholar; Birmingham, Stephen, Certain People: America's Black Elite (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977)Google Scholar.