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Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. 189 pp. Hardback. $55.00.
The Black body in rhythmic motion. Contrapuntal configurations and curvical bodily articulations. Hips in undulating motion while the head is ever so still. Cool and hot expressiveness ever so fused. Earl "Snake Hips" Tucker. The cakewalk. The Lindy Hop. Deconstructed Linearity. Asymmetricality of movement as an aesthetic choice. Swinging, improvising, bopping, grooving, and hip hopping in all of its subjective vitality. Muntu Kuntu spaces of being. The Black body as reconfigured within spaces of white imagination. A site of white projected fear, abhorred and yet desired. The atavistic trope. The Black body as trope: Strange fruit! Endurance. The Middle Passage. Sorrow songs and the Blues motion of a Black body. Sounds of Jazz. Microtonal shadings. Free and democratic spaces. Postmodern plural, open-ended bodily narrativity over bodily narrative resolution. The Black body in rhythmic motion.
It is precisely within this dense conceptual space where we find Brenda Dixon Gottschild at her scholarly best. In Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts, Gottschild archaeologically digs (compare the word deg or dega, Wolof/African, which means to understand or to appreciate) and unearths, as it were, the Africanist cultural aesthetic presence in AfricanAmerican and Euro-American dance and other contexts (painting, sculpture, fabric art, verbal forms, etc.). With Foucauldian insight she uncovers and reveals layers of power relationships configured by white racism.
Although sympathetic to the deconstructionist thesis that all texts are intertexts, she does not accept the displacement of ownership or the agentless implication of the deconstructionist thesis. She argues that "we desperately need to cut through the convoluted web of racism that denies acknowledgment of the Africanist part of the whole" (3). But neither does she succumb to a narrow essentialism; for though she contends that Africanist and Europeanist aesthetic principles constitute "binary...