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

Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, Dance and Other Contexts. Westport: Greenwood, 1996.189 pp. $45.00.

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...