Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance Dance and Other Contexts

Subjects:

• The Arts » Dance
• Popular Culture » American Studies
• The Arts » Theater
• Multicultural Studies » Black Studies

Reviews:

• [This book] takes on the interesting subject of how the African American culture has made a difference to art in America--what this difference is and how it is manifest. Gottschild's subject is the saturation of America with the African....Gottschild focuses on dance but includes the minstrel stage, jazz, vaudeville, Gangsta Rap, the 19th-century 'Hottentot Venus' (the pejoratively named African woman who was brought to England and displayed as a freak), performance criticism, and Native American powwow. A freewheeling writer, Gottschild often segues into a general discussion of racism and its impact on the performing arts in pointing out the locations of African influence in American performance....[a] welcome addition to a burgeoning literature on African American performance. Recommended for all academic collections.
  —
  Choice
• Brenda Dixon Gottschild's brilliant Digging the Africanist Presence in American Literature walks a line between anecdotal revelation and researched historical postulation as it traces cultural trends in dance and performance....Gottschild packs loads of inventive theorizing into this slim offering....[A] major accomplishment.
  —DCA News
• [E]xcellent work....[H]elps us understand the role of "stealin' steps" in the process of perpetuating the traditions of African American vernacular and choreographed dance and how stealing steps has obscured the importance of African American dance for all of American culture. Like all original and creative works,...Gottschild increase[s] our knowledge and provide[s] leads for other scholars to follow.
  —American Quarterly

• Endorsement From
  Sterling Stuckey, Presidential Chair
  Professor of History and Religious Studies
  University of California, Riverside: Brenda Dixon Gottschild makes a powerful case for an African presence in modern American ballet and in dance generally, and...brings the black aesthetic, in theoretical terms, ever nearer one's reach. [This text is] a dance of the intellect.
• Endorsement From
  Lawrence W. Levine, Margaret Byrne Professor of History, Emeritus
  University of California, Berkeley: Written with dynamism, passion, and perception on a subject of central importance to all of us, this powerful book makes us ponder issues we took for granted. It deserves a broad readership.
• Endorsement From
  Yvonne Daniel, Associate Professor of Dance Anthropology
  Smith College and the Five College Dance Consortium: Dr. Dixon Gottschild's voice is convincing because of her eclectic documentation and it is touching as well because of the human experiences the reader is drawn into within the related responses of her students, her colleagues, herself, and her antagonists. She is always clear about specific objectives, leaving tempting tangents, yet incorporating the thinking of scholars and learned others in multiple disciplines--definitely in a creole mode that is rich, colorful, and not easily discounted.

Table of Contents:

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Up from Under: The Africanist Presence
• First Premises of an Africanist Aesthetic
• Don't Take Away My Picasso: Cultural Borrowing and the Afro-Euro-American Triangle
• Barefoot and Hot, Sneakered and Cool: Africanist Subtexts in Modern and Postmodern Dance
• Stripping the Emperor: George Balanchine and the Americanization of Ballet
• Past Imperfect: Performance, Power, and Politics on the Minstrel Stage
• Dance and Theater in a Multicultural Context: Who Stole the Soul, Who Takes the "Rap," or Free To Be You and Me?
• Illustrations
• References
• Index