Hallie Gammon - DANC 0163 - The History of Black Dance in America/What is Black Dance?

It was interesting to read the "History of Black Dance" article before the "What is Black Dance?" article, since the former seemed to assume that it already knew what black dance was in order to describe its history - that is, it took all of history and then filtered out everything that didn't fit its definition of black dance - whereas the second article started from the standpoint of the history of dance and then tried to construct a definition of black dance from it. I found the first article more helpful and informative, perhaps because of this certainty of what it was describing - the unspoken assumption is that "black dance" is dance developed by African Americans.

The second article is much more nebulous and never answers its own question. According to some, black dance is indeed dance by African Americans, but for others, not all such dance qualifies as black - if, for example, it is not "expressive" or "culturally specific." Black dance may even be any dance "revolving around themes inspired by black history" - which seems to imply that black dance could be danced by people who are not ethnically black. To me, all these definitions seem plausible, but the bigger question is whether it is even useful to try to define "black dance." I agree with the statement that "it becomes pedantic to try to figure out exactly what is black dance and what is white dance." The terms are simply too broad.

I particularly disagree that “in order to meaningfully describe what black dance is, one must first ask the question, ‘what is white dance?’” This points to an approach of describing black dance in opposition to white dance, but first of all, you wouldn't define the adjective "black" as "not white" - that is indeed one of the qualities of black, but it is far from a complete definition. To define black by what it is not, you would have to list off every color in the rainbow besides black. Similarly, to say that black dance is "not white dance" is hardly complete; it is also not Native American dance, nor Asian dance, etc. Although it is true that some elements of black dance did develop directly in opposition to white influence (during slavery, for example), this is not the whole story. Many of the elements reflect dances native to Africa that developed far away from white influence; though they frequently do not occur in white dance, it is not because of this that they do occur in black dance. If we are trying to define black dance, I think it is much more productive to find the elements that are included in it rather than excluded from it. Either way, however, I agree that "trying to define what black dance is limits our ability to appreciate how extensive the African diaspora is and to accept what could be a broader picture of who we as African Americans really are."

Implicit in that statement is the recognition that the term "black" encompasses a huge range of cultures and identities. Although these articles only deal with black African Americans, the term can also apply to other members of the African diaspora and to black Africans themselves. All these attempts at definition also seem to operate to some degree on the assumption that there is such a thing as an "African culture." I find this implausible: Africa is the world's second-largest continent and very probably the longest inhabited by humans, and so has been home to many different cultures and civilizations with their corresponding traditions. Although we can draw similarities among them the same way we can find common elements among different European cultures, there are necessarily elements specific to each group. The move to establish "African" as a cultural identity in and of itself is relatively recent, dating to the colonial and post-colonial period. Slavery in the U.S. was already underway prior to this movement, meaning that black slaves probably came from many different backgrounds and had their own rituals and associated music and dance traditions. I imagine that the pressure of being identified and discriminated against based on skin color alone led to the melding of these different cultures into a broader "black" identity, but to me, talking about "African dance" leading directly to "black dance" gives the simplistic impression that African dance was a single, definable thing, when it actually came from many different backgrounds. I think this is the misconception referred to when he mentions "what could be a broader picture of who we as African Americans really are."

In sum, while I think the approach of the first article - looking at dance as an integral part of the history of African Americans - can be useful, I don't think trying to define exactly what "black dance" is will be helpful to anyone, black, white or otherwise. If we accept that "any dance of any sort being made by an American choreographer today has definitely been influenced by African American culture. So it's all in a sense black dance," then we can see that what we're trying to define has already permeated dance as a whole so thoroughly that trying to separate it out would be like chasing ghosts.