Reading 5

Ele Woods

Response to Stuckey's Christian Conversion and the Challenge of Dance

This week article was about the creation of the first spiritual black dances in the United States and it marks the first piece we have read describing dances during slavery. I found the spiritual and religious description of the dancing interesting.  The article said that before the introduction to Christianity, Black people found their spirituality through dance. I know that sometimes when I am dancing with a group of my friends I feel a connection to something other than myself. This makes me wonder about the power of dance. Was this spiritual connection something that people had always known or did they just discover it while dancing? Later in the article, The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass is mentioned. While reading this passage I was reminded of the scene from the novel when one of the other slaves tells Frederick that he draws his power from a root and dances. I wonder if his dances are the same as the Shout, and if so would it be fair to compare the Shout to almost a Voodoo-ism? While the dances must be the same, naming the Shout "Voodoo" seems to belittle it and make it invalidate it. 

Another thing I thought about when I read this article was how amazing dance must have been for the slaves on a purely power basis. The slave owners clearly did not want the slaves to dance because they knew they could not control that form of self-expression. (They also probably couldn't perform it if they tried). The Shout was kind of like a way of fighting back against the slave owner. The article references The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass at this point to show how the White slave owners did not know how to react to this power and instead claimed victory over the dance by trying to make it their own. Instead this dance gave the slaves their own little bit of freedom. In the Novel, this is the first instance of Frederick Douglass claiming his freedom.

One thing that I wished the article would have continued with was the idea of sexual abuse and lust. The article starts speaking about how sexual abuse was prevalent and then later explains a little more about how the slave owners did not know how to categorize the circle dancing and so they bestowed their owned sexual need on it and labeled the dance and society hypersexual. I have always been very interested in the hyper-sexualization of black female slaves and the idea of the black woman as a "beast" in slavery narratives. The white slave owners must have been shocked by the powerful, spiritual and sometimes joyful dancing.  I really liked the way the article explained how the white owner, not understanding the black slave, had to use their own mind to label a whole society of women and so it was the white rich men with the perversion not the society of black women who danced their own dances.