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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Heckscher, Jurretta Jordan. "'All the Mazes of the Dance': Black Dancing, Culture, and Identity in the Greater Chesapeake World from the Early Eighteenth Century to the Civil War," American Studies, George Washington University, March 2000.
Why was dancing so important to African Americans enslaved in the American South? Previous studies have documented black dancing throughout the South or concentrated on the significance of genres such as John Kunering. This study in historical ethnography is the first to illuminate the development of a specific African-American dance culture within a specific Southern region. It seeks to disclose some of the reasons for dance’s pivotal significance in African-American culture and to establish the importance of the study of dance for the understanding of American cultural history. The region examined is the “Greater Chesapeake” (Maryland, Virginia, and the Virginia-oriented portion of North Carolina). Having determined what can be known of dance culture in the region’s African slave source areas, the work documents the emergent black dance culture of the eighteenth century, reconstructing the outlines of choreographic form through comparison with other historically relevant African-based choreographic traditions. Drawing on the theoretical insights available from the ethnographic study of dance and movement, the work then considers the reasons for dance’s significance in the lives of enslaved African Americans in the Greater Chesapeake. It concludes that African Americans deliberately chose to use dance as a primary instrument of cultural and personal identity, on that enabled them to coalesce and persist in community, to preserve and reanimate essential features of ancestral African Heritage, to incorporate selective elements of white dance tradition as an emblem of their own American identity, and to establish an African-American model of the person that directly counterposed the bodily foundations of slavery in the bodies of the enslaved.
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