Christopher J. Smith
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252042393
- eISBN:
- 9780252051234
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042393.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
The first of two companion chapters, this essay focuses especially on the historical meeting of European and African American movement vocabularies in English-speaking early-nineteenth-century ...
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The first of two companion chapters, this essay focuses especially on the historical meeting of European and African American movement vocabularies in English-speaking early-nineteenth-century contexts. It focuses particularly upon public music and dance in two creolized cities: Kingston, Jamaica, and New York City. Primary source evidence includes period illustrations (most notably, a ca. 1802 watercolor entitled A Grand Jamaica Ball) and period accounts of entertainments at lower Manhattan’s African Grove Theater; both are analyzed for the evidence they provide regarding the synthesis of creolized movement vocabularies and, by extension, cultural experiences. Methodology is drawn especially from iconography and kinesics.Less
The first of two companion chapters, this essay focuses especially on the historical meeting of European and African American movement vocabularies in English-speaking early-nineteenth-century contexts. It focuses particularly upon public music and dance in two creolized cities: Kingston, Jamaica, and New York City. Primary source evidence includes period illustrations (most notably, a ca. 1802 watercolor entitled A Grand Jamaica Ball) and period accounts of entertainments at lower Manhattan’s African Grove Theater; both are analyzed for the evidence they provide regarding the synthesis of creolized movement vocabularies and, by extension, cultural experiences. Methodology is drawn especially from iconography and kinesics.
Sterling Stuckey
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199931675
- eISBN:
- 9780199356027
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199931675.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century, Cultural History
This book traces the roots of black nationalist thought and culture in America over several centuries. Arguing that African influences were pervasive among slaves and have profoundly influenced ...
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This book traces the roots of black nationalist thought and culture in America over several centuries. Arguing that African influences were pervasive among slaves and have profoundly influenced African American and American life over the past 150 years, it considers the central question of how a single culture was formed out of a multiplicity of African ethnic groups in slavery. The book argues that the common culture fashioned by slaves gave rise to a Pan-Africanism that gave slaves identity and ideology that were related to the creative process itself, which made unity ever more likely. This was especially true of the blues, first heard by Frederick Douglass in the 1820s and written about in 1845 in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, another way in which the book establishes that the roots of black nationalism began as cultural and aesthetic forms rather than as social and political conditions. Disciplines such as anthropology, art history, folklore, and linguistics demonstrate that cultural practices that were widespread in slave communities had African antecedents. Slave Culture looks at how W.E.B. Du Bois, David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, Paul Robeson, and Douglass played roles in putting together nationalist theory. Nationalism found here was fashioned by those not mainly concerned with racial identity but with racial justice, and no one treated in this volume preferred racial separatism and the primacy of color over racial equality.Less
This book traces the roots of black nationalist thought and culture in America over several centuries. Arguing that African influences were pervasive among slaves and have profoundly influenced African American and American life over the past 150 years, it considers the central question of how a single culture was formed out of a multiplicity of African ethnic groups in slavery. The book argues that the common culture fashioned by slaves gave rise to a Pan-Africanism that gave slaves identity and ideology that were related to the creative process itself, which made unity ever more likely. This was especially true of the blues, first heard by Frederick Douglass in the 1820s and written about in 1845 in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, another way in which the book establishes that the roots of black nationalism began as cultural and aesthetic forms rather than as social and political conditions. Disciplines such as anthropology, art history, folklore, and linguistics demonstrate that cultural practices that were widespread in slave communities had African antecedents. Slave Culture looks at how W.E.B. Du Bois, David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, Paul Robeson, and Douglass played roles in putting together nationalist theory. Nationalism found here was fashioned by those not mainly concerned with racial identity but with racial justice, and no one treated in this volume preferred racial separatism and the primacy of color over racial equality.
Sterling Stuckey
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199931675
- eISBN:
- 9780199356027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199931675.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century, Cultural History
This chapter lays out the organizing principle of slave culture in North America and underscores the centrality of the ancestral past to the African in America. The most important African ritual in ...
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This chapter lays out the organizing principle of slave culture in North America and underscores the centrality of the ancestral past to the African in America. The most important African ritual in slavery, the Ring Shout, is revealed in some detail. With the ring a symbol of unity and counter-clockwise dance and rhythm consciousness as common starting points, different ethnic groups on plantations of the South began moving toward unity almost before being aware of it. Children were especially drawn to the ring, helping to transmit the Shout over generations. African practices and values are related to specific academic disciplines to make slave behavior comprehensible. Slave art in the form of tales, music and dance are in dispensable to the analysis that establishes far more similarities between slave culture in the North and south than previously thought.Less
This chapter lays out the organizing principle of slave culture in North America and underscores the centrality of the ancestral past to the African in America. The most important African ritual in slavery, the Ring Shout, is revealed in some detail. With the ring a symbol of unity and counter-clockwise dance and rhythm consciousness as common starting points, different ethnic groups on plantations of the South began moving toward unity almost before being aware of it. Children were especially drawn to the ring, helping to transmit the Shout over generations. African practices and values are related to specific academic disciplines to make slave behavior comprehensible. Slave art in the form of tales, music and dance are in dispensable to the analysis that establishes far more similarities between slave culture in the North and south than previously thought.
Christopher J. Smith
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252037764
- eISBN:
- 9780252095047
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252037764.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
This chapter examines the creolizing maritime cultures of Long Island and Manhattan, two New York islands that directly shaped William Sidney Mount's personal and musical world. It reconstructs the ...
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This chapter examines the creolizing maritime cultures of Long Island and Manhattan, two New York islands that directly shaped William Sidney Mount's personal and musical world. It reconstructs the environments that Mount knew and by which he was shaped, as a child and young adult in antebellum America. To this end, the chapter considers how influences from Long Island and Manhattan play out in the life of Mount, in that of his uncle and musical mentor Micah Hawkins, and in Hawkins's 1824 ballad opera The Saw-Mill, or, A Yankee Trick. It begins with a discussion of evidence of blackface minstrelsy's creole synthesis in the antebellum period by describing two festival performances, Pinkster and 'Lection Day, and during the Federalist period. It then assesses the creole synthesis in black Manhattan by focusing on the “African Grove” Theater, along with Mount's first works and new career path following the death of Hawkins. It concludes with a review of Mount's scenic painting Rustic Dance after a Sleigh Ride.Less
This chapter examines the creolizing maritime cultures of Long Island and Manhattan, two New York islands that directly shaped William Sidney Mount's personal and musical world. It reconstructs the environments that Mount knew and by which he was shaped, as a child and young adult in antebellum America. To this end, the chapter considers how influences from Long Island and Manhattan play out in the life of Mount, in that of his uncle and musical mentor Micah Hawkins, and in Hawkins's 1824 ballad opera The Saw-Mill, or, A Yankee Trick. It begins with a discussion of evidence of blackface minstrelsy's creole synthesis in the antebellum period by describing two festival performances, Pinkster and 'Lection Day, and during the Federalist period. It then assesses the creole synthesis in black Manhattan by focusing on the “African Grove” Theater, along with Mount's first works and new career path following the death of Hawkins. It concludes with a review of Mount's scenic painting Rustic Dance after a Sleigh Ride.
