Black Dance as a Category and Field of Study
November 2018
Black Dance as an area of study has grown rapidly since the late 20th century and is gaining increasing visibility as dancers of the African Diaspora advocate for its value in higher education and American dance spaces. Consequently, a critical debate has emerged regarding the use of the term “Black Dance” as a category. While some scholars view it as too broad, diminishing, and implicitly racist and/or sexist, others take the position that it is a necessary term for delineating the contributions and value of Black folks and Black cultures to American and global dance spaces. The creation of the term by white dance critics, appropriation of the term by Black artists, and its relatively recent re-emergence in Dance scholarship and writing reveal why some scholars reject the term while others advocate for its use. I take the position that the use of the term, with its link to the conversation on embodiment and embodied inquiry, has the potential for opening up new epistemological spaces in academic inquiry and research due to the manner in which it foregrounds qualitative methodological approaches, specifically wedding traditional academic frameworks with embodied data analyses and personal experiences.
The history of Black Dance as a category is significant for understanding how and why scholars have taken positions for or against the term. Scholars point to the 1960s as the origin of the term “Black Dance,” and they analyze the term within the context of the social and political movements of the era. In the introduction of Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, Thomas DeFrantz associates the category with the Black Arts Movement and the collective attempt to define a “black aesthetic” (5). Similarly, Angela Fatou Gittens locates the origin of the term in the Black Arts Movement, but she also draws in La Négritude, Pan-Africanism, African Independence movements, and the wider Black Power movement out of which the Black Arts Movement emerged (50).
DeFrantz and Gittens’ descriptions of the sociopolitical contexts out of which the term gained widespread use in the 1960s suggest that the term is about a sociopolitical stance. Black dancers’ choice to use the term indicated their agency in defining not only what they created, but also in aligning with the sociopolitical stance of the Black Arts Movement and other Black liberation movements occurring at the time. However, DeFrantz, along with Takiyah Nur Amin, also points out that the term was created by white journalists and dance critics, and widely used in the 1960s and ‘70s in their dance writing. Amin describes its use by white dance critics as a pejorative marker to distinguish the work of Black choreographers from mainstream, i.e., white, concert dance (10), and DeFrantz explains that the term, when used by white critics, came to simply signify that there were African American dancers on stage (10).
Due to its controversial nature, the term fell out of use but later re-emerged in the 1980s and ‘90s as dance scholars and critics worked once again to define “Black Dance” (Amin 10). Amin’s article demonstrates that “the variety of definitions and perspectives . . . reflect an array of political ideas and a diversity of opinions about the significance and potential application of the term” (11). The term’s origins, appropriation by Black artists, and its disappearance and re-emergence in dance writing suggest that no consensus was reached about the meaning of “Black Dance.” It is worth considering what the use of the term today might suggest about Black dancers’ choreographic works and what ways the term can be applied for continued study in academic spaces.
From the array of perspectives included in Amin’s article, as well as further reading from other scholars, I discerned that arguments against the term are grounded in two distinct, yet related, stances: one, that it is inherently racist and marginalizes Black dancers, and two, that the dances created and performed by Black dancers are too varied to be labeled under one term. Amin writes that Theresa Howard challenges the term as one that “sets the doers apart as separate and unequal in artistic validity” (8), while Richard C. Green posits that the choreographies and performances of Pearl Primus were haunted by the notion of racial identification despite her modern dance training (114). Zita Allen questions if Black Dance really exists and who is qualified to define it, given its origins as an oppressive label (Craighead 18-19).
The views of Howard, Green, and Allen find support in the work of Clare Craighead, who seeks to problematize the term through a postmodernist and second-wave feminist lens. Craighead rejects the use of the term on the premise that it relies on hegemonic discourses of white heterosexual capitalist patriarchy (17). She argues that the term operates through the process of othering and implies a dichotomy between Black dance and white dance, but white dance is not acknowledged as a category because the hegemonic discourse of whiteness would not require that it become an umbrella category that diminishes its diversity (20). By Craighead’s analysis, the racism and othering associated with “Black Dance” diminishes the diversity of dance styles, techniques, and vocabularies employed by Black dancers.
With regard to the diversity inherent to Black people dancing, Amin discusses both Christopher Reardon and Brenda Dixon Gottschild, whose work suggests that not only have Black dancers assimilated various movement styles that do not originate in Black cultures, but also that non-Black dancers have assimilated movement that originates within Black cultures (10). Similarly, DeFrantz notes that Alvin Ailey’s Revelations and Talley Beatty’s The Black Belt are both described as “Black Dance” despite their different approaches to movement vocabularies, music, and kinesthetic effect (7-9). Thus, any academic study of Black Dance must take into consideration the ways that the term may be misapplied or misunderstood, and how the existence of Black Dance implies the continued existence and adherence to certain sociopolitical structures that deem Black creative work unequal to or distinct from what is considered mainstream or hegemonic.
Nonetheless, previous and current scholarship also indicates that there may be some value in the continued application of the term, particularly when we analyze what it reveals about history, sociopolitical structures, and Black dancers’ authority and agency in creative spaces. Arguments for the term tend to locate Black Dance in the Black body, Black experiences, and Black cultures. Thus, those who advocate for its use do not define the term as one particular movement style, technique, or vocabulary. The distinction between body, experience, and culture is necessary, but the three are inextricably linked in ways revealed by various Black Dance studies that rely on embodied data analysis frameworks.
While locating the term in the Black body runs the risk of exposing an underlying essentialism, demonstrated by DeFrantz’ discussions of Alvin Ailey’s Revelations and The Black Belt (7-9), it also implies a wider dimension of Black experience. Thus, Amin, drawing on the work of Carole Y. Johnson and bell hooks, defines “Black Dance” as “the multiple movement idioms that both originate within Black African culture and those that emerge as they are filtered through the experiences of Black people as a result of assimilating various cultural influences (13). The key element and filter becomes Black experiences, which occur through and because of inhabiting Black bodies, but does not reduce the existence of Black Dance to simply a consequence of racialization. A Black experience is not just a racial experience; it encompasses various social, political, and cultural experiences, and it draws together notions of the Black dancer as object and subject.
By shifting the emphasis from the body to the experience, examinations of Black Dance reveal how bell hooks’ “authority of experience” can be legitimized in academic inquiry. For example, using an embodied data analysis framework, Rosemarie A. Roberts interrogates micro-level Black and brown performance and what they reveal about macro-level social inequalities (280). Employing a similar micro-to-macro framework, Tracey Owens Patton reflects on her experiences in white homogenous dance spaces and demonstrates how the experiences of Black dancers in those spaces can uncover the hegemonic structures informing those spaces (105).
Both Roberts’ and Patton’s studies, along with Amin’s all-inclusive definition, reveal another, wider dimension of Black Dance that is related to Black experiences; that wider dimension is culture. Richard A. Long defines “Black Dance” along a “unified cultural aesthetic that links the non-verbal expression of people of African descent throughout the Diaspora” (Amin 9). This implies that racial identification is not enough to establish the connections in Black Dance among the Diaspora.
Halifu Osumare exemplifies this point when she writes about her experiences in Ghana in her memoir, Dancing in Blackness. Osumare found that despite identifying herself as Black, Ghanaians still referred to her as “Obruni” (199). While “Obruni” is interpreted as both “white woman” and “foreigner;” Osumare took it to mean “white woman” due to her physical characteristics, leading her to question the concept of Blackness and if it was about culture, imagined self-perception, or imposed socialized racialization (199). Where imagined self-perception and imposed racialization are insufficient for establishing kinship between herself and Ghanaians, Osumare discovers that her “[B]lackness was lodged in [their] cultural connections” (200), a discovery that was made through dancing, and thus embodied inquiry.
Thus, Black Dance as a category and field of study is valuable for what it can reveal about embodied cultural knowledge, embodied inquiry, and sociopolitical structures. Black Dance allows one to navigate and perhaps transcend such structures. As the scholarship indicates, multiple perspectives exist and have existed throughout the study of Black Dance on what elements are crucial for defining the term, but it is in Amin’s working definition that encompasses experience and culture that I find a sufficient conception for exploring what Black Dance means to me and what it can mean for academic inquiry.
Amin’s definition, encompassing body, experience, and culture, suggests that the distinctions and relationship among the three deserve further examination. Because the term is linked to sociopolitical readings of Black artists’ creativity, I use Amin’s definition as a starting point for exploring the role of Black Dance in Black women’s restructuring of spatial and temporal boundaries, and particularly how such restructuring is a method for transcending the very sociopolitical structures in which the term originates.
Works Cited
Amin, Takiyah Nur. “A Terminology of Difference: Making the Case for Black Dance in the Twenty-First Century and Beyond.” The Journal of Pan-African Studies, vol. 4, no. 6, 2011, pp. 7-15, https://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol4no6/4.6-1Terminology.pdf.
Craighead, Clare. “‘Black dance’: Navigating the politics of ‘black’ in relation to ‘the dance object’ and the body as discourse.” Critical Arts: A South-North Journal of Cultural and Media Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 2007, pp. 16-33. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/02560040608540452.
DeFrantz, Thomas F. “African American Dance: A Complex History.” Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, edited by Thomas F. Defrantz, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, pp. 3-35.
Gittens, Angela Fatou. “Black Dance and the Fight for Flight: Sabar and the Transformation and Cultural Significance of Dance from West Africa to Black America (1960-2010).” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2012, pp. 49–71. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23215195.
hooks, bell. "Postmodern Blackness." Postmodern Culture, vol. 1 no. 1, 1990. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.1990.0004.
Osumare, Halifu. Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir, University Press of Florida, 2018.
Patton, Tracy Owens. “Final I Just Want to Get My Groove On: An African American Experience with Race, Racism, and the White Aesthetic in Dance.” The Journal of Pan-African Studies, vol. 4, no. 6, 2011, pp. 104-124, https://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol4no6/4.6-7IJustWant.pdf.
Roberts, Rosemarie A. “How Do We Quote Black and Brown Bodies? Critical Reflections on Theorizing and Analyzing Embodiments.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 4, 2013, pp. 280-287. Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/107780041247151.