Black Dance and Transformation
December 2018
The cultural turn in historical study and the emergence of critical and postcolonial theories have brought significant shifts in research methodologies, allowing scholars to think more deeply about the topics we choose, questions we ask, knowledges we consider legitimate, and the methods used to gain and integrate such knowledge. My decision to begin a graduate program in History and Culture where I could tailor my program of study to my specific interest, Black Dance, came with the awareness that not only is the subject highly personal to me, but also that personal transformation underscores my desire to study a topic that is relatively new, not easily defined, and requires an openness to epistemologies and methodologies that were not traditionally accepted in academic spaces. Because personal transformation lies at the center of my research interests, it follows that my goal is to encourage transformation within society through the study of Black Dance.
In “Transformative Research: Personal and Societal,” Donna Mertens asks, “What is the nature of research that has a transformative goal for the participant, researcher, and society? And, if we accept that the transformative goal is multi-leveled, then what are the implications for the methodologies that we use to conduct this research?” (Mertens 18). While I find value in Mertens’ Transformative Paradigm and the questions and concerns that arise from it, the transformation for which Mertens advocates is inherently political. Her questions and concerns are tied to sociopolitical structures and boundaries, power relations, and oppressions and discriminations that saturate academic spaces specifically and our lives in general. It is taken for granted that every body is a political body, so the political, and therefore oppression and inequity, become the starting point.
As I have considered this notion and its limits, I have come to another question: what exists beyond the political with respect to Black Dance? While I could easily answer this question based on my personal and spiritual beliefs and experiences, applying it to academic inquiry presents a challenge. What epistemologies and methodologies exist for me to make the seemingly baseless claim that Black Dance is about something other than resistance to sociopolitical structures? What happens when liberation becomes the starting point and not the end goal for my study of Black Dance? In spaces where every body is considered to be a political body, and resistance is inscribed on the creative work of oppressed peoples, transformative research for me looks like transcending the limits of political structures and traditional academic discursive practices in order to acknowledge and uncover the root of the creations/creativity of Black folks and all of humanity, historically and in the present day. While there have been shifts in academia that have not only made my research interests feasible, but have also allowed me to think about Black Dance beyond its inherently political undertone, I think there is still a lot of work ahead to transform Black dancing bodies from political bodies to liberated bodies for their own sake.
In considering the possibilities and limitations, I have arrived at the question of, what role does Black Dance play in Black women’s restructuring of spatial and temporal boundaries? By exploring some of the scholarship on Black Dance, dance and politics, and embodiment, the sociopolitical nature of the study of Black Dance has emerged as a foremost concern. For example, debate over the term “Black Dance” itself is inherently about politics and power structures. Thomas DeFrantz, Angela Fatou Gittens, and Takiyah Nur Amin all discuss the moment that “Black Dance” came to exist, during the 1960s Black Arts Movement, making the term indicative of a sociopolitical stance once adopted by Black artists, and therefore a pushback against a sociopolitical structures rendering the choreographic work and aesthetics of Black dancers unequal and inferior, or altogether ignored, in a white supremacist world.
While Amin advocates for the use of the term on the basis that it is necessary to delineate the contributions of Black dancers in academic, American, and global spaces that continue to marginalize Black people and their creations (12), DeFrantz prefers the term “African American Dance” to “invite readers to look beyond how ‘black’ is defined by its racial opposition to ‘white’ (16). DeFrantz’ conception of “black” in opposition to “white” is shared by Clare Craighead, who deems the term racist based on the idea that as a category of identification, it sets up an oppositional discourse of the Other and supports hegemonic discourses that normalize whiteness (20). Amin’s advocacy for the term operates within a framework of resistance to a political structure, and both DeFrantz and Craighead make valid points about how the term’s highly politicized nature has the potential to Other the Black dancer and their work.
I intend to keep these considerations in mind as I conduct my inquiry, and I also think that there must be a way to move through and beyond the politicization to get to something deeper, something more essential to Black Dance than resistance and opposition. The axiological, ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions of Mertens’ Transformative Paradigm, along with my own idea of what “transformative” means, is how I think we can arrive at that “something” that is beyond systems of privilege and oppression.
Mertens’ axiological assumption is informed by the South African concept of Ubuntu, which “calls upon researchers to conduct their studies with an awareness of the effects of research on all living and nonliving things -- those that came before us, those who are with us now, and those who will come in the future” (21). Wedding past, present, and future is a cornerstone of my research question. When I speak of pushing temporal boundaries, I am considering the ways that Black Dance has allowed those who partake in it, both participants and researchers, to reach beyond the limits of linear time. In the opening chapter of Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot describes the overlap between “what happened” and “that which is said to have happened” in historical study, and how the fluidity of those boundaries is itself historical (2). The definitions and ideas inscribed on Black Dance reveal the axiological assumptions of researchers and our ability to “define reality and make impactful judgements about others” (Mertens 20), as what we say happened, based on what is important to us, influences our understanding of “what happened.”
For example, consider Lynne Fauley Emery’s assertion that “the African was forced to dance in bondage and under the lash. He danced because the white ruler wanted his stock in good condition. He danced not for love, nor joy, nor religious celebration, nor even to pass the time; he danced in answer to the whip. He danced for survival (Emery 1988, 12)” (Craighead 18). This interpretation of dance being forced upon enslaved Africans stands in sharp contrast to P. Sterling Stuckey’s reading of the Ring Shout as a “ground of cultural oneness” (44), allowing enslaved Africans in America to “give symbolic expression to their religious vision. . . in an environment hostile to African religion” (41). The “what happened,” enslavement, remains the same, while “that which is said to have happened” varies according to the scholars’ interpretations. These divergent interpretations demonstrate how the axiological assumptions of the researcher, what we consider of value and and then use to make judgments, influence not only the questions asked but the conclusions reached. Thus, moving forward with a transformative goal in mind, I will consider the ways that my research questions and my concern with transcending sociopolitical boundaries indicate the values that are important to me, and if those values are important to the communities I work alongside as I continue to study Black Dance. An important question to keep in mind is, how does my study and whatever conclusions I may reach affect those who came before me, are with me now, and will come in the future?
Axiological assumptions are closely related to the ontological component of Mertens’ Transformative Paradigm. The “openness to possibilities about the nature of reality that comes from inner feelings, intentions, feelings of meaningfulness, and spirituality” (Mertens 21) has played a large role in determining what I believe it is possible to discover through Black Dance inquiries. As Trouillot posits, the philosophical boundaries underlying the positivist theory of history reinforces chronological boundaries between past and present and assumes a linear and cumulative sense of time (5). However, for myself and others who consider the nature of reality outside of Western constructions, time is not exclusively linear.
Considering how Black Dance allows one to push spatial and temporal boundaries means exploring the concept of time as nonlinear and being able to access the past and future from a present space, in addition to accessing dimensions other than the Newtonian material world. These alternative conceptions of time and space are pertinent to Black Dance studies considering the ways that dance techniques and aesthetics are created and passed along, kept alive, revived, or reinvented, and the way that Black Dance, being largely based in African and African Diasporic cultures, implies the importance of unseen and ancestral realms to present, physical realities. It seems that those who dance, especially those engaged in Black Dance, may have some idea of this ability to access different space-time dimensions.
Recalling her dance experiences in Ghana, Halifu Osumare writes, “I was there partially because I understood that African dance and music promotes an important counternarrative to the hegemonic Western discursive order. This embodied knowledge transcends the rational mind, allowing participants to engage emotional and ancestral spiritual dimensions. . .” (182). While this particular quote still rests within the sociopolitical boundaries that are frequently considered in academic spaces, it also suggests a nature of reality and way of knowing that have not been traditionally validated in academia. Furthermore, as Dana Mills articulates in Dance and Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries, dance is its own language, its own method of inscription (6). Thus, in spaces where verbal discourse has traditionally been privileged, dance carries the potential of offering us transformative ways of being and communicating.
If the study of Black Dance suggests transformation with regards to ways of being, then it follows that it also suggests transformation with respect to ways of knowing. Mertens’ transformative epistemological assumption “centers on the meaning of knowledge as it seen through multiple cultural lenses and the importance of power inequities in the recognition of what is considered to be legitimate knowledge” (22). Again, the role of power relations, and therefore politics, comes to the forefront in Mertens’ Transformative Paradigm, but centering ways of knowing through multiple lenses implies that the political is not all there is. As demonstrated by Osumare, embodied knowledge plays a central role in Black Dance and transcends considerations of “rationality” that are pervasive in the positivist-influenced academic realm.
In recent years, embodied data analysis frameworks have given rise to new, transformative scholarship. In “Living, Moving, and Dancing: Embodied Ways of Inquiry,” Celeste Snowber discusses various scholars who have integrated embodied frameworks into arts-based research. The experiences of participants and researchers in transformative research take center stage in Mertens’ paradigm, and some of that experience is embodied. Both Rosemarie A. Roberts and Tracey Owens Patton wed traditional academic frameworks and embodied experiences to draw conclusions about what micro-level dance experiences reveal about macro-level structures. While their emphasis on structures also relies on sociopolitical discourses, they also draw in emotions, feelings and sensations held in the body.
Carving out this epistemological space in academic inquiry suggests the potential for exploring what knowledge is held my body as I engage in Black Dance. Surely, it is not all political knowledge. Certainly, there is knowledge about my spirit, the essence of who I am beyond whatever sociopolitical identities I navigate in a human body. I intuitively know that dance is something other than politics, and while I may have, in earlier years, disregarded the notion for lack of academic frameworks to support it, it would be unscholarly to simply dismiss the idea. Embodiment as a way of knowing is something that I can investigate within myself and within research participants as I seek answers to my questions about the role of Black Dance and the transcendence of spatial and temporal boundaries.
The fourth and final assumption of Mertens’ Transformative Paradigm is the methodological. There is no specific methodological approach in transformative research, which, for me, suggests endless possibilities for how I can approach questions regarding Black Dance. I anticipate the integration of Africana Studies paradigms, Womanist theory, and Dance theory, and perhaps, spiritual knowledge I have gained through non-academic sources. Reading and analyzing the work of previous scholars has been invaluable, so while I do recognize some of the limits of the discursive practices in academia, I also know that previous scholarship makes my work possible.
Mertens concludes that the Transformative Paradigm prompts a different kind of engagement and different research questions from the traditional, and the studies focus on supporting changes (23). I, too, am focused on supporting changes by going beyond the limits of what previous Black Dance research has achieved and getting to the root of what Black Dance means when liberation is the starting point. I hope that my work will be able to transform me personally and support change at the societal level.
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.
Mertens, Donna M. “Transformative research: personal and societal.” International Journal of Transformative Research, vol. 4, no. 1, 2017, pp. 18-24. Sciendo, https://doi.org/10.1515/ijtr-2017-0001.
Mills, Dana. Dance and Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries, Manchester University Press, 2017.
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.
Snowber, Celeste. “Living, Moving, and Dancing: Embodied Ways of Inquiry.” Handbook of Arts-Based Research, edited by Patricia Leavy, The Guilford Press, 2018, pp. 247-266.
Stuckey, P. Sterling. “Christian Conversion and the Challenge of Dance.” Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, edited by Thomas F. Defrantz, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, pp. 40-56.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Beacon, 2015.