THEY STOLE OUR DANCE AND MADE IT THEIRS...SEE HOW.

The Africanist Aesthetic in American Dance Forms

by Emily Willette, Smith College
The Africanist Aesthetic and American Dance Forms

The history of globalization and cultural hybridization goes back through time as long as people from different places have been interacting with each other. Through trade of all kinds, people all over the world have been sharing their practices with others and taking in those of others. Since dance embodies many cultural attitudes, it is one way to look at the effects of globalization. Through slavery American dance was influenced by African dance, and in turn the African slaves were influenced by the dances already performed in this country. This can be seen in many dance forms created and altered in the United States.

History

The Africanist Aesthetic, as seen in American dance, is not any particular aesthetic of any one group of people from Africa, but rather is a blend of common elements across many different groups.  According to Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, this blending and creation of an African-American culture came about because of homogenization of slave life.
[1] Since the beginning of slavery in the United States, groups of Africans had been split up. No one group with a common language or cultural practices were kept together, which lead to cultural hybridization even in the early history of slavery.  With the invention of the cotton gin, many plantations that had previously grown indigo or tobacco began to grow cotton because this device made it so much easier to produce. Since almost all slaves were doing the same work, the shared practices were the basis for what Hazzard-Gordon calls, “a fairly stable, homogeneous, dominant cultural variant.”[2] The final force that Hazzard-Gordon cites is the outlaw of the slave trade in the early 1800’s. Since no, or almost no, new slaves were being brought into the United States and the percentage of slaves that were born in the United States was becoming the majority, the people were becoming further and further removed from their home culture with and had no way to recover what had been lost.

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