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Dance, Difference, and Racial Dualism at the Turn of the Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

John Perpener III
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Extract

Standing at the beginning of a new century, but still faced with what was referred to at the end of the old one as the “politics of difference,” I find myself struggling with the daunting task of discussing extremely complex issues associated with dance scholarship. The issues I refer to revolve around the—all too familiar—divisions of class, gender, race, and other central signifiers of identity that have dominated a substantial part of scholarly discourse in various disciplines over the past two decades.

It is unrealistic to think that the change of the millennium clock has ushered in a new age of enlightenment that will ameliorate the kinds of confrontations over group identity that have, by now, become routine in American society. But it does not seem unrealistic to hope that a new level of clarity can be achieved in scholarly debates involving issues of racial identity and the arts—debates that, in the past, have elicited reactions ranging from indifference, to defensiveness, to volatility.

As an individual who has begun to take an active part in the divisive dialogues surrounding identity, art, and culture in turn-of-the-century America, and as an African American scholar involved in the growing field of dance studies, I have chosen to place issues of race at the forefront of the various identity markers that divide the human family into more circumspect sub-groups. In spite of the progress toward inclusiveness that dance as a performing art and as a field of intellectual pursuit has made, I believe that racially proscriptive thinking still exerts its presence with surprising force in different aspects of our discipline. My realization of the significant role that racial divisiveness plays in our society, our art, and our scholarship greatly shaped the direction of my research and is, indeed, reflected in much of the dance research undertaken by African American scholars today (1).

Type
Trends in Dance Scholarship
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Summer 2000 , pp. 63 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2000

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References

Notes

1. In this discussion—for reasons that I hope will be apparent to the reader—my primary focus is on African American scholars who are researching various aspects of African American dance. I also acknowledge the important role that the work of European American scholars can play in researching African American dance when I refer to Lynne Fauley, Emery'sBlack Dance from 1619 to Today (Palo Alto, Calif.: National Press Books, 1972).Google Scholar Another work that I consider to be an invaluable resource is Aschenbrenner's, Joyce “Katherine Dunham: Reflections on the Social and Political Contexts of Afro-American Dance,” in Dance Research Annual, no. XII (New York: Congress on Research in Dance, Inc., 1981).Google Scholar

2. Winant, Howard, “Racial Dualism at Century's End,” in The House that Race Built, ed. Lubiano, Wahneema (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), p. 87.Google Scholar

3. Perpener, John O. III, “Cultural Diversity and Dance History Research,” in Researching Dance: Evolving Modes of Inquiry, eds. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton and Hanstein, Penelope (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), pp. 334-351.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., pp. 336-337.

5. Du Bois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk, eds. Blight, David W. and Gooding-Williams, Robert (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997 [1903]), pp. 38-39.Google Scholar

6. Howard Winant, “Racial Dualism at Century's End,” p. 88.

7. Ibid.

8. Malone, Jacqui, Steppin' on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana and Chicago, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1996).Google Scholar

9. Thomas DeFrantz, personal conversation, November 16, 1999.

10. Ibid.

11. Green, Jill and Stinson, Susan W., “Postpositivist Research in Dance,” in Researching Dance: Evolving Modes of Inquiry, eds. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton and Hanstein, Penelope (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), p. 93.Google Scholar

12. Lather, Patti, Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy with/in the Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 1991).Google Scholar

13. Jill Green and Susan W. Stinson, “Postpositivist Research in Dance,” pp. 92-93. As Lather's framework is outlined, there are a number of research methodologies that are subsumed under each category. Positivism falls under the category of prediction. As Green and Stinson explain, Lather includes this approach in her framework because it exists alongside the three postpositivist categories: understanding includes methodologies such as interpretation and phenomenology; emancipation embraces methodologies such as those of feminist and critical research; and the purpose of research that employs postmodern and poststructural methodologies is deconstruction.

14. Ibid., p. 94.

15. Ibid., pp. 104-105.

16. Ibid., pp. 109-110.

17. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996).Google Scholar

18. Gubar, Susan. Racechanges (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. xxi.Google Scholar

19. Dance historian Banes, Sally refers to a similar idea in Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modem Dance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), p. xxxii.Google Scholar She expands on it in Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 308. Dance historian Brenda Dixon Gottschild explores different facets of cultural intertextuality/cultural appropriation issues in her chapter, “Barefoot and Hot, Sneakered and Cool,” in Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press), pp. 47-58. As she says on page 57, “European American concert dancers have utilized the Africanist aesthetic, and so have African American artists. Moreover, African American postmodernists such as Blondell Cummings, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Bill T. Jones, Bebe Miller, Donald Byrd, and David Rousseve have deconstructed, refashioned, and preserved European American concert dance aesthetics in their own image. They are latter-day followers in the African American tradition of wearing many hats and inverting-subverting codes, descendants of folks who did so long before there were words like deconstruction or postmodernism.”

20. Goler, Veta, “Dancing Herself: Choreography, Autobiography, and the Expression of the Black Woman Self in the Work of Dianne Mclntyre, Blondell Cummings, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar,” Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1994.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., p. 43.