In her groundbreaking study, Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery, historian Katrina Dyonne Thompson uncovers the racist roots of America’s “first entertainment venue”— slave society. Complicating a scholarly narrative that posits the origins of contemporary stereotypes about African Americans in the popular images produced by blackface performers in nineteenth- and twentieth-century minstrel shows, Thompson argues that these derogatory representations actually began developing earlier. The complex story behind the intersection between racism and popular culture in the United States, she claims, began on the shores of the West Coast of Africa. A struggle for control over black bodies, psyches, and souls occurred well before the expansion of mass amusement in the industrialized northern U. S. The moral war over the commodification of blackness, rather, first emerged in the spatially violent confines of the upper decks of slave ships, even before the voyage through the Middle Passage. Tracing the history of race and power in the U.S. through the lens of coerced African American performance from the Atlantic crossing to the minstrel stage, Thompson convincingly reveals the inextricable link between white supremacy and black agency.
The organization of the monograph is as persuasive as the broad array of sources the author uses, which contributes to the strength of her methodological contributions. Thompson’s ability to shift from cultural to spatial analysis and her effective use of slave autobiographies and narratives, popular literature, planter’s writings, and travel journals, helps her to illustrate an arduous voyage through a horrific chapter in American history. Using an artfully crafted genealogical approach to examining the relationship between race and identity in America, Thompson charts the stages upon which slaves performed the desires of their oppressors from the sixteenth through the twenty-first century. Despite the lack of evidence from black perspectives, the ways in which she pieces together an incredibly diverse set of sources to highlight African American resistance reveals her skills both as a historian and folk scholar.
The first chapter, “The Script,” provides a compelling discussion of the elite imaginations that conjured race as a topic of cultural commentary. By exploring the journals of wealthy European and American travelers, Thompson demonstrates how hegemonic understandings of morality shaped toxic excuses for subjugating slaves. She also draws on the work of her predecessors by situating the project with an African Diasporic framework, which allows her to investigate the ignorance of explorers who socially categorized West African peoples before they ever left the colonized continent. More importantly, her theoretical trajectory brings slave experiences to the forefront of her conversation, demonstrating the distorted representation espoused by this racist genre in colonial propaganda. The notion that blacks were somehow animalistic in their movements and physical form in ways that were also “innately musical” and highly sexualized grew out of narratives that placed Africans at the bottom of an uncompromising social order. As a result, Thompson argues, “true culture, history, and traditions were hidden from the Western world.” And this misrepresentation “created a negative image of blacks that ultimately laid the foundation for racial hierarchy.” (31)
After describing this colonial-era imagining of black Africans as socially inferior, she shifts to a discussion of the extreme environmental conditions experienced by West African captives during their treacherous journey to the Americas. As slave ships traversed the unforgiving Middle Passage, white slavers forced their human cargo to entertain the crew. Here began the racist movement to commodify black Africans as “happy and willing subjects.” Naming this second chapter “Casting,” Thompson suggests that by portraying themselves as joyous and carefree, captives found themselves forced into a stereotype in order to save their own lives. Of course there were black Africans who resisted serving as entertainers for the prejudiced ship crews. While some slaves physically challenged their oppressors, all potential survivors had to learn to do so spiritually. Acknowledging that slavers and their crews both desired black bodies and were attempting to steal slave spirits, imprisoned West Africans developed a double-consciousness that they carried with them as they landed on the Atlantic coast and found themselves coerced into the domestic slave trade.
The next two chapters, “Onstage” and “Backstage” analyze the music and dance of African slaves on North American plantations and the ways in which white masters continued the tradition of their counterparts from ships that had traveled the Middle Passage. Thompson explains, using documents written by planters, publications, travel journals, and slave narratives, that upper-class white men expected their black “property” to work and also entertain. Ideas of black inferiority emerged through masquerade, subjugation and, ironically, slave agency to create an inherent relationship between African Americans and performance that supported reasoning for their enslavement in the U.S. South and de facto segregation in the urban North.
Chapter 5, “Advertisement: Dancing through the Streets and act lively,” is by far one of the most difficult portions of the monograph to read, not because of any fault on the part of the author but rather her skill as a descriptive writer. Like her discussion of the spatial dynamics of the slave ship earlier, Thompson’s examination of the gruesome realities of the internal slave trade brings her audience into the world of slave trafficking, specifically the organized system of transportation called the coffle. Throughout their journey to the slave pens and ultimately the auction block, African captives paraded the streets, with the drivers forcing them to sing and dance for buyers and spectators. During their time enduring the domestic slave trade, Thompson argues, black bodies became the site of an American “cultural script” that emphasized a tension between white dominance and black agency, which ultimately shaped persistent racism in popular culture and entertainment.
Her last chapter, “Same Script, Different Actors: Eb’ry time I wheel about, I jump jim crow,” looks at the ways that blackface minstrelsy reinforced white male supremacy in a dialectical fashion. By performing on northern stages white men painted themselves as inferior subjects, “happy and willing” to live at the bottom of a power hierarchy. And black actors supported an image that undermined their freedom by reproducing stereotypes against themselves for purposes of popular entertainment and survival. Minstrelsy supported an image that haunted African Americans from the slave ship to vaudeville theatres.
Even though black entertainers helped to produce the negative representation that their white masters had forced upon them, African Americans resisted by creating their own forms of culture and entertainment that were rejuvenating, healing, and hopeful. Despite finding themselves in an unforgiving system of forced bondage, Thompson explains, black slaves endured and continue to live within a transnational psychosis, a national neurosis, and a compulsive and deranged cultural tick that relegates them still to the lowest rung of the social ladder in the United States.
Here is where Ring Shout, Wheel About provides a significant historiographical contribution. Although there is less evidence from the perspective of African Americans, Thompson does demonstrate the centrality of a double-consciousness to understanding this history. Rather than being a story of simple control, this fascinating study demonstrates the complexities of understanding the sources of negative racial stereotypes both globally and in the U.S. specifically. In order to exist in America, black Americans embrace two souls, an antinomy of existence characterized by African and American, a contradiction that both created and supports the foundational fabric of the U.S. nation. Ultimately, Thompson’s work reveals how black became synonymous with national ideologies of race that are as old as and also linked to white America’s celebrated leisure practices.
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[Review length: 1247 words • Review posted on December 1, 2016]