TY  - BOOK
AU  - Thompson,Katrina Dyonne
TI  - Ring shout, wheel about: the racial politics of music and dance in North American slavery 
T2  - JSTOR eBooks
SN  - 9780252096112
AV  - E443 .T49 2014
U1  - 390/.250973 23
PY  - 2014///
CY  - Urbana
PB  - University of Illinois Press
KW  - Slaves
KW  - Southern States
KW  - Songs and music
KW  - United States
KW  - Social life and customs
KW  - Race in the theater
KW  - History
KW  - Theater and society
KW  - African American dance
KW  - Slavery
KW  - Justification
KW  - Plantation life
KW  - Racism in popular culture
N1  - Includes bibliographical references and index; The script : "Africa was but a blank canvas for Europe's imagination" -- Casting : "They sang their home-songs, and danced, each with his free foot slapping the deck" -- Onstage : "Dance you damned niggers, dance" -- Backstage : "White folks do as they please, and the darkies do as they can" -- Advertisement : "Dancing through the Streets and act lively" -- Same script, different actors : "Eb'ry time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow" -- Epilogue : the show must go on -- -
N2  - "In this ambitious project, historian Katrina Thompson examines the conceptualization and staging of race through the performance, sometimes coerced, of black dance from the slave ship to the minstrel stage. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, Thompson explicates how black musical performance was used by white Europeans and Americans to justify enslavement, perpetuate the existing racial hierarchy, and mask the brutality of the domestic slave trade. Whether on slave ships, at the auction block, or on plantations, whites often used coerced performances to oppress and demean the enslaved. As Thompson shows, however, blacks' "backstage" use of musical performance often served quite a different purpose. Through creolization and other means, enslaved people preserved some native musical and dance traditions and invented or adopted new traditions that built community and even aided rebellion. Thompson shows how these traditions evolved into nineteenth-century minstrelsy and, ultimately, raises the question of whether today's mass media performances and depictions of African Americans are so very far removed from their troublesome roots"--
UR  - https://ezproxy.uttyler.edu/login?url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt7zw5wh
ER  -