Foreword: Toward Black Dance Studies

It was June 1926 when W. E. B. Du Bois delivered the remarks that have become known as his “Criteria for Negro Art” speech. The occasion was the 17th annual meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Members of the newly minted civil rights organization gathered to conduct the work of the association and to celebrate the awarding of the Spingarn Medal to Carter G. Woodson (Figure F.1). Woodson, who would become the twelfth person in history to be awarded the medal, had launched his visionary Negro History Week—known today as Black History Month—in February of that same year. W. E. B. DuBois (1918) and Carter G. Woodson (1915). Du Bois was already widely known for many of his significant accomplishments: being the first Black person to earn a PhD from Harvard University (1895), publishing The Souls of Black Folk (1903), cofounding the NAACP (1909), and launching the organization’s magazine, The Crisis, as editor (1910). Woodson’s accomplishments were comparable: being the second Black person to earn a PhD from Harvard (1912), founding ASALH (the Association for the Study of African American Life and History) (1915), inaugurating that organization’s scholarly publication, the Journal of African American History (1916), and becoming dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Howard University (1920). On this auspicious occasion, where one celebrated Black intellectual was to present an award to the other, Du Bois centered his remarks on notions of beauty, truth, aesthetics, and art. Noting that some might object at the content of his speech, Du Bois quipped: I do not doubt but there are some in this audience who are a little disturbed at the subject of this meeting, and particularly at the subject I have chosen. Such people are thinking something like this: “How is it that an organization like this, a group of radicals trying to bring new things into the world, a fighting organization which has come up out of the blood and dust of battle, struggling for the right of black men to be ordinary human beings—how is it that an organization of this kind can turn aside to talk about Art? After all, what have we who are slaves and black to do with Art?” Or perhaps there are others who feel a certain relief and are saying, “after all, it is rather satisfactory after all this talk about rights and fighting to sit and dream of something which leaves a nice taste in the mouth.”1 Du Bois challenged his listeners, those members and supporters of the noted civil rights organization, to embrace the idea that art “is part of the great fight we are carrying on and it represents a forward and upward look—a pushing onward.”2 Later, he opined that Black folks, particularly the young folks of the moment, had within them “new stirrings . . . stirrings of a beginning of a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be,”3 as a result in part of the work of Woodson and others whose writing and creative expression stimulated a new appreciation among Black folks of their own histories, pasts, and presents. Du Bois proclaimed that Black people are “remembering that the romance of the world did not die and lie forgotten in the Middle Age [sic]” and “that if you want romance to deal with you must have it here and now and in your own hands.” The wealth in Du Bois’s remarks is that in them he argues that Black people, possessed of an often-denied history and equipped with an aesthetic sensibility informed by our own unique historical circumstances, are possessed with the capacity and potential to create on our terms, from our own cultural substance, and for our own needs. Du Bois’s remarks suggest a simple but radical proposition in the face of racism and a pervasive culture of white supremacy: if we concede that Black folks have the capacity to create and make art then we must concede that Black folks are also fully human, worthy of all the rights, respect, and dignity thereof. It is out of this radical notion that I locate a central aspect of Black Dance Studies. As a field, and as a primary point of departure, it takes for granted the full humanity of Black people. It assumes the value of our expressive culture and the privileging of our aesthetic sensibilities. We have our “romance” here and now, shaped by our own evolving ideas of life, beauty, truth, history, and art. I have written elsewhere and at length about defining Black dance and its characteristics, and the ongoing relevance of African American dance in particular, in the broader discourse of dance history.4 Here, I turn my attention to Black Dance Studies, an academic discourse that situates the embodied creative expression emerging from Black life as primary source, site, and subject. Moreover, I consider Black Dance Studies as extending and contributing to one of the core tenets of Black Studies—namely, to enable Black folks to speak our cultural truths and make our own contribution to the “forward flow of human history.”5 What is there to find “in” Black Dance? Black Dance contains within it an ever-evolving, ever-growing body of movement that reflects the historical, social, and cultural conditions of Black people. It is in the excavation of Black Dance and the critical engagement with what we find there, through processes of embodiment, observation, and writing, that the possibility emerges for a deeper engagement with Black life. Early thinkers and artists working in what we might come to understand as core antecedents to Black Dance Studies today—people like Asadata Dafora, Pearl Primus, and Katherine Dunham—showcased, through their study, the embodiment and staging of our dances: the rich and diverse experiences of Black people and cultures across the diaspora. Contemporary scholars working in and through Black Dance Studies embody, teach, document, stage, and write about emerging movement vocabularies not as a means of merely cataloging Black dance, but in an effort to expand and maintain the artistic and intellectual legacies of our shared past while investigating these dances as a site for understanding the nuances of Black life here and now. Plainly, if one is to understand the experiences of Black people, critical engagement with those practices closest to our bodies is paramount. Black Dance Studies invites and encourages this engagement. We are all better because of the work of those in Black Dance Studies who illuminate the aesthetic sensibilities found in Black dance. Whether it is Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s thick movement descriptions of the dance of Earl “Snakehips” Tucker or Thomas F. DeFrantz’s critical engagement with the theoretical underpinnings of Black art as an urgent fugitivity, aesthetic research opens urgent space for understanding the reach of Black invention.6 By centering Black dance as our primary source, scholars and artists reveal the particularities and peculiarities of our collective sense of beauty, truth, desire, and the like that emanate from our movement vocabularies. Black Dance Studies makes room for explicit engagement with the ideas embodied in Black dance, reflecting something of our social, cultural, and historical realities but also our tastes, fantasies, and collective striving; the dance comes first, and engaging the aesthetic experience of the dance is primary above and before any other layer of analysis that one might bring to the exploration. By centering Black dance as the core subject under study, we complicate existing ideas about knowledge and its production. Black dance, along with other expressive modes, documents the collision and cultural borrowing among and beyond communities of African-descended people. There is no historical period when Black folks have lived where we don’t find dance serving social needs and communicating cultural identities as essential ritual and practice. Notably, by narrating the choreographies emerging from Black theatrical traditions and documenting the ways that dance is operationalized beyond the contours of performance, those who work in Black dance studies are adding to our broadest understanding of Black histories and pulling into sharper relief how it is that Black people have navigated various forces meant to undermine our full flourishing. People like Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Jacqui Malone, Kariamu Welsh, and many others persist as researchers, clarifying our aesthetic sensibilities as well as preserving the remnants of Black culture for our collective study and edification.7 The boundaries between academic disciplines can be likened to the lines on a map. While such boundaries are “real” in a sense—and crossing them has political, social, and intellectual consequences—those boundaries are not “fixed” in a material way. A map of the boundaries between nations or states in the year 1400 does not necessarily look the same in 2026. This is a productive and helpful way to think about the lines or boundaries between academic disciplines or discourses. Plainly, while they are real, they are not fixed for time immemorial and new fields of study shape themselves insomuch as they constitute the limits of other emerging discourses. Consequently, as new ways of thinking emerge and instantiate themselves, boundaries between disciplines become destabilized, fluid, and permeable. Black Dance Studies then is a necessary and critical intervention within Dance Studies, challenging the central preoccupations of the broader discipline at any given time to rethink its language, hierarchies, core tenets, and even what counts as “dance” or “performance.” At the same time, Black Dance Studies challenges Black Studies as a discipline to develop greater facility, familiarity, and theoretical precision in considering the resonance and role of Black creative expression and production within the larger project of Black liberation. As such, Black Dance Studies is, as an emerging discourse, at the vanguard of thoughts and ideas that provoke and challenge existing disciplines to reconsider their epistemological assumptions and core concerns. In that famed 1926 speech, Du Bois was unequivocal in his proclamation about the deployment of art to promote and publicize a particular cause or viewpoint: Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda, for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.8 Black Dance Studies, too, “stands in utter shamelessness” in its unwillingness to yield the center of its interests and concerns to logics suggesting that the scholarly engagement with Black cultural production and embodied expression is of no avail. I hold my breath in positive anticipation of new terminologies and pedagogical and research approaches emerging from Black Dance Studies that challenge the status quo, unseat violent white supremacist intellectual and cultural logics, and deploy ideas and perspectives that amplify the persistent value of Black life and creative expression. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” 290. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” 291. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” 294.