Tag: performance

ARTICLE: Pryor on the Etymology of ‘Nigger’ in the Antebellum North

Jessica Marie JohnsonLeave a comment
Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. "Effect of John Brown's invasion at the South (Nov. 19, 1859)." New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed July 22, 2016. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-fb9f-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Effect of John Brown’s invasion at the South (Nov. 19, 1859).” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed July 22, 2016. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-fb9f-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Pryor, Elizabeth Stordeur. “The Etymology of Nigger: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North.” Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 2 (2016): 203–45.

Abstract:

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BOOK: Thompson on Dance, Slavery and Performance

Jessica Marie JohnsonLeave a comment

Katrina Dyonne Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

via UI Press:

“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. She shows how these performances informed white European and American understandings of race, influenced interactions between whites and blacks, and often held conflicting meanings in enslaved people’s lives.

“Drawing on travel journals, slave narratives, popular literature, and historical sources, Thompson explicates how black dance was used by whites 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…”