Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts by Brenda Dixon Gottschild (review)

Book Reviews 219 many objects in museum collections, native and otherwise, have survived precisely because they were cherished by their owners during their lifetime. In Harjo's variation on the Western as morality play, all ambiguity is erased since the good guys are the losers, making their moral victory absolute. At a time when historians routinely deplore the noble savage as another selfserving white construct of the Indian, it is unsettling to encounter noble savages still thriving in a narrative like Harjo's. But that very fact makes her essay useful in setting up the contemporary works in "Gifts of the Spirit." Her didactic reading of the past is shared by many of the artists she discusses , and thus contextualizes their creations. "Gifts of the Spirit" was not without precedent. More than a quarter century ago what is now the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria mounted an exhibition that took on a life of its own, travelling widely as "The Legacy: Tradition and Innovation in Northwest Coast Art. 11 Current sensitivities ensure that most future exhibitions of native art will also showcase contemporary works along with the older museum pieces. Still, sentimental notions of the "Vanishing Indian" linger on in the popular culture, and a catalog like Gifts of the Spirit, as the permanent record of an exhibition asserting native cultural vitality, has a worthwhile contribution to make. Brian W. Dippie Universityof Victoria Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Perforrnance:Dance tmd Other Contexts. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Brenda Dixon Gottschild, a professor of dance at Temple University, traces the pervasive presence of African-influenced aesthetic values and practices in American performance from the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century to the rap and hip hop artists of our own time. Much of the book focuses on the unacknowledged use of what she terms "Africanist" elements in the elite concert dance dominated by European Americans in the United States. In its attempt to educate an audience that the author assumes to be ignorant of, 220 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d'eludes americaines or to have denied the value of, African-American contributions to styles and genres of performance in the United States, this book sets out clear definitions of what, for Gottschild, constitute such contributions, and then hammers home their importance in a variety of contexts. Chapter 2 delineates the five principles considered by the author most central to understanding Africanist performance: "Embracing the Conflict," Polycentrism/Polyrhythm," "High-Effect Juxtaposition," "Ephebism" (that is, high energy and intensity), and the 11 Aesthetic of the Cool." Gottschild wants to argue that these attributes have deeply informed the dominant culture in the United States, but that at the same time, they remain separable components of that culture. While throughout the book Gottschild asserts the centrality of 11 intertextuality" to the ways in which cultures interact, she also wants to maintain the independent identity of African-American cultural attributes. To do otherwise, she argues, -ignores the history of oppression and domination that African Americans have suffered at the hands of European Americans. If one accepts the premises of Gottschild's approach-that the five attributes mentioned above define an Africanist aesthetic and that these attributes constitute separable elements within the performances of a wide range of American artists-interpretive perspectives become possible that might not otherwise emerge. As a dancer and professor of dance, Gottschild is at her most informative when she takes on specific dancers and choreographers. Her suggestion in chapter 4 that Martha Graham's wellknow principle of pelvic contraction and release as the basis for her modern dance technique could not have come from a European dance tradition, but had to have emerged from the African-American tradition (where torso articulation was common), points out one of the limitations of discussing this dancer solely within the confines of European dance traditions. Perhaps her most satisfying chapter to this reader, however, deals with George Balanchine's incorporation of Africanist attributes into ballet. Ballet represents the epitome of European performance in the scheme of this book. Its aesthetic qualities are almost diametrically opposed to those of African-influenced dance. As a form of ethnic dance...