Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery by Katrina Dyonne Thompson (review)

In one of the more harrowing scenes from Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North African Slavery, Katrina Dyonne Thompson describes the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl on board the slave ship Recovery. The girl, who was also suffering from a severe case of gonorrhea, refused to dance with the other women and so was suspended by her leg and flogged to death. As Thompson explains, the girl had refused to follow the “racial script” whereby she was expected to serve as a willing sexual entertainer for the slavers (42-44). From the decks of the Middle Passage to the Epps plantation in Louisiana where Solomon Northup was enslaved, black bondsmen and women were expected to perform music and dance for their enslavers, performances that asserted white dominance and that whites took as proof of innate black inferiority and used to defend slavery.

Ring Shout, Wheel About follows this “racial script” as it unfolded under the system of racial slavery in North America, but inverts the usual timeline of race and American entertainment. Blackface minstrelsy, which developed in America in the 1830s, did not introduce the happy, musical slave. Rather, Thompson argues, the minstrel show was the culmination of 300 years of narratives, interactions and command performances under slavery. The first American entertainment form was the performance of race and power that occurred every day on the slave ship, in the coffle and slave pen, and on the plantation.

Thompson’s argument unfolds through six chapters that each examine a key context in which this American entertainment form developed: early English travel narratives (“the script”), the slave ship (“casting”), the plantation (“onstage”), slave quarters (“backstage”), the coffle and slave pens of the domestic slave trade (“advertisement”), and finally, the minstrel show (“same script, different actors”). Thompson draws on travel narratives, records of the Atlantic slave trade, nineteenth-century slave narratives, WPA slave narratives, the writings of slaveholders, and songs and stories from folklore and minstrelsy. Thompson develops rich comparisons across time and space, although the book occasionally suffers from a vague treatment of the specific context of particular cases. Her secondary sources are wide ranging, but in some cases dated, and there are key interpretations missing from her bibliography. Even with these flaws, this is a compelling and important contribution to the study of slavery, race and American entertainment.

Thompson begins by examining early European travel narratives that constructed people of African descent as natural and willing performers for whites. While European writers “recognized the importance of the performing arts traditions” to West African cultures, they abstracted music and dance from their ritual contexts, instead presenting them as “evidence of the heathenism of Africans” (23-24). Women’s dances, in particular, came to signify the decadence and immorality of Africans, which further served the subjugation and commodification of West African bodies in the slave trade. When Europeans extracted the performance of music and dance from Africans on slave ships, these performances became a means whereby Europeans both “staged race” and “asserted their power over the African captives” (56). But these performances also brought African culture, including musical instruments, to the Americas. In some cases music and dance served as a cover for resistance onboard, and would continue to do so under the plantation regime.

Thompson next explores the double edge of the performing arts under slavery, focusing principally on the American South since the late-eighteenth century. The Southern plantation became a “stage” and the slaveholders “choreographers” who demanded performances from the enslaved to satisfy “white desires for dominance” (70). Singing and dancing were labors whites expected of all bondsmen. For women in particular, the performing arts furthered sexual exploitation as whites treated women’s dancing as advertisement of sexual availability. Thompson demonstrates how whites disavowed the...