1619: The Dramatic Performance Traditions of North America's First Enslaved Africans

The 400th anniversary of the 1619 arrival in Virginia of a "Dutch man of war" carrying "20. and odd Negroes" sparked renewed interest in the identity of the earliest enslaved Africans known to arrive in the English colonies in North America.¹ In its "1619 Project," the New York Times analyzed their long-lasting impact on American society from a variety of perspectives with the goal to place "the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative."²

The 1619 Project is not without controversy. In order to give itself an aura of originality, it largely ignored that the relationship among race, slavery, and American culture has been discussed in a modern way by scholars for more than half a century, and that commonly-used textbooks cover this topic extensively. Moreover, its decision to classify "those men and women who came ashore on that August day" as "the beginning of American slavery" overlooks the tragedy of indigenous American slavery. It also reinforces an Anglo-centric bias in the narrative history of the United States by omitting that enslaved Africans had already arrived in places such as Puerto Rico a century earlier. However, there can be no denial of its claim that "most Americans still don't know the full story of slavery," and that this Pulitzer Prize-winning Project gave great momentum to a much-needed "re-education." In fact, film studio Lionsgate recently announced a partnership with the New York Times, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Oprah Winfrey to adapt the Project into an expansive portfolio of new media content.³

Considering the likelihood that the 1619 community will remain in the spotlight, a better understanding of its cultural identity is highly relevant. This article wishes to contribute to this discussion, at least partially, with a focus on the community's dramatic performance traditions. Its goals are twofold. First, it aims to fill a lacuna in the New York Times' Project that stressed the importance of African Americans to the nation's performance culture yet omitted a reflection on the 1619 community's own cultural identity. Second, it intends to demonstrate that the "full story of slavery" cannot be truthfully explained if framed as a "national narrative." By analyzing the dramatic performance traditions of the 1619 community in an Atlantic context, the article proposes an alternative framing of this narrative; not as a national, but as a transnational story.

This is not a purely speculative exercise. Admittedly, the available information from Virginia itself is spurious. The only known seventeenth-century source relating to performances of the black community remains vague in its reference to a 1680 decision by the authorities to prohibit "the frequent meeting of considerable numbers of negroe slaves under pretense of feasts and burials" and their carrying of "staffe, gunn, sword or … other weapon."⁴ However, in spite of this paucity of sources, there is a large corpus of seventeenth-century documents that describe in great detail performance traditions from the West-Central African region where the 1619 community originated. Considering that charter generations tended to have a profound impact on black cultural identity formation in the diaspora, this information is important to the historical development of African American dramatic culture.⁵ In fact, the adjustment to the new land did not necessarily imply that all African cultural elements were put aside. Historical documents and data from ethnographic studies allow us to demonstrate with considerable accuracy how certain traditions with roots in seventeenth-century West-Central Africa influenced the development of black dramatic performances in the Americas. While most of the English-language primary sources presented in this article are likely familiar to experts in early African American or African Atlantic scholarship, it also includes a large number of quotations taken from primary sources in other languages that are less familiar to modern Anglophone scholars. Most of these sources have not been translated into English. Unless otherwise indicated in the notes, I translated the quotations myself.

Linguistic sources provide a remarkable example of how cultural elements from...