of water and resistance via dance, talk and song

Alvin Ailey's "Wade in the Water" dance from Revelations.

Last week, the students looked at the concept of  black resistance while studying Alvin Ailey’s choreography in “Wade in the Water,” a piece from Revelation,  a famous 1960 performance. They also read excerpts from David Celcelski’s study of black maritime workers in antebellum America. To help them think deeply about resistance across time, I showed them the movements of dancers behind Marvin Gaye performances, circa 1960s, and “Soul Train” episodes from the early 1970s. The idea was to help them see how the Ailey movements presaged the way American vernacular dance reflected the resistance seen in Americans during the Civil Rights and Black Power (and, I might add now,  counterculture) movements. More critically, I wanted them to see how this foreshadowing happened more than a century after those maritime workers expressed independence by moving through space. Whether they wrote in, before or after class, several students were able to pick up on the many things I hoped they would. 

One of our take-aways was understanding how the African American men, free or enslaved, who navigated the waters off the coast of Wilmington, often resisted the oppression they faced as people of color simply because they were mobile. They could thus build traditions – such as singing - and maneuver strategically (sometimes with poor results if the many failed rebellions by blacks who lived in coastal areas are considered ) away from the direct oversight of whites. Decades earlier, some had even been used by the British government to fight white settlers before the American Revolution. As Anne Marie, one student wrote, “The black maritime seamen began to see in a silver lining in the opportunities that could present themselves if they would only rise up and claim them.”

Seahawks' Richard Sherman was criticized for postgame comments.

Marcia said while watching the Ailey piece, which also had a water motif, she did not immediately make the connection that it could be seen as a performance about how “blacks were able to rebel in their own way to the confinements of slavery.” But she finally did, saying, “Flashforward to the 1960s and the dance company…in their own way [was] also rebelling the confinements of being black in America through dance.”  Added Trakayla, African Americans were “almost silently telling whites that they will not be held down.” However, Elizabeth still noticed that the movements were “restricted [and] limited,” and thus, uncover the ways in which oppression continued. Conversely, Alex was able to still see a “celebration” in the Ailey dancers and make connections between black urban dwellers of the past who often “enjoyed living in…cities” because the freedom such a life seemed to offer differed from that endured in the plantation setting. Brandy, another student, noticed how the Ailey dancers seemed to “release their pain…via chest convulsions.”

As a means of helping the students to also keep the “city” in view (especially because Cecelski does something similar when he directs attention away from the black plantation life to black sealife), I also asked the class to pay close attention to how urban life emerges in the United States during the nineteenth century by reading an excerpt from Thomas Bender’s Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth Century America. They discovered that early American leaders like Thomas Jefferson never understood the degree to which American life would be defined by the urban space rather than the open land. Interestingly, because African Americans have long been tied to the urban space, they were always an integral part of this space. Wrote Marcia, “many port cities had large populations of black people,” something that whites feared. As Brandy also relayed, these men were sometimes able to be political by taking messages to blacks in distant places.

Speaking of Thomas Jefferson, Jake, another student, shared his troubles with the man. More critically, Jack was able to draw connections to the scuttlebutt over the recent 18-second post-NFC championship tirade by Seattle Seahawks player Richard Sherman. Jake later emailed me to say that Sherman, who grew up in the tough Compton section of Los Angeles and went on to Stanford University, was under a national microscope for his “trash-talking” because he was African American. Pre-Civil War maritime workers suffered similarly, Jake wrote. Though the urban space is hugely important because it allowed black seaman to work independently, they, too, were constantly being monitored by others.

And speaking of Compton, this week we turn to the idea of black labor by reading an excerpt from historian Robin Kelley’s Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class. Kelley is among the many scholars since W.E.B. DuBois’ 1935 Black Reconstruction who are interested in recounting labor stories from “below,” which is to say from people who are often oppressed, black and white ones. In the excerpt before us, we will want to continue exploring how the city space figures into the post-World War II social problems faced by black Los Angelenos and moreover, how those problems figure into the emergence of gangsta rap. Though this reading may feel like quite a  jump from our recent look at black seaman, this approach reflects my wish to proceed with themes rather than chronologically as I did when I taught this class last spring. The theme this week is labor, something that certainly figured into last week’s look at resistance. The students will want to find meaning in these two concepts – resistance and labor - while keeping urban life and black identity front and center.

Interestingly, all four themes that will be addressed by the time we finish this week – urban, identity, resistance and labor – figure prominently into the 1974 movie “Claudine,” which we will watch this Wednesday.