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Abstract

“Rosy, Possum, Morning Star: African American Women’s Work and Play Songs” is an excerpt from a book length inquiry into, and engagement with, the song and dance of 19th-century African American women, as a source of self-authored social, literary, and historical text. The inquiry takes off from an interdisciplinary exploration of the narratives embedded in the cultural performance of early African and African American women. It explores continuities and improvisations, discursive strategies, articulations of agency, and constructions of identity in a lineage of diaspora articulation characterized by ancestral circles, acts of historical documentation and witness, and the communal creation of liminal space. Weaving together a range of study, including biography and anthropology, ethnography and musicology, poetics, art, and cultural history, on the loom of storytelling, the work also explores the symbolic range of performance inscription by reference to West African, ancient Egyptian, and San traditions, proposing an expansion of our sources and reading of diaspora literature based on the creative and theoretical inscriptions in the performed narratives of African American women.

Keywords

African American women work songs ring and children’s games African American history 19th century African Diaspora performance

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“Rosy,Possum,Morning Star: African American Women’s Work and Play Songs”

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