Black Women of The Cakewalk: Reclaiming The Performance Through Corporeal Orature

Öz

The presentation of the Cakewalk through history is contested through white narratives of appropriation followed by Black narratives of reclamation. Originating in the United States as a performance created by slaves, the Cakewalk is a predecessor to many forms of social dance today. However, it is often Black men who receive recognition for the performance while Black women are forgotten to history. In looking at a historical review of the Cakewalk and following two case studies of Aida Overton Walker and Heather Agyepong, this article argues for the importance of Black women in reclaiming the Cakewalk by embedding new narratives into its history through their own bodily presence and agency. The work extends from theories of literature, politics, and media to physical embodiment, understanding that the Black body has agency in the ways it chooses to communicate through visual presence and performance. In doing this work, Aida Overton Walker and Heather Agyepong not only redefine the presence of the Black person through history, but also negotiate how Black identity should and can be presented.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Cakewalk
• Heather Agyepong
• Corporeal Orature
• Black Dance
• Aida (Ada) Overton Walker

Kaynakça

1. Agyepong, H. (2020). Wish you were here. [Online][Accessed on 12 Dec 22]. http://www. heatheragyepong.com/wish-you-were-here
2. Agyepong, H. (2021). Out of the archives: Photographers in the archives, lecture recording, Four Corners, delivered 18 February 2021. [Online Video][Accessed on 10 Jan 22]. https://vimeo.com/521 355306?fbclid=IwAR161eGK2LQjjtxjYtPxMdPun_kz7yeJ-4myCwux7fHUXNFY1_Q2e_Kv7aM
3. Agyepong, H. (2023). Wish you were here. Centre for British Photography. [Gallery Exhibition]
4. Archer-Straw, P. (2000). Negrophilia: Avant-garde Paris and Black culture in the 1920s. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd.
5. Baldwin, B. (1981) “The cakewalk: A study in stereotype and reality”. Journal of social history. 15 (2), 205-218.
6. Bañagale, R., Hayward, S., Goodwin, I. (5th July, 2016) Clorindy: “A classical day in the life”. A day in the life. [Podcast]. https://criticalkaraoke.libsyn.com/clorindy-a-classical-day-in-the-life-for-july-5-2016
7. Bragin, N. M. (2022), ‘Streetdance and Black Aesthetics’, in Mary Fogarty, and Imani Kai Johnson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies, New York: Oxford University Press.
8. Brand, D. (2011). A Map to the door of no return. Toronto: Random House.

9. Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2016) Embodied sociolinguistics. Copeland, N. (ed.) Sociolinguistics: theoretical debates, 173-197. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
10. Caddy, D. (2007). “Parisian cake walks”. 19th Century Music. 30 (3), 288-317. https://doi.org/10.1525/ ncm.2007.30.3.288
11. “Dean, Dora [Dora Dean Babbige Johnson],” Notable Kentucky African Americans Database, [Accessed on December 25, 2022], https://nkaa.uky.edu/nkaa/items/show/1885.
12. DeFrantz, T. (2004). The Black beat made visible: Hip hop dance and body power. André Lepecki (ed.) Of the presence of the body : Essays on dance and performance theory. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
13. Desmond, J. (1997). Embodying difference: Issues in dance, in Jane Desmond, ed. Meaning in Motion. Durham: Duke University Press.
14. Du Bois, W.E.B. (1997). The souls of Black folk. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
15. Emery, L.F. (1988). Black Dance: From 1619 to today. Second revised edition. Pennington, NJ: Princeton Book Company.
16. Foster, H. (2004). An archival impulse. October, 110 (Autumn), 3-22.
17. Glass, B.S. (2007). African American dance: An illustrated history. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.
18. Gottschild, B.D. (1996). Digging the Africanist presence in American performance: Dance and other contexts. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing.
19. Gottschild, B.D. (2000) Waltzing in the dark: African American vaudeville and race politics in the swing era. New York: Palgrave.
20. Hautsch, J., & Cook, A. (2021). Gifs and Performative Spectatorship. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. 35(2), 75-87. doi:10.1353/dtc.2021.0024.
21. Hill, C.V. (2010) Tap dancing America: A cultural history. New York: Oxford University Press.
22. Hughes, L & Meltzer, M. (1990) Black magic: A pictorial history of the African-American in the performing arts. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Da Capo Press.
23. Knowles, M. (2002). Tap roots: The early history of tap dancing. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.
24. Krasner, D. (1996) Rewriting the body: Aida Overton Walker and the social formation of Cakewalking. Theatre Survey, 37(2), 67-92.
25. Krasner, D. (1997). Resistance, parody, and double consciousness in African American theatre, 1895-1910. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
26. Krasner, D. (2011) The Real Thing. Brundage, W.F. (ed.) Beyond blackface: African Americans and the creation of American popular culture, 1890-1930. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 99-123.
27. Kraut, A. (2016). Choreographing copyright: Race, gender, and intellectual property rights in American dance. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
28. Leach, C. W., & Allen, A. M. (2017). The social psychology of the Black Lives Matter meme and movement. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(6), 543–547. https://doi. org/10.1177/0963721417719319
29. Library of Congress (n.d.). Ada Overton Walker [biography]. [Online] [Accessed on 03 Nov 21].
30. From https://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.music.tdabio.182/default.html Long, R. (1989). The Black tradition in American dance. London: PRION.
31. Lu, J. H. & Steele, C. K. (2019) ‘Joy is resistance’: cross-platform resilience and (re)invention of Black oral culture online, Information, Communication & Society, 22 (6), 823-837. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1575449
32. Creole Show - Breaking Stereotypes, (2016). Kreol International Magazine. [Online] [Accessed on 3 Feb 21] https://kreolmagazine.com/culture/history-and-culture/creole-show-breaking- stereotypes/#.Y6Itp3bP1PZ
33. Mayes, S. & Whitfield, S.K. (2021) An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre: 1900-1950. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.
34. O’Connor, C. (2016). Embodiment and the construction of social knowledge: Towards an integration of embodiment and social representations theory. Journal for the theory of social behavior, 47 (1), 2-24.
35. Overton Walker, A. (1906). Colored men and women on the stage. The colored American magazine. 9, 571-575. [Online] [Accessed on 3 Apr 21]. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1. b3793665&view=1up&seq=613
36. Overton Walker, A. (2018). How to Cake Walk, by Aida Overton Walker (1903). Syncopated Times. [Accessed on 01 November, 2022] from https://syncopatedtimes.com/ how-to-cake-walk-by-aida-overton-walker-1903/
37. Raengo, A. (2014). Blackness, aesthetics, liquidity. Liquid blackness journal, 2 (1), 5-18. https:// liquidblackness.com/liquid-blackness-journal-issue-2
38. Scheper, J. (2016). The color line is always moving: Aida Overton Walker. In Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage, 22-60. New Brunswick; New Jersey; London: Rutgers University Press. [Retrieved April 5, 2021] from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1j7x9t3.5
39. Taylor, M. & Rush, A. (2023) Musical theatre histories: expanding the narrative. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
40. Thorne, W. (2015). The later years of Aida Overton Walker; 1911 - 1914. Black Acts. [Accessed on 03 November, 2022] from https://web.archive.org/web/20150402065608/http://blackacts. commons.yale.edu/exhibits/show/blackacts/walker
41. Thorpe, E. (1989). Black Dance. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press.
42. Woll, A. (1989). Black musical theatre: from Coontown to Dreamgirls. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.