(re)Imagined Africas: African Ritual Performance Retentions in the Drama of the New Negro Renaissance

This dissertation examines how playwrights and of the New Negro Renaissance negotiate relationships to Africa through their incorporation of Afrocentric performance aesthetics. Taking a Pan-Africanist perspective, this dissertation identifies elements of Afrocentric performance aesthetics present in New World Black artforms, known as retentions, in select dramatic texts from the New Negro Renaissance. In doing so, this dissertation illuminates how these playwrights used particular African-derived performance retentions to negotiate twentieth century social and political issues affecting not only Black Americans but also African diasporas across the globe as well as Africans themselves. As performance texts are underrepresented in studies of New Negro Renaissance works, this dissertation emphasizes the sociocultural impact that performance had on the movement. Performance is a fruitful genre for analyzing African retentions in the New World, as many of those retentions are performative in nature, including music, dance, storytelling, and other forms of ritual. Chapter 1 examines an early New Negro Renaissance text, the Williams and Walker company’s 1902 musical In Dahomey, for its recreation of the Dahomeyan Xwetanu festivities as a means to criticize growing Back to African movements. Chapter 2 explores W. E. B. Du Bois’s pageant The Star of Ethiopia in a hyper-local context, situating its second run in Washington, D.C. in 1915 in the context of West African ritual masquerade and sacrificial practices that transform his original draft into a spiritually-charged experience for D.C. New Negro audiences experiencing political and social turmoil at that time. Chapter 3 analyzes Zora Neale Hurston’s co-authored play with Langston Hughes, Mule Bone, in terms of its preservation of Southern Black American folk culture which bears traces of Yoruba divination rituals and Igbo logic systems. Chapter 4 revisits two of these texts, In Dahomey and Mule Bone, in the context of dance and women’s issues illuminated by international star Josephine Baker’s Banana Dance. Juxtaposing Baker’s Banana dance with In Dahomey choreographer Aida Overton Walker’s cakewalk and Mule Bone’s lead female character Daisy’s Baker-esque creolized dance performance reveals a robust intertextual dance tradition led by New Negro women performance artists that reimagine Afrocentric performances and continually revise the Black dance tradition.