Dancing the 'clearing' in African diaspora narratives

Paule Marshall's use of the circle dance, the Ringshout, in her novel Praisesong for the Widow provides an insightful understanding of how this ritual has historically provided African Americans with a means of maintaining a unified psyche in the New World. Taking Marshall's understanding as a point of departure, this project constructs the Ringshout as an interpretive model for intertextual interpretations of African American and African literatures of the Diaspora.;Specifically, this dissertation develops a literary trope in African Diaspora literature. It examines the cultural/religious dance, the Ringshout, that is a remembrance ritual for its participants, as a "clearing" as identified in Toni Morrison's Beloved. In doing so, it reveals the connection between the "philosophy of form" danced in the Ringshout as a matrix for the creation of a Ringshout Aesthetic.;The Ringshout, a traditional dance performed throughout the Southern States and in various forms in the Caribbean, is a ritual of reciprocity extended into the literary arena, where the writers of the African Diaspora do their own ritual of remembrance. Each literary work, then, situates and substantiates a "clearing space" that is a "danced text.";This interpretive model includes cultural/theoretical concepts derived from several Diaspora writers. It includes, for example, Toni Morrison's rendering of the "clearing" in Beloved , Ayi Kewi Armah's prologue from Two Thousand Seasons, Ngugi wa' Thiongo's "quest for relevance" in Decolonizing The Mind, Robert Farris Thompspon's "Philosophy of the Cool" from African Art in Motion: Icon and Act and Judylyn Ryan's "ethos of interconnectedness" from her essay "Spirituality and/as Ideology in Black Women's Narratives.";As in Morrison's clearing, where Baby Suggs, Holy invites members of the body to renew themselves, the texts examined here in this study, likewise, are responsive calls of the writers within the Diaspora for the New World African self to be loved and regenerated. The thematic and structural reciprocity within these texts demands an examination of various genres and disciplines. Thus, the theoretical basis of this study includes an intersection of various disciplines including literary analysis, dance theory, African centered theology, African music cultural reference, folklore traditions and performance theory. Nevertheless, the analysis focuses extensively on the works of two writers: Paule Marshall (USA) and Earl Lovelace (Trinidad).