SOURCE: “The Slave Ship Dance,” in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, edited by Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 33-46.

In the following essay, Fabre discusses the dances performed on board slave ships headed for the New World as they are variously represented in accounts from ships' logs, observers travelling on the ships, and the captives themselves. She then explores the forced dances' dual relation to the realities of the Middle Passage and to an African heritage.

We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians and poets.

Olaudah Equiano (1789)

Dance is for the African “the fullest expression of art.”

Lee Warren, The Dance of Africa (1972)

The central importance of dance in West and Central Africa has been often emphasized by historians, anthropologists, and Africans themselves. A communal activity, dance was also a crucial element in ceremonial life and created special...