AFRICAN AMERICAN SPIRITUALS AS A RESPONSE TO THE TRAUMA OF ENSLAVEMENT (original) (raw)

Enslavement in the US created a complex context in which several generations of people of African descent experienced collective traumas over the course of two and half centuries. Spirituals, as a genre of music and performative practice, are usually seen as inextricably linked to slavery and can be regarded as many-sided collective responses to the traumatic experiences generated within the context of enslavement. The spirituals and their association with slavery bear a complex relationship to the evolution of collective identity among US people of African descent in a post-slavery era in which racist social structures continued to generate personal and collective traumas that affect them. In this presentation we examine attributes of the spirituals as responses to the traumas of enslavement; we also consider how spirituals might be utilized as responses to traumatic experiences of Black and others in the contemporary world.