Using insights from her field of West African art and ethnography, Laura Smalligan (in an earlier journal article concerning the Jamaican slave dance, Jonkonnu) opens up and renews challenging perspectives regarding the indispensable African content of New World slavery. Smalligan argues that the Connu slave pageant stemmed from a particular time, place and outlook (of slaves from the Bight of Biafra, modern Nigeria). Discussion here pivots on two comparisons: of dance, often accompanied by trance states (from West Africa to Anglophone plantation societies in the Caribbean and mainland North America); and, of the way contemporary scholars now - often smitten in this generation by the postmodern literary turn' - view, prematurely, slave ethnicity as heuristically vague and unmanageable, as opposed to local slave society people, black and white, then who in their ordinary talk and activities depicted certain slaves ethnically (and linguistically). These broad comparisons should deepen and advance understandings to that dimension of the African diaspora to the Americas known (fashionably) as ethnogenesis', that is, the process of becoming African-American.
