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Performing Africa: Memory, Tradition, and Resistance in the Leimert Park Drum Circle

Abstract

This dissertation examines contemporary communal responses to the cultural trauma of slavery, specifically, how the participants in the Leimert Park Drum Circle in South Central Los Angeles perform memories and traditions to construct and re-locate an imaginary known as “Africa.” Leimert Park Drum Circle participants, or more aptly, “cultural actors,” have assembled in a distinctly African-centered gathering nearly every Sunday for the last sixteen years. Situated in Los Angeles’ larger West African drum and dance community, the Leimert Park Drum Circle acts as parchment on which primarily African American participants deploy their bodies as tools to inscribe their “African memories” and “African traditions.”

As a weekly occurrence, the events of the Leimert Park Drum Circle create an urban palimpsest - characterized by repeated inscription and erasure, trace production, and uchronia (no time) - through which cultural actors ideologically remap the imaginaries of Africa, race, and time. Constructed through the cultural tracing of repeated inscriptions and erasures, “Africa” is the accumulation of memory and tradition - conflated, invented, or re-worked. Ultimately, “Africa” is a phenomenological location situated between a shared ambiguous history and the memories generated from that history.

The findings of the autoethnographically-based research demonstrate that we confront the trauma of slavery in addition to the politics of memorialization and historical representation through our weekly participation in the Leimert Park Drum Circle. Since “memories” and “traditions” can be performed anywhere and the presence of an urban palimpsest permits past, present, and future to exist at once, the imagined ideal of “Africa” is performed as a “no place, in no time,” where we resist and defy hegemonic practices aimed at erasing and invisibilizing us, our experiences, and our histories.

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