Spatial Dialectics

The purpose of this article is to explore how music provided the U.S. plantation-slaves with a space in which the hegemony of the White ruling class could be subverted, adapted, and resisted. Consistent with the beliefs of slave religion, which saw the material and the spiritual as part of an intrinsic unity, I identify two tendencies in slave song: freedom as material practice and freedom as the “aesthetic imagination.” I argue that the tensions between these two spheres provided a crucial intimation of a life without slavery