The ring shout grounded a distinct African-derived black oppositional culture in America

Evidence

Among these newer books, the one that I think shares the deepest affinity with Black Marxism is Sterling Stuckey’s Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), which focuses on the ring shout as a key element in the construction of a black culture and oppositional ideology. Published just four years after Black Marxism, Slave Culture also recognizes the African roots of black folk opposition to racial capitalism, demonstrating how the ring shout’s conception of community—as a metaphor and practice—shaped black thinkers as diverse as David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 67

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in the Black radical tradition’s origins — Robinson here endorses Stuckey’s argument that an African religious practice seeded the tradition’s later formation.
• ADDENDUM: The ring shout as communal practice embodies the ritual-mechanism angle; could support the tree/ritual core of how communal infrastructure underwrites identity.