Special Religion issue, Includes Martha Ellen Davis, "Diasporal dimensions of Dominican folk religion and music"; Loren Y. Kajikawa, D'Angelo's voodoo technology: African cultural memory and the ritual of popular music consumption"; Joseph M. Murphy, "'Chango 'ta vein'/chango has come': Spiritual embodiment in the Afro-Cuban ceremony, bembé"; Teresa L. Reed, "Shared possessions: Black Pentecostals, Afro-Caribbeans, and sacred music"; and Rebecca Sager, "Transcendence through aesthetic experience: Divining a common wellspring under conflicting Caribbean and African American religious value systems."
Can musical sounds reveal history, or collective identity, or new notions of geography, in different ways than texts or migrating people themselves? This essay offers the idea that the sounds of music, with their capacity to index memories and associations, become sonic points on a cognitive compass that orients diasporic people in time and space. Explores grassroots religious musical productions to show that Afro-Caribbean groups can stake out multiple diasporic identities in overlapping diasporic spaces through the various political registers of tribe, kingdom, and nation.
[Unedited] My dissertation examines the way in which specific historical bodies such as the soldadera (a female camp follower), the mulata, and the figure of Emiliano Zapata have been appropriated in Mexico by different cultural genres such as literature, music, popular balladry, and film. All of the historical figures that I consider occupy the site of a powerful tropological discourse that has saturated the public imagination throughout the 20th c. Hayden White, among others, contends that trope, which is figurative language, constitutes a 'mode of thought.' As a mode of thought, trope can govern the expectations that are held of certain people. This project is concerned with defining those expectations within the confines of the nation-state, and more importantly, explaining how they are disrupted. This leads to my critical query: why do certain historical bodies constitute the sites of such discursive tension? The figures I examine in this study suggest something deeper in the concept of nationhood than the reigning paradigms of identity; their bodies become metaphors for the tensions within the spaces they occupy. In order to embrace this project, I explore the idea of tropes within traditional Western rhetorical practices and then enter into dialogue with indigenous thought and aesthetics. The process by which noted historical figures become aesthetic tropes in both popular cultural production and high art constitutes the crux of this study. For example, the soldadera and the mulata are given anonymous, even pejorative names that reveal their striking omnipresence in the national imaginary; nevertheless, they are erased from the national narrative. In effect, the participation of the soldaderas in the Mexican military was never officially recognized or remunerated; they were deplored as cumbersome parasites. Similarly, mulatas enter the imaginary as exceptional, exotic figures whose exuberant sexuality is perceived as dangerous to traditional culture. Yet their image is nonetheless pervasive in 20 th century Mexican culture. In light of the nation's historical amnesia regarding the place of Africans, I examine the way in which different musical genres and cultural traditions in the state of Veracruz articulate Mexico's legacy of blackness. Unlike the nameless anonymity of the soldadera, mulata and Africans, Emiliano Zapata begins as a specific individual with a proper name and history. However, the specificity of his historical context becomes abstracted through the appropriation of his name by the indigenous groups who, by assuming his patronymic as Zapatistas, forcefully insert their anonymity into the national narrative. Despite its program to achieve mestizo middle-class values, national culture repeatedly turns back to figurations of marginal subjects. How these figures inspire art forms as diverse as corridos, film, fiction, and music as well as the power of these uniquely marginalized figures to travel across genres so irreverently is what drives my intellectual endeavor.
"Dominican culture and society can be characterized as a hybrid whose nature is expressed in various domains. For example, folk or popular Catholicism, the religion of some 90 percent of the national population, is in summary a cultural amalgamation. But deconstructed, it can be seen to retain elements of the various contributors to its eclectic configuration: Spanish of different regions, classes, Catholic religious orders, and even religions with regard to Judaic and Islamic features retained in Spanish folk Catholicism; West and Central African of various ethnic origins; continuities of native Taíno beliefs and practices; and other origins, such as the possible East Indian origin of the vodú deity of the “black” Guedé family, Santa Marta la Dominadora." -The Author
