Examines the meanings of the marvelous in the context of the Afro-Brazilian ritual called the Reinado de Nossa Senhora do Rosário, according to the way it is applied in the song lyrics and in participants’ verbal discourses. Analyses were based on participants’ perspectives about the origin and history of their religious tradition, which is based on their enslaved ancestors’ experiences of pain. Those facts and events still highlight the sense of belonging to this tradition nowadays and make their performative acts meaningful, significant, and thus wonderful., unedited non–English abstract received by RILM] Os significados da ‘maravilha’ no contexto do Reinado de Nossa Senhora do Rosário, tal como o termo é utilizado nos cantos e nas elaborações discursivas dos congadeiros, são aqui abordados a partir da perspectiva desses participantes sobre a origem e o percurso histórico de sua tradição religiosa, calcada na experiencia da dor de seus ancestrais escravizados. Tais fatos e eventos ainda motivam o pertencimento a essa tradição no presente e preenchem de sentido, de significância e, consequentemente, de maravilha as ações performáticas atuais.
Within sectors of North America's African-American community, the colloquial expression "being touched by the brush" describes a multi-ethnic individual that possesses subtle Negroid physical features which are only detectable by close inspection by a "trained eye." Here, Edison discusses the historical factors in Puerto Rico and Panama that make up the foundation upon which Francisco Arrivi's "Los Vejigantes" and Carlos Guillermo Wilson's "Chombo" were constructed.;
The conjure woman has long lived as a popular American cultural icon, so much so that it seemed destined that multimedia conglomerate the Walt Disney Company would eventually adopt and embrace her. The conjure woman's likeness is reflected in the Disney feature films Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007). This essay investigates just what happens to black women and spirit work when placed in the hands of Disney, a corporation with a sordid history of pirating in another context. The work is particularly invested in complicating black female body politics by addressing the additional stigma against female spiritual autonomy. How is an association with African spiritual cosmologies inscribed on the physicality of black women in popular culture? I focus my attention on Tia Dalma, the minor black female character engaged in Vodou in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, applying a close reading of the spiritual iconography and other cinematic coding surrounding her performance of African-based spirituality. I assess Disney's appropriation of black cultural forms in the construction of fantasy and fairytale.
Reading Heading South as a decolonial romance reveals anxiety about the liminal location of young male citizens in 1970s Haiti caught within the necropower of state terror and US imperialism. Focusing on young men selling 'romance' on the beach within the continuing colonial relations between the United States and Haiti and black and white bodies, the film engages with the limits of transracial, heterosexual romance in sex tourism. The impossibility of romance shows that for Haitian citizens, nationalist redemption lies in politics not in transracial intimacies. However, politics is itself necropolitical, since death is the only passage to narratable citizenship. As a decolonial moment, death speaks about the necropower of daily existence for Haitian citizens caught between state terror and US imperialism; asserts agency in the 'will to death in order to be free'; and highlights the disposability and (un)grievability of poor, young black bodies in Baby Doc Duvalier's Haiti.
Considers the role of music, both symbolic and material, in screen representations of Rio de Janeiro since the 1950s. The music of Rio's streets and hillsides has played more than a mere supporting role in the cinematic representations of the city across the last half-century. Embracing samba, bossa nova, MPB, soul, funk, funk carioca (a local variant of Miami bass), and rap, the heterogeneous voices of Rio's soundscape have arguably shaped audiences' understanding and imagination of its cultural geography and social dynamic as much as the films' visual narratives and dramas. The author discusses some key examples spanning the last 50 years, from Nelson Pereira dos Santos's Rio, Zona Norte (Rio, North Zone, 1957) and Marcel Camus's Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus, 1959), to Carlos Diegues's remake Orfeu (Orpheus, 1999) and Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002). Taking as his point of departure the mythical narrative of Orpheus, he explores the representation of popular music as a force for social redemption, regeneration, and reconciliation. He interrogates the interplay of different musical styles and idioms, such as samba and bossa nova, on screen, and challenges one of the common assumptions about shifts in style and sound: the idea that the harder soundtracks of most recent films (centering on rap and funk carioca) correspond to a necessarily more realistic and truthful representation of the city, as opposed to the allegedly sentimentalized depictions associated with the bossa nova-influenced scores of Orfeu negro and Rio, Zona Norte. In cinematic representations of the city, Rio's musical identity continues to be performed in a dialogue between tradition and innovation, the local and the diasporic, with no song style being more real than any other.
The article discusses the role that the visual arts and museums—through the way their framing and selection choices shape viewers’ perception—play in the construction and deconstruction of post/colonial Caribbean identities. The locus of the analysis is a multimedia installation titled White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece, which was mounted at the Barbados Museum by Barbadian Canadian visual artist Joscelyn Gardner in 2004. The artist's aim in the installation was to expose the telling gaps, silences, and omissions in regard to black and white kinship and inter-racial relations in artistic productions of the colonial period. One such production was the sub-genre of portraiture known as the conversation piece, which was fashionable among an emerging middle class that included colonial landowners and merchants eager to use that visual medium to simultaneously document the wealth their colonial connections brought them and disavow their use and abuse of black bodies to create that wealth. In challenging the conventions of the conversation piece, Gardner recovers unspoken and suppressed stories from the colonial Caribbean past in order to re-present black and white Creole females identities; and in her use of the installation to ‘intervene’ into items displayed in permanent exhibits, she demonstrates how the Museum can become a site of active contestation of received knowledge.
Describes the reflections and experiences of conducting research with a group of excluded young people of African Caribbean descent. The project used participant photography to engage the participants. Concludes that visual research methods empower young people, minimizing the power relationship that can exist between the researcher and young person in conventional interviews.
