Examines the role of successive intraregional migrations on the construction of cultural identity in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. The author analyzes the Afro-Dutch experience within the broader canvas of Caribbean migration studies, and thus brings a broader diasporic perspective to current research of identity and culture, with particular reference to Curaçao. Through migrations, the island has incorporated different kinds of musical expressions of the region. Of all cultural forms, music provides an ideal opportunity to explore cultural exchanges within and beyond diasporas. Curaçao therefore offers a rare window for viewing the role of intraregional migrations in the formation of discourses on diaspora and cultural identity. Migration studies that look only at the modern transnationalistic diapora obscure the deeply rooted significance of migration on Afro-diasporic identity within the Caribbean and the cultural identity of specific island societies. Intraregional migration movements both past and present profoundly influenced the cultural identity of Curaçao and its diasporic historical vision. Curaçaoan cultural identity has not been solely shaped by the internal dynamics of a merging of African and European cultures, but also intraCaribbean interactions of the descendants of enslaved Africans.
Explores the neighborhood-based samba practices of working class Afro-Brazilians during the festas juninas (June festivals) in Bahia, Brazil. In contrast to Bahia's famous Carnival, a recognized site for activism, the festas juninas appear apolitical, seeming to lack overt resistance to color-based inequities that persist in Brazil despite national discourses of mestiçagem (mixing) and racial democracy. In recent years, however, June samba has (re-)emerged as a means for marginalized people to assert belonging in June events and festival narratives from which they have been excluded. Their activism draws on tactics used by Bahia's Afrocentric activist carnival organizations, but with important differences. Most notably, rather than placing Africa at the center of their interventions, June samba participants express new notions of Black Bahian subjectivity through the critically informed embrace of local Afro-diasporic traditions—especially a recently recognized UNESCO masterpiece known as samba de roda—and more cosmopolitan musical sensibilities.
Indo-Caribbean music culture includes a stratum of traditional genres derived from North India’s Bhojpuri region. This article discusses three such genres: alha-singing, an archaic form of birha, and an antiphonal style of singing the Tulsidas Ramcharitmanas. Despite the lack of supportive contact with the Bhojpuri region after 1917, these genres flourished until the 1960s, after which the decline of Bhojpuri as a spoken language in Trinidad and Guyana, together with the impact of modernity in general, undermined their vitality. A comparative perspective with North Indian counterparts reveals illuminating parallels and contrasts.
