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.
The African diaspora has been a key concept adopted by artists, activists, educators, and scholars committed to challenging the specific ways in which the marginalization of blackness has operated and continues to operate among Spanish-speaking Caribbeans and their descendants. This essay focuses on a relatively small network of New York roots musicians of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent who nevertheless have a strong impact on the way the concept of the African diaspora is argued for in local musical, educational, activist, and scholarly circles. They constitute a key component of what Rogers Brubaker has termed the “actively diasporan fraction” who seek “not so much to] describe the world as seek to remake it.” This article documents and analyzes these musicians' reliance on the concept of urban maroonage as a politicized permutation of the concept of the African diaspora and a central component of a liberation mythology and pedagogy. I propose that though this mythology and pedagogy often falls into what Brubaker has criticized as a “non-territorial form of essentialized belonging” it is at the same time a mythology that takes into account what Earl Lewis has termed “overlapping diasporas” as well as the shifting borders of diasporic identity that Juan Flores and others have explored—two key factors in the way diaspora is enacted, but that Brubaker himself fails to address properly.
Unedited] Blues scholarship has offered a number of interpretations for the haunted desperation of the souls of Delta blues musicians, their deals with the devil, and the magical acquisition of musical skill. The association of 1920s and 1930s blues musicians with the supernatural may have been fed by those rediscovered blues musicians sharing what their mid-20th c. white interlocutors wanted to hear, but they may also have resonated with a more metaphorical belief in the role of the supernatural. Robert Johnson’s diverse recordings, specifically “Crossroad blues,” “Preaching blues” and “If I dad possession over judgment day,” illuminate connections between blues and African Diaspora of the circum-Caribbean. The lyrical content, with its images of prayer and desperation, musical construction, with connections to common practices in religious musics in the circum-Caribbean, and ascribed primitivist elements in these songs suggest that Johnson’s invocation of the supernatural may also have been the metaphorical presentation of a widely known legend. Therefore, beliefs about spirituality in the blues, and the interconnection of blues and religion, have bases beyond religious or commercial sources.
There are many parallels between the music and worship of the African American Pentecostalism of the author’s upbringing and that of Afro-Caribbean religious groups, including Trinidadian Spiritual Baptists, the Haitian Heavenly Army, and Jamaican Revival Zionists. This can partly be attributed to their shared West African roots. Many features of West African worship have survived among these two geographically separate groups, including a heavy use of rhythm and percussion instruments, a call and response vocal form, and a climax of spirit possession, when congregants reach a state of rhythmically induced ecstasy in which they feel fully possessed by the divine. Both groups have also independently adopted white Christian hymnody, in which they stay true to the text but often change the music in an improvisatory style.
[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.