The concept of limping is widespread in various forms of music and dance in the northern Cibao region of the Dominican Republic. A limp is said to characterize the way in which accordion and percussion instruments interpret rhythms in merengue típico music, and some consider it a feature distinguishing the típico style of merengue from other styles around the country. Traditionally, merengue típico is also danced with a limping movement. Moreover, the typical Carnival characters of the Cibaeño cities Santiago and La Vega are also meant to move with limps. Musicians, dancers, and Carnival celebrants give various verbal explanations to explain the limp’s history and importance, and many of these tie it to stories about devils or other amoral characters. The limp is, however, not only a local stylistic feature, but one that connects Cibaeño culture with other expressions involving limps around the Caribbean region, from blues rhythms to zydeco dancing to the so-called pimp walk. The connective tissue between all these diverse cultural expressions might be Esu, Elegguá, or Papa Legba, the deity of the crossroads who limps, is sometimes syncretized with the Christian devil, and is invoked at the beginning and end of vodou and santería ceremonies. This article uses data collected through interviews with merengue típico musicians and dancers, four years’ participation in Santiago Carnival, and the theories of Henry Louis Gates and Paul Gilroy to explore Black Atlantic expressions in a Dominican context, while explaining the connections between dance and music from a Cibaeño perspective., unedited non–English abstract received by RILM] El concepto de “cojear” está muy extendido en diversos géneros de música y de baile en la región norteña de la República Dominicana denominada el Cibao. Se dice que el “cojo” caracteriza la forma en que el acordeón y los instrumentos de percusión interpretan los ritmos del merengue típico, y algunos lo consideran una característica que distingue el estilo típico cibaeño del merengue de los merengues de otras regiones el país. El merengue típico tradicional también se bailaba “cojeando.” Por otra parte, los personajes típicos del carnaval cibaeño en las ciudades de Santiago y La Vega también avanzan, según se dice, con un “cojo.” Músicos, bailarines, y carnavaleros dan varias explicaciones verbales sobre la historia y la importancia del cojo, y muchas se lo atan a historias sobre diablos y otros personajes amorales. Sin embargo, el cojo no es solamente una característica estilística local, sino una que conecta la cultura cibaeña con otras expresiones del “cojo” en toda la región caribeña, desde los ritmos blues hasta el baile del zydeco y el “pimp walk.” El tejido conectivo entre todas estas diversas expresiones culturales podría ser Esu, Eleguá, o Papa Legba, el dios de las encrucijadas que cojea, que a veces se sincretiza con el diablo cristiano, y a quien se invoca al comienzo y al final de las ceremonias de vudú y de la santería. El presente artículo utiliza los datos recogidos a través de entrevistas con músicos y bailarines del merengue típico, cuatro años de participación en el carnaval santiaguero, y las teorías de Henry Louis Gates y Paul Gilroy para explorar las expresiones del Atlántico Negro en un contexto dominicano, mientras explique las conexiones entre la danza y la música desde una perspectiva cibaeña.
The singing of capeyuye (the Mascogo—Black Seminole people—equivalent of the U.S. spiritual) became a significant token of individual and communal identity in that population. The life and career of Gertrudis Vázquez are studied as emblematic of that tradition. The technical aspects of capeyuye are described and its performance is examined with the context of Mascogo society, particularly its connection with important events such as funerals, birthdays, and other festive occasions.
"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
Afro-Brazilian traditions in the city of Juazeiro do Norte, in the state of Ceará, evolved mostly in connection with the practice of Candomblé and related rituals. Similarly to what happened elsewhere in Brazil, transculturation and miscegenation became important features of these traditions, especially in the blending of African and Catholic religious practices. The song and dance associated with religious and secular Afro-Brazilian genres in Juazerio do Norte are examined.
Tambrin music on the Caribbean island of Tobago is traditionally performed to entertain people at weddings and other family celebrations. The genre is also connected with healing ceremonies and the belief in ancestral spirits. It can cause trance and possession. Nevertheless, today’s musicians hardly ever play in these traditional contexts. Opportunities to perform arise from political events, folklore festivals, and concerts for tourists. In consideration of theoretical views concerning cultural contacts, preservation, and staged respectively participatory performances, the article deals with different forms of musical interaction and different ways of playing depending on repertory, individual performers, and performance conditions, based on fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 2009, thus comprising the music of two generations of musicians.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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402 p, Exploration of the musical heritage of Latin America and the Caribbean, arranged by region, focusing on the major countries/regions (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, etc. in Latin America and Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, Haiti, etc. in the Caribbean). In each chapter the author gives a complete history of the region’s music, ranging from classical and classical-influenced styles to folk and traditional music to today’s popular music.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
As contemporary tambú music and dance evolved on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, it intertwined sacred and secular, private and public cultural practices, and many traditions from Africa and the New World. As she explores the formal contours of tambú, the author discovers its variegated history and uncovers its multiple and even contradictory origins. She recounts the personal stories and experiences of Afro-Curaçaoans as they perform tambú–some who complain of its violence and low-class attraction and others who champion tambú as a powerful tool of collective memory as well as a way to imagine the future.
Examines the history of a genre that spans several continents and several centuries. Material from Mexico, Cuba, France, and Great Britain are brought together to create anew, expand upon, and critique the standard histories of danzón narrated by Mexico's danzón experts and others. In these standard histories, origins and nationality are key to the constitution of genres that are racialized and moralized for political ends. Danzón, its antecedents, and successors are treated as generic equivalents despite being quite different. From the danzón on, these genres are positioned as being the products of individual, male originators and their nations. Africa is treated as a conceptual nation, and Africanness as something extra that racializes hegemonic European music-dance forms. Political leanings and strategies determine whether these music-dance forms are interpreted, adopted, or co-opted as being black or white.
Considers the characteristic features of Garífuna music, which are intrinsically related to the history of slavery, warfare, miscegenation, and resistance of this people of African and Caribbean ancestry, living today mainly on the Atlantic Coast of Central America and in the U.S. Based on his analysis of the Wanaragua or Yancunú rhythm, performed in Livingston, Guatemala, by dancers wearing shell rattles (illacu) tied to their ankles, and a musical ensemble consisting of two drums (garaón) and gourd rattles (sisira), the author examines the metric ambiguity of its basic “time line” or 'clave' of 3:3:2 as well as the rhythmic flexibility and unpredictability with which the dancers and musicians relate to it, as a musical expression of the social and cultural conditions created by that history, especially by the processes of miscegenation.
