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Locating Montserrat Between the Black and Green
Abstract
This article is an ethnographic investigation of Montserrat's "triangular" cultural heritage, comprised of Irish, African, and Montserratian identities. I examine the annual St. Patrick's Festival and short-lived African Music Festival (2013-2014) through a performance studies lens to understand how national symbols, masquerades, and music and dance contribute to ambivalent, often contradictory cultural narratives about Irishness and Africanness on the island. I illustrate how such performances prompt important dialogues and debates among the community that promote local cultural development twenty years after the island's volcanic crisis of the mid-1990s. This article complicates the touristic image of Montserrat as the "Other Emerald Isle" and details how individuals experience festival in differing ways and how they dialogue productively as they strive for decision-making power.
How can we create more inclusive spaces in the field of dance?
This book presents a framework for dance practitioners and researchers working in diverse dance cultures to navigate academia and the professional dance field. The framework is based on the idea of "cultural confluences," conjuring up an image of bodies of water meeting and flowing into and past one another, migrating through what the authors refer to as the mainstream and non-mainstream. These streams are fluid categories that are associated with power, privilege, and the ability (or inability) to absorb other cultural forms in shared dance spaces. In reflective interludes and dialogues, Emoghene and Spanos consider the effects of migration on their own individual experiences in dance to understand what it means to carry culture through the body in various spaces. Through an analysis of language, aesthetic values, spaces, creative processes, and archival research practices, the book offers a collaborative model for communicating the value that marginalized dance communities bring to the field.
This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and arts administrators in dance.
On 17 March, the last day of Montserrat's annual St. Patrick's Festival, locals and tourists gather at the culminating Slave Feast event to commemorate the island's attempted slave rebellion on that same day in 1768. At the Slave Feast, festivalgoers enjoy local foods, buy handmade crafts, and watch artists perform music, dance, and poetry. Masquerade dancers form a circle among the crowds; the young performers wear grinning masks that dangle in front of their faces as they stamp and spin in the dusty street. Their bodies move polyrhythmically, shoulders pulsating up and down. The troupe's captain cracks a whip that bites at the dancers’ feet, urging them to step faster, higher; the performers become more frenzied. As their feet punctuate the pavement below, there is a sense that they are floating just above the ground, occasionally dipping their bodies toward the earth and momentarily disrupting the driving rhythm of the dance. Their hands gesture in toward and then away from their torsos, fingers pointing to their temples and then opening out into serving motions in front of them. The sound of the masquerade “boom” drum vibrates through the space, the high-pitched fife dictates the dancers’ steps and formations, and the goatskin kettle drum emits driving rhythms that become increasingly heated (see figure 1). Echoing the multiple voices that contribute to the community's cultural heritage, the fife layers European-sounding melodies onto African-sounding drum patterns. The discrete physical and historical elements of Montserrat's masquerade dance combine to “remember” a “dismembered” community, one that has been divided and dispersed over centuries of trauma inflicted by both man and nature. These performers dance the archive; these dancers are the archive.
When the Soufriere Hills volcano violently erupted on December 26, 1997 and erased two-thirds of the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean archipelago, it did, indeed, “scar people into thought.” In a matter of hours, the most green and densely populated areas of the island looked like the surface of the moon. This vast terrain, including the capital city, continues to lie under mud and ash created by the volcano’s (ongoing) pyroclastic flows. In Markham’s poetic imagination, the ecological crisis sent people to the theater: the eruption was “as if at the beginning or end of a play.” The scarring of the land, and the scarring of people into thought were mutually reinforcing, and impossible to disaggregate. Whether that play was beginning or ending, however, remains difficult to determine. If Edouard Glissant is correct in saying that “History (with a capital H) ends where the histories of those people once reputed to be without history come together” (64), then the Montserratian people are creating a new play enacted on a wide, albeit watery, stage-surface. As quickly as the debris from the volcanic explosion escaped from the mountain, it unfurled dispossessed historical fragments that were lodged deeply in the community’s collective cultural memory. As Montserratians were set adrift in the Atlantic world, they began the task of reassembling those fragments. The “play” the community continues to collectively write and perform is new, but it is reassembled out of very old routes.
During the masquerades common during carnival time, jumbies (ghosts or ancestral spirits) are set free to roam the streets of Caribbean nations, turning the world topsy-turvy. Modern carnivals, which evolved from earlier ritual celebrations featuring disguised performers, are important cultural and economic events throughout the Caribbean, and are a direct link to a multilayered history. This work explores the evolutionary connections in function, garb, and behavior between Afro-Creole masquerades and precursors from West Africa, the British Isles, and Western Europe. Robert Wyndham Nicholls utilizes a concept of play derived from Africa to describe a range of lighthearted and ritualistic activities. Along with Old World seeds, he studies the evolution of Afro-Creole prototypes that emerged in the Eastern Caribbean-bush masquerades, stilt dancers, animal disguises, she-males, female masquerades, and carnival clowns. Masquerades enact social, political, and spiritual roles within recurring festivals, initiations, wakes, skimmingtons, and weddings. The author explores performance in terms of abstraction in costume-disguise and the aesthetics of music, songs, drum-rhythms, dance, and licentiousness. He reveals masquerades as transformative agent, ancestral endorser, behavior manager, informal educator, and luck conferrer. Copyright © 2012 by University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved.
Peter Reed is Assistant Professor of Early American Literature in the Department of English at the University of Mississippi and pursues research interests in nineteenth-century performance, culture, and literature.
1. Jacobs's account of Jonkonnu appears in Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Lydia Maria Francis Child (Boston: Published for the author, 1861); Lewis's journals were published as Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of a Residence among the Negroes in the West Indies (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1845). Jonkonnu has a variety of different spellings ("John Canoe," "Jonkanoo," "John Connú," etc.), although modern Caribbean commentators generally standardize the name to "Jonkonnu." Elizabeth A. Fenn, "A Perfect Equality Seemed to Reign: Slave Society and Jonkonnu," North Carolina Historical Review 65, no. 2 (1988): 127-53, asserts that Jonkonnu proper concentrated geographically in North Carolina and Virginia.
2. Jacobs, Incidents, 180, chapter 22.
3. Robert Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and Its Ritual Expression on British West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1987), discusses the reasons for tolerating Jonkonnu, echoing Frederick Douglass's scathing assessment of holiday festivities as "keeping down the spirit of insurrection." See Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, ed. William Lloyd Garrison (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 74.
4. Jacobs, Incidents, 180.
5. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica. Or, General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of That Island: With Reflections on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government. In Three Volumes. Illustrated with Copper Plates (London: printed for T. Lowndes, in Fleet-Street, 1774), 2:425.
6. Lewis, Journal, 39, entry for January 6, 1816.
7. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:424; Michael Scott, Tom Cringle's Log (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and T. Cadell, 1833), 243.
8. Jacobs, Incidents, 180; Judith Bettelheim, "The Jonkonnu Festival: Its Relation to Caribbean and African Masquerades," Jamaica Journal 10, nos. 2-4 (1976): 84.
9. Isaac Mendes Belisario, Sketches of Character, in Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica, Drawn after Nature, and in Lithography (Kingston, Jamaica: Published by the artist, at his residence, no. 21, King-Street, 1837); Bettelheim, "Jonkonnu Festival," 8.
10. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), understands local culture, ostensibly rooted and unchanging, as already the product of circulations and travels. Although his work deals with twentieth-century culture, the mobility he detects originates in the commercial and cultural stirrings of early modernity. See also David Armitage and M. J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), for historical and historiographical essays on the formation of the early modern Atlantic world. Lewis quote from Journal, 24, entry for January 1, 1816.
11. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:424; K. Y. Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600-1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade (London: Clarendon, 1970), treats Conny as not just legend but historical fact.
12. See Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).
13. Lewis, Journal, 25, entry for January 1, 1816. Jonkonnu acts bear significant formal resemblances to traditional Anglo-European mummeries in Ireland and Newfoundland. See Dirks, Black Saturnalia, 176.
14. Lewis, Journal, 24, entry for January 1, 1816.
15. Erin Skye Mackie, "Welcome the Outlaw: Pirates, Maroons, and Caribbean Counter-cultures," Cultural Critique 59 (2005): 32.
16. Lewis, Journal, 24, entry for January 1, 1816.
17. "Un esclave Marron, au Brésil," Le Magasin Pittoresque 14 (1846): 229; Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
18. See the discussion of suicide and slave resistance in Katy Ryan, "Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison's Fiction," African American Review 34, no. 3 (2000): 389-412.
19. Although the script remained unpublished until much later, the pantomime's audiences bought and read a prospectus containing contextual information, a summary of the pantomime's action, a cast of characters, and lyrics to many...
This article is an analysis of the racial signifiers in two contemporary popular shows, Riverdance and Lord of the Dance. It argues that we need to understand the history of transatlantic Irish and African American exchange in order to comprehend the popular appeal of Celtic revivalism.
This essay examines the complex ebbs and flows of musical exchanges between Africa and its diasporas. Specifically, it focuses on musical engagements between, on the one hand, the Caribbean and West Africa and, on the other, the United States and Southern Africa. It argues that the influence of diasporan music on modern African music, especially popular music, has been immense. These influences and exchanges have created a complex tapestry of musical Afro-internationalism and Afro-modernism and music has been a critical site, a soundscape, in the construction of new diasporan and African identities. A diasporic perspective in the study of modern African music helps Africa reclaim its rightful place in the history of world music and saves Africans from unnecessary cultural anxieties about losing their musical ‘authenticity’ by borrowing from ‘Western’ music that appears, on closer inspection, to be diasporan African music.
An Evaluation of HMG's Response to the Montserrat Volcanic Emergency
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