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Reviewed by:
  • Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures
  • Elizabeth Chin
Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures edited by Susanna, Sloat. 2010. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. 393 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth.
doi:10.1017/S0149767712000198

Today the scholarly study of dance is well on its way to gaining academic legitimacy, but the progress is slow: in the United States there are not many PhD programs in Dance Studies, and jobs for dance scholars are few and far between. Nevertheless, dance scholarship continually gains in breadth, depth, and sophistication, while also entering into fruitful exchange with any number of other fields and theoretical domains. These exchanges have been critically important in allowing dance scholars to explore how and why dance matters to politics, geography, youth, urban sites, and more. Just as important, such engagement has shown the academy more broadly that dance —like any other kind of cultural production—is itself politically, historically, and culturally complex, multifacted, and above all, relevant. It is this move away from a more didactic and documentary impulse that has allowed scholarship on dance to flourish; the dominance of that same problematic impulse in this volume is, therefore, its greatest weakness.

With twenty-one contributions arranged geographically, Making Caribbean Dance is at once hefty and unwieldy. The chapters come from a range of authors with a corresponding range of backgrounds: many are dancers themselves, some are dancer/scholars, others are choreographers, some are primarily researchers. [End Page 121] The large number of contributions and the breadth of their topics make the book something approaching comprehensive—so much is covered here, from dance hall in Jamaica to Indian dance in Trinidad. Perhaps if conceived as an encyclopedia of Caribbean dance, the project would have been more successful. It seems clear that in order to accommodate the large number of chapters, unusually tight limits on length had to be imposed. The result is that many essays end abruptly or feel incomplete, and there is little opportunity for in-depth analysis and discussion. The volume is most useful as a sort of primer that provides descriptive examples of Caribbean dance forms—some of them well known (Rumba) and others less so (Big Drum). This review focuses on a small subset of the chapters to illustrate the pleasures and problems of the collection overall.

Several artist statements are included, and these are among the most provocative and useful portions of the volume. These artists do not feel confined to reproducing traditional, academic forms of the essay, for instance, and the freshness of their voices and perspectives provides fertile opportunity for thinking about their specific work—and dance in general—in novel ways. “The Drums Are Calling My Name” by Nicolás Dumit Estévez is a dreamy recollection of childhood experiences with television, dance, and performance, while in “Helen, Heaven, and I,” Tania Isaac describes her own choreographic world and world-view with direct language that speaks and moves.

Those looking for theoretically engaged, critical analysis will be disappointed. Virtually none of the chapters frames its topic conceptually; neither does any of them conduct interpretation or analysis that is theoretically engaged. Considerations of epistemology, knowledge-making, meaning production, cultural politics, gender issues, questions of race or colonialism—all remain utterly untheorized, though these issues do make shadowy, uninflected appearances in several chapters. The Caribbean occupies a prominent place in both the geography and scholarship of modernity—in flows of the Black Atlantic culture, in the development of postcolonial theory, and in the invention of Negritude. The absence of analysis drawing from or contributing to these ongoing discussions is a glaring omission that appears as nothing so much as a missed opportunity for studies of dance, and for dance studies more broadly.

One notable exception to this problem is Isaac Nii Arong’s chapter, “Ghanaian Gome and Jamaican Kumina: West African Influences.” Poetically written and offered as an analysis of cultural kinship between Jamaica and Ghana, the essay is nonlinear and thus embodies the very circuits of the cultural movement it traces. With its strategic choice of writing format, it is a strong example of what anthropologist Delmos Jones would have...

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