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182 Despite its particular colonial history and the ways in which that history has encouraged a lingering fascination with its former European metropoles, the Caribbean does not exist in isolation from the rest of the Americas. As Daniel Maximin’s L’Isolé soleil shows, there are intricate, sometimes hidden, but nonetheless profound and enduring links between the Caribbean and North America, in particular. Rhythm and music offer some of the most fluid and effective means of connecting the islands with other New World diasporic communities , but politics is another domain in which crosscurrents of influence have shaped history and society in the Caribbean and North America. From the Haitian Revolution to Black Power, the impact of diverse political movements has reverberated across national frontiers, offering examples and ideas that have been enthusiastically greeted by thinkers and activists across the Americas. Frantz Fanon may have written first of his experiences in Martinique and then of Algeria, but he was still one of the most influential theorists for American Black Power militants, being one of Stokely Carmichael’s “patron saints” and being so widely read in the United States that Eldridge Cleaver claimed “every brother on a rooftop” could quote him (quoted in Macey 2000, 24). In L’Isolé soleil, Maximin demonstrates that this dynamic of pan-American political influence and dialogue works in both directions, with ideas and images (and sounds) rebounding from one place to the other. Near the end of the novel, he writes of the stopover made by Angela Davis in Guadeloupe in 1969 and of the complementarity between U.S. Black Power and the ongoing political-cultural struggles in the Francophone Caribbean (1981, 277). Also, the character Adrien recognizes the tendency for Caribbean intellectuals to “desert” to other zones (Fanon to 4 James Brown, Rhythm, and Black Power James Brown, Rhythm, and Black Power 183 Algeria, Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay to Harlem, Jacques Roumain to Spain) before affirming the importance of contemporary U.S. black radicalism for Guadeloupeans in the 1970s: “We are discovering America with Black Power,” he states (279). In Maximin’s novel and in historical reality, music and rhythm are inextricably linked to politics. The sounds and images of black America in the 1960s, in particular, resonated across the Caribbean. Even where there was no overt political message in the music, the very images of blacks apparently making it big in a “white” country and the innovative soundtracks that jazz, soul, and R&B provided were highly potent markers of the growing liberty and increasing economic influence of fellow New World blacks that could only have had political connotations for Caribbean people. Black American music thus blew in images and sounds of Black Power, just as almost two hundred years before in New Orleans the drums and rhythms of migrant Saint-Domingue slaves had carried the idea of revolution to the plantation world of North America. Indeed, the plantation is a kind of common matrix for the diverse nations and territories of the circum-Caribbean. The basic configuration of the plantation, in terms of its physical layout and the social relations it created, was essentially the same from northeastern Brazil to the American South. When Édouard Glissant visited Mississippi and Louisiana, he found himself explaining to Americans the ways in which their world mirrored and echoed his own homeland of Martinique and of how the families that fled the French and Haitian revolutions brought a distinctive culture that persists in various forms: in cooking, in architecture, and in music, which are “principally the same in the culture of this whole area” (2000, 29). The African trace, Glissant says, was kept alive and reconfigured according to the “inspiration” of particular places in this circum-Caribbean world, a zone shaped by a common, interconnected history that “travels with the seas” (29). This chapter effects a similar transmarine movement by shifting the primary focus from the Caribbean to the United States, in particular to a case where rhythmic invention by an artist born in the South was seized on by Black Power militants and incorporated into a notion of black aesthetics that served a politicized notion of African American culture as a largely homogeneous, untainted entity. Although the main focus will be on the United States, my analysis will demonstrate some of the ways in which the Black Power interpretation of rhythm in African American music compares and contrasts with the Caribbean examples evoked in the previous chapters. What emerges is a sense of the ongoing, though often...

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