Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures

Introduction

Introduction Music flows through the people of the Caribbean islands and it comes out in dance. It comes out on streets and stages, in homes and places of worship, at clubs and competitions. Whether the dance is old and full of surprising retentions, African or European (or a mixture of the two), or as new as tomorrow and constantly evolving, whether it is danced by a small subculture (sometimes just in one place) or spreads over a whole island or a chain of islands and into the world at large, dance in the Caribbean, as elsewhere, tends to reflect multiple elements of a culture and to encapsulate aspects of identity—national, local; religious, ritual, spiritual, ancestral; fun loving, sexual; creative, resistant, traditional, progressive; professional, amateur; communal, personal. The Caribbean islands are crucibles of mixture. As boats and airplanes, electronic signals, people, and ideas move between them, they continue to influence each other. This mixing has been happening since the beginning of the modern Caribbean, after the Spanish claimed the islands they sighted. Existing populations were eliminated or left as small remnants through mistreatment , enslavement, and Old World diseases. Bringing enslaved people from Africa from the early 16th century on resulted in the African-European mix of cultures that characterizes the Caribbean. Waves of takeovers and attempted settlements, chiefly by the French, Dutch, and British, left islands with mixed peoples, customs, languages— and dances. These European powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries greatly expanded the labor-intensive sugar-growing industry and the numbers of enslaved Africans brought to the islands, with Spanish island colonies later following this expansive pattern. In the nineteenth century, as first British, then French, then Dutch, and finally Spanish colonies disavowed the slave trade and two or three decades later emancipated enslaved people, indentured laborers from many places—places like Portugal, China, Africa—as close as other Caribbean islands and as far off as India, were brought in to work the sugarcane fields. This arrangement continued into the twentieth century as U.S. interests turned to Caribbean sugar. Other im- xiv Introduction Map 1. The Caribbean Islands. Map by Don Burmeister migrants were recruited or sought refuge or business opportunities in the islands. Throughout their history, continuing today, people from within the islands visit and migrate to other islands, further complicating the hybrid nature of their cultures. Yet islands by their very water-surrounded definition do not melt into each other, so that each island retains its own history and specifics of culture, its own institutions and flavor, its own subtly or distinctively different collection of dances. We offer a chance here to trace shared connections and subtleties of difference. Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures takes off from an earlier volume, Caribbean Dance from Abakuá to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity. It covers many topics, including entire islands , not discussed in the earlier book and greatly extends the discussion on many others, offering a faceted look at the way dance of all sorts reflects and is shaped by questions of identity, of individual and communal creativity , and the complications—of continuity and change—of hybridized and evolving cultures. Again, it sticks to the West Indian archipelago itself, even more so this time, with an unusual number of authors who are not only from the islands they write about but also still live there and contribute in Introduction xv multiple ways to the cultures they are a part of. Similar and related dance and music phenomena arising from the mixture of the African and the European and the Caribbean diaspora on the mainlands of the Americas are of enormous interest. We keep to the islands just to make the subject area more manageable. Not every topic we would have liked to cover is here, nor is every island . We regret this. The culture of a smaller island can easily be eclipsed, but thanks to the Internet, news seeps out more readily than before. On St. Maarten, for instance, there has been a revival of the ponum dance. Ponum is a dance said to have been danced when slaves were emancipated in 1848, earlier than in other Dutch Caribbean colonies because then as now the island was shared with the French. Today it is danced to a song about emancipation and considered a national dance (called the only surviving folk dance), presented at regattas, book fairs, and for the visit of Queen...