Transatlantic Caribbean: Dialogues of People, Practices, Ideas [1. Aufl.] 9783839426074

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
From “Survival” to “Dialogue”: Analytic Tropes in the Study of African-Diaspora Cultural History
On Talking Past Each Other, Productively: Anthropology and the Black Atlantic, Twenty Years On
Trans-Atlantic Educational Crossroads: Experiences of Mozambican Students in Cuba
Turning Back to the Turning Point: The Day of Guanahani in 1492 in Global Perspective
Theorizing Dominican Modernity: The Crossroads of “Revolution” on Hispaniola
Migration Flows and the Politics of Exclusion in the French Antilles
Staging the Caribbean: Dialogues on Diasporic Antillean Music and Dance in Paris during the Jazz Age
Rasta in Revolution: The Rastafari Movement in Socialist Cuba
A Transatlantic Restoration of Religion: On the Re-construction of Yoruba and Lúkúmí in Cuban Santería
Petrodollar, Bolivarianism, and the Re-Yorubanization of Santería in Chávez’s Socialist Venezuela
CaribBerlin: Multiple Paths in the Religious Life of a German Oricha Priest
Processes of Cultural Transfer in 19th-Century Literature: The Caribbean within the Context of the Cultural Radiance of Europe, exemplified by France and Spain (1789-1886)
Scattered Seeds: Transnational Origins of the Decolonization Movement in Jamaica
Transient Histories: Memory and Movements Within the 19th Century Caribbean
Contributors

Citation preview

Ingrid Kummels, Claudia Rauhut, Stefan Rinke, Birte Timm (eds.) Transatlantic Caribbean

Ingrid Kummels, Claudia Rauhut, Stefan Rinke, Birte Timm (eds.)

Transatlantic Caribbean Dialogues of People, Practices, Ideas

Supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2014 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: »The Atlantic« at the Maelcón in Havana (Photo: Claudia Rauhut, 2013) Typeset: Oliver Tewes Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-2607-0 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-2607-4

Contents

Introduction

Ingrid Kummels, Claudia Rauhut, Birte Timm, and Stefan Rinke | 7 From “Survival” to “Dialogue”: Analytic Tropes in the Study of African-Diaspora Cultural History

J. Lorand Matory | 33 On Talking Past Each Other, Productively: Anthropology and the Black Atlantic, Twenty Years On

Stephan Palmié | 57 Trans-Atlantic Educational Crossroads: Experiences of Mozambican Students in Cuba

Hauke Dorsch | 77 Turning Back to the Turning Point: The Day of Guanahani in 1492 in Global Perspective

Stefan Rinke | 97 Theorizing Dominican Modernity: The Crossroads of “Revolution” on Hispaniola

Maja Horn | 109 Migration Flows and the Politics of Exclusion in the French Antilles

Kristen S. Childers | 121 Staging the Caribbean: Dialogues on Diasporic Antillean Music and Dance in Paris during the Jazz Age

Ingrid Kummels | 141 Rasta in Revolution: The Rastafari Movement in Socialist Cuba

Katrin Hansing | 165

A Transatlantic Restoration of Religion: On the Re-construction of Yoruba and Lúkúmí in Cuban Santería

Claudia Rauhut | 181 Petrodollar, Bolivarianism, and the Re-Yorubanization of Santería in Chávez’s Socialist Venezuela

Félix Ayoh’Omidire | 201 CaribBerlin: Multiple Paths in the Religious Life of a German Oricha Priest

Lioba Rossbach de Olmos | 225 Processes of Cultural Transfer in 19th-Century Literature: The Caribbean within the Context of the Cultural Radiance of Europe, exemplified by France and Spain (1789-1886)

Gesine Müller | 239 Scattered Seeds: Transnational Origins of the Decolonization Movement in Jamaica

Birte Timm | 253 Transient Histories: Memory and Movements Within the 19th Century Caribbean

Matthew J. Smith | 273 Contributors | 291

Introduction I NGRID K UMMELS , C LAUDIA R AUHUT , B IRTE T IMM , AND S TEFAN R INKE

The oceanic dimension of the Caribbean has inspired substantial research in the fields of anthropology, history, and literary studies for decades. The massive enslavement of people from Africa and the slave trade of the Middle Passage to the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas have been identified as constitutive of the world’s first industrialization and interpreted as a turning point for what we have come to understand as “globalization” and “modernity” (Mintz/Price 1976). In these processes, which this volume conceives and analyzes in their transatlantic dimensions, the Caribbean has continued to play a crucial role. We coined the term “Transatlantic Caribbean” to emphasize the interconnections to and from the Caribbean – to signify a region that transcends the one that is broadly defined as the islands that are within and adjacent to the Caribbean Sea as well as the coastal areas of South and Central America (Barker 2011). Many Caribbean societies have fostered intraregional relationships and shared certain similarities in their cultural and economic histories since the rise of plantation economies and the transatlantic slave trade in the 16th century. Yet, as research on the dissemination of Caribbean migrant communities all over the globe has shown, their strong connectivity extends well beyond this region (Gowricharn 2006; Cervantes-Rodríguez et al. 2009). Indeed, its web of connections and flows of people, practices, and ideas to and from the Caribbean has incited increased interest in the mobility and immobility of social actors, their network building, modes of communication, transfers of knowledge, political ideas, and their group consciousness (cf. for example Putnam 2013). Research in these fields has been inspired by groundbreaking theoretical approaches to understanding the range and hierarchies

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of interaction between actors along the coasts of the Americas, Europe, and Africa, such as in Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic or Bernard Bailyn’s Atlantic History, and, moreover, has led to new concepts of modernity itself. This volume, which is the result of the international conference “Crossroads of the World: Transatlantic Interrelations in the Caribbean” held on July 2012 at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, thus approaches the Caribbean as a contact zone of “global encounters.” Such cultural transfers and exchanges sparked a history of innovations and the development of new thoughts, which, when disseminated across the Atlantic, closely connected the region with the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Based on current empirical research centering the Caribbean in its transatlantic entanglements, it builds upon and intends to refine concepts of the Atlantic seascape. Combining approaches of history, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, the contributions here connect empirically based micro-studies with research questions from transnational and global studies. The turn to transatlantic studies can be traced back to the social reality of transregional entanglements, but also to analytical concepts such as transculturación (Ortiz 1940), creolization (Mintz/Price 1976) or diaspora (Hall 1990), developed in particular by scholars who did research in the Caribbean to capture this reality. Even though important concepts were elaborated concerning the Caribbean and the diversity of its case studies, the Caribbean itself was predominantly perceived for many years as an exceptional region. Hence, the particular theoretical insights it yielded were later used for constructing theories with regard to other regions and in the study of transnational processes (Trouillot 2002; Gowricharn 2006; Glick Schiller 2009). While this is useful, it is at the same time necessary to specify concrete routes of interconnectedness and to avoid using sweeping theoretical concepts such as creolization – or for that matter transculturación and diaspora – as both “master symbol[s] of the Caribbean and as a paradigm[s] for the global” (Khan 2001: 272). In order to gain a more integral understanding of the current world situation with regard to the (im)mobility of social actors and transfers of knowledge as well as cultural and political ideas, this volume emphasizes the prominent role of the Caribbean in world history and how the region’s particular experience influenced leading paradigms such as modernity. When we think about modernity, it is important to remember that it originated in slavery and the exploitation of millions of Africans forced to work in highly efficient plantation economies. These constituted the basis of the world’s first industrialization and became the major source of Europe’s wealth and hegemony. The critical analysis of the Caribbean’s exploitation

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in a global context, articulated by prominent Caribbean scholars like C.L.R. James (1938), Aimé Césaire (1950), and Frantz Fanon (1961), has decisively influenced the work of the present generation of scholars, who approach the Caribbean as the point of departure for the analysis of an ambivalent and double-edged modernity. Caribbean societies are still greatly impacted by the legacies of slavery and racial, ethnic (and religious) hierarchies within the modern/colonial system, which are reproduced and transformed in the context of Caribbean migrations to different parts of the world (Grosfoguel et al. 2009). For this reason, when we research these societies in their interrelations, it is necessary to put a spotlight on the “darker sides of modernity,” on the ongoing manifestations of coloniality (Mignolo 2000; 2011), and on aspects of a “violent Atlantic modernity” (Palmié 2002: 127). As processes of creolization and transregional entanglements between the Caribbean and Western Europe have developed simultaneously, it is possible to trace relational inequality structures back to the historical entanglements between the two regions since colonial times (Boatcă in press). It is in view to such perspectives that take the persistent inequalities and power asymmetries into account that the contributions in this volume approach the Caribbean in terms of concrete routes of transatlantic flows, (im)mobility and the dialogues of people which may not only have a linguistic character, but economic, political, literary, religious, and musical dimensions as well. Operationalizing the Transatlantic Caribbean: On Methodologies

What does it actually mean to investigate these interconnections that converge in the Caribbean? How can we trace people, practices and ideas across oceans, national borders, and continental coasts, and what are the limits to the fluidity of such exchanges? To what extent is research in the humanities and social sciences capable of operationalizing these approaches and thus effectively “grounding” the ocean? How can we substantiate the concept of the Caribbean as a global and highly interconnected region through empirical research? In our view, cultural and social anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars have abundant insight to share and much can be gained from the work that has been done in archives, libraries, and from field research at places like schools, political organizations, places of religious worship, nightclubs, street dances, ships, or immigration offices. Such “busy intersections” (Rosaldo 1989) are highlighted by the contributions in this volume. Building upon current approaches centering on translocality, transnationalism, social space, the intersectionality of

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class, race and gender, glocalization, and global entanglements as well as on processes of cultural, religious, and ethnic identification and belonging, scholars continue to expand and operationalize notions such as modernity, memory, tradition, or the Black Atlantic. Cultural and social anthropologists have done this through translocal theory and multi-sited ethnographic field work. Historians have built upon these approaches by integrating multi-archival research and oral histories into their work, while not restricting themselves to the sources of the archives of the imperial metropoles. The variety of disciplinary research united in this volume provides a cross section of diverse methodological approaches and follows recent trends in anthropology and history which privilege empirical research on individuals and their trajectories as more productive points of departure for theorizing than abstract theorems (Baca et al. 2009). The examples highlighted here not only demonstrate the multifaceted processes of transatlantic encounter and exchange in the areas of religion, education, popular culture, social and political movements, but also allow us to read history against the grain and to reveal the silences in historiographical accounts. The volume approaches these interconnections by means of the central notion of dialogue, termed specifically as Afro-Atlantic live dialogue by James Lorand Matory (1999a). Matory traces the long-term interweaving of connections, multidirectional exchange and movement of people, ideas, and practices between Africa, Europe, and America and highlights in particular the conflictive dynamics of the cultural reproduction of African traditions in the Americas, both in the past and the present. With his notion of dialogue, Matory offers a concrete methodological and epistemological tool for the study of the long dureé of transatlantic interrelations that many of the contributors undertake in this volume. They underscore dialogues that continue to shape the Caribbean by following actors on their routes across the Atlantic, by exploring their pathways, encounters, networks, modes of communication, and ideas for social and political mobilization, often in reference to day-to-day life. Instead of privileging research on the institutional level of colonial policy, international relations, and actors representing the social elites, many contributions in this volume follow students, musicians, political activists, writers, laborers, or religious practitioners and their quotidian practices. By recasting our research as the Transatlantic Caribbean we integrate and bridge the manifold encounters of different peoples, cultures, and practices that shaped specific sites of the Caribbean region and its transatlantic dimensions. As an approach, it allows for unearthing the complex webs of interconnectivity and mutual exchange and helps to break with

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Eurocentric perspectives, idealized historical master narratives, and canonized national legacies created by a historiography that is centered on the concept of nationhood that is still upheld in post-colonial nation-states, as well as in former colonizing countries. In contrast, the focus on actors reveals the negotiations that took place along different paths and points of encounter beyond the confines of the nation state. For example, nonprivileged individuals may circumvent (though from a vulnerable position) the state’s power of regulating the border, citizenship, and residency status. Subsequently, the contributions in this volume not only explore various converging encounters, roots/routes, and movements, but also the limitations of creative exchanges stemming from the continued legacy of slavery and other persistent forms of social exclusion along the lines of race, class, gender, religious, and ethnic belonging. It is on the grounds of this empirical research, and by following the actors on their journeys across land and sea, that we approach the processes of border crossing, mobility, networks, and symbolic identification which have characterized the region ever since the colonial encounter (and indeed before). This has made it possible to detect areas and actors which require more research with regard to the interconnections between the islands of the Caribbean Sea, Latin, Central and North America, Africa, and Europe, and therefore take us beyond those merely between the US, the Anglophone Caribbean, and Europe, which Gilroy chose to highlight when he uncovered the role of Black American intellectuals and artists in what he calls countermodernity. Several contributors have examined the Transatlantic Caribbean’s less familiar south-south relations, such as those between Cuba and Mozambique in the field of socialist education (Dorsch), between Haiti and Jamaica in the field of work migration and political exile (Smith) and between Jamaica and Cuba in the field of Rastafarian music and culture (Hansing). South-south relations have also played an important role for particular manifestations of religion which the Caribbean diaspora has privileged in recent globalization processes. For this reason, special emphasis has been placed on the networks of Yoruba-Atlantic religions between Venezuela, the Caribbean islands, and Nigeria (Ayoh’Omidire), between Cuba and Nigeria (Rauhut), as well as those between post-socialist Germany and Cuba, which were initiated by former Cuban contract workers in the German Democratic Republic (Rossbach de Olmos). A number of chapters show that in view of socialism’s political and social impact on the Atlantic, it is useful to think about these interconnections as part of a “Red Atlantic” (Dorsch; Palmié). In a similar way, other contributions reflect on a “Yoruba Atlantic,” in which practitioners of Yoruba-based religions like Santería

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exercise their religion in a very different social reality and environment at various sites of the Transatlantic Caribbean. 1 These authors reconstruct the particular paths and dynamics of border-crossing religious networks (Ayoh’Omidire, Rauhut, Palmié) and demonstrate how some practitioners construct a sense of belonging to a global community that has recently been called “Yoruba world religion” (Frigerio 2004; Olupona 2008). The “legitimate” representation of Yoruba religion is debated by actors with varying access to the sources and resources of transatlantic religious networks and therefore within power asymmetries (Rauhut). The contributors who examine the better-known north-south relations have undertaken new approaches to the (im)mobility and acting capacity of individuals in the Transatlantic Caribbean. They have taken serious account of the experiences and self-identifications of the actors by considering them as students, intellectuals, political activists, artists, musicians and migrants at the same time, as in the case of Martinicans and Guadaloupeans migrating to France (Childers) or the Jamaican radicals in Harlem (Timm). As research on the nexus between the actors’ mobility, political vision, and engagement shows, nation building in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica was a transnational endeavor (Horn, Timm). The Dominicans’ modernity followed a particular postcolonial path, for the Trujillato system strategically drew upon the “enlightened” side of Western modernity and ideals by adopting a highly racialized discourse of direct opposition to Haiti’s “savagery” and “backwardness” (Horn). Finally, the authors in this volume elaborate on the emergence of transnational, diasporic, and global forms of consciousness which have built upon these transatlantic interconnections from the 15th century. The global significance contemporaries’ attributed to Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World in Guanahani, the autochthonous name of the island he first landed on, is explored by taking into account the impact of other explorers’ voyages and this period’s print revolution (Rinke). The reciprocal processes of exchange of francophone and hispanophone literature and political practices of the respective empires are deciphered, whereby it is demon-

1

The Yoruba emerged in West Africa due to their missionary and colonial construction as an ethnic group from the middle of 19th century (Peel 1989). Millions of Africans were enslaved and brought to the Americas, especially to the Caribbean and Brazil in the 18th and 19th century and were retroactively categorized as Yoruba. They have established Yoruba-based religions such as Santería in Cuba, Vodou in Haiti, or Candomblé in Brazil, which consist in the worship of African gods (Orishas) by way of their association to Catholic saints.

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strated that periphery and center should not be viewed as separate worlds, but rather as mutually constitutive (Müller). By spanning webs of Caribbean music and dance between such metropolises as Paris, Havana, and New York in the 1920s and 1930s actors effectively bestowed Caribbeanness with a global dimension. On this basis, actors as diverse as musicians, dancers, patrons, and writers already identified as a diaspora during this period (Kummels). Expanding the Black Atlantic and Approaching it through the Metaphor of Dialogue

Two contributions look into the processes of exchange and critical notions of modernity, tradition, and memory from the perspective of the theoretization of the key concepts of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (Palmié) and of AfroAtlantic live dialogue (Matory). Palmié encourages scholars to not only engage theoretically and epistemologically with the Black Atlantic, but also to expand it to other regions, languages, sites with empirically grounded work. Indeed, the contributors to this volume have embraced the call for more empirical study, permitting readers to see several overlapping “Atlantics” from places like Maputo, Berlin, Paris, Havana, Kingston, or Caracas. Gilroy’s influence has been considerable: His scholarship has increased our awareness of previously neglected aspects of transatlantic interrelations, emphasized the central role of enslaved African people and their descendants, and foregrounded their agency in conforming to a “counterculture of modernity.” Still, long before Gilroy, anthropologists of “AfroAmerican Studies” from the early 20th century studied the cultural contact and transfers between Africa, the Americas, and Europe in a way that we would today call multi-sited field research. They underlined the crucial role of the Caribbean in these transatlantic connections to Africa through various cultural, religious, and social ties. They elaborated analytical tropes such as survival (Herskovits 1941), flow and re-flow (Verger 1968), memory (Bastide 1955) and creolization (Mintz/Price1976), which have since been challenged and reworked, especially in anthropology and history, in line with recent Atlantic approaches (Yelvington 2001; Palmié 2008a; Thornton 1998; Drotbohm/Kummels 2011). By introducing the notion of an Afro-Atlantic live dialogue, James Lorand Matory provided researchers with an innovative metaphor that has contributed to a more complex understanding of the long-term interweaving of connections between people traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, who, during and after slavery and up to the present, have carried with them

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their transformative cultures, practices, and visions. Using the example of religious practitioners from the Brazilian Candomblé – intellectuals and merchants who have frequently traveled between Brazil and Nigeria since the second half of 19th century – Matory showed how they collaborated with Lagosian intellectuals to bring about a “transnational genesis of Yoruba” (Matory 1999b). Thus, what is often evoked by scholars and practitioners today as a Yoruba traditional religion is not in fact a “pure” and continuous memory of a timeless and spaceless Africa, but rather a selective, and even conflictive, process of strategic incorporation of religious sources, images, and practices in different localities and periods in the Atlantic world (Matory 1999a). The still relevant notion of the survival of African cultures in the Americas could accordingly be better understood by emphasizing the often uneven aspects of dialogue between actors and practices. Survival needs to be situated between affirmation and transformation and should rather be seen as a process of rediscovering and (re-)inventing (Matory 2006). The contributions of Palmié, Ayoh’Omidire, and Rauhut empirically support this insight that different strategies of identification and belonging cannot be traced back to Africa and that African practices cannot be conceived solely as the origin and lone past of Afro-American cultures. These practices instead constitute continuous and important sources of identification in the present. With his analytical metaphor of dialogue, Matory thus encourages us to focus on the people themselves – on their experiences and their strategic agency in the cultural reproduction and the making of a history which is shaped by patterns of interconnectivity across the Atlantic world. In this volume, Matory further elaborates on the notion of dialogue as not being of a purely or mainly linguistic character (a notion developed by Bakhtin), but instead as also having economic, political, literary, religious, and musical dimensions. He contends that coeval interlocutors shape dialogue, creating multiple sets of relationships through time, a process that is essential for the formation of a diasporic consciousness. Dialogues can have several layers and the authors participating in this volume often analyze dialogues in a broad sense at a micro level in order to assess the relation of power between the interlocutors, the duration of dialogues, and their wider societal implications. They address dialogues in the context of highly uneven power relations, for instance in situations relating to the “first contact” between indigenous people in the Caribbean and European colonizers (Rinke) or the legacies of colonial/racialized hegemonic values of the US and Europe in the Dominican Republic (Horn) or regarding

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attempts to confront “violent Atlantic modernity” in colonial Cuba by interconnecting world views taken from ancient Abyssinia, Egypt, and Rome (Palmié). Other contributors highlight those dialogues initiated in urban spaces as points of transit and migration (Smith, Childers), sites of political networks (Timm), and places of attraction for artists and intellectuals (Kummels, Müller). The concept of a dialogue is further applied in order to emphasize the transcultural dimensions of interactions within the Atlantic world in the fields of education (Dorsch), music (Hansing, Kummels), literature (Müller), and religion (Ayoh’Omidire, Rauhut, Rossbach de Olmos). This empirical research from a micro-perspective on actors and their practices of transatlantic and particularly Afro-Atlantic live dialogue can be systematically linked to macro-level conceptions of the modern/colonial world system. In a world of persistent social inequalities and power asymmetries, particular with regard to access to resources, information and knowledge, dialogue is usually not on equal footing and often reflects the intractable legacies of violent enslavement, exploitation, and colonial-based racial hierarchies that continue to shape global power relations today. By taking this dimension into account, we are able to gain a more integral understanding of how people act in the face of asymmetries and conflicts of dialogues that constitute the Transatlantic Caribbean. Memory: In Dialogue with the Past

Centuries of colonialism, slavery, racism, sharp class divisions, and underdevelopment still cast their shadow on the Caribbean. To be sure, the relatively young nation-states are still in the process of negotiating their interpretations of the past and determining the way forward, politically, economically, and socially. For hundreds of years, colonizers rigorously imposed what should be remembered as a part of history. According to their version children in the Caribbean were taught to see colonialism as a step towards “civilization” and to view colonizers as heroes. Though people in the Caribbean hence felt as though they formed part of an empire, they were still denied even the most basic rights. Nation-states tend to develop national myths and legacies centered on well-known dates and widely accepted watershed events for the purpose of creating a common past that legitimizes the unified nation and its current borders (Hobsbawm/Ranger 1983). However, in the post-independence societies of the Caribbean, new spaces have opened up for reinterpreting history and creating new memories. History is thus increasingly being written from the perspective of the

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region in a way that puts the spotlight on actors whose voices were silenced in colonial and early post-colonial narratives. Many contributions in this volume emphasize the importance of reflecting on processes of memory and memorialization. They shift our attention to the silences in historiography and remind us that hegemony and power relations determine which histories are told. Michel-Rolph Trouillot has prominently argued that not all silences are equal (Trouillot 1995). The tremendous influence of European colonization and Western science has not only led to Eurocentric interpretations of world history, but privileged, assumingly “European-Western” ideas and ideals, while Africa and African practices, or the prevailing structures of racism and colonial dominance, as well as the resistance against them, are, as Horn argues, often absent in the dominant narratives of the past. In contrast, the practitioners of YorubaAtlantic religions highlighted by Matory, Palmié, Ayoh’Omidire, and Rauhut reevaluate African traditions as legitimate sources for their religious practices. Hansing, furthermore, shows how not only Jamaican Rastafarian music and culture, but also the alternative interpretation of history is appealing to young black Cubans today. Rastafarian beliefs offer a different worldview and perspective on colonialism and racism in the Caribbean, from which many black people still suffer in socialist Cuba. Music and dance themselves are important media for transmitting embodied knowledge and creating memory, as revealed by the performances which Caribbean artists produced in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Kummels’ contribution demonstrates how diasporic Caribbeanness is formulated as an alternative narrative on the stages and dance floors of cabarets, night clubs, music halls, and boîtes, as well as on venues of academic debate. Neither individual nor collective memory is static. The meaning and interpretation of historical events change over time and are influenced by our perspective today. Stefan Rinke, for instance, reassesses the way we have been taught to think about the very first encounter between Columbus and the indigenous societies in the Caribbean on the basis of novel insights about the latter’s perspective. Childers’ contribution reveals the voices of the migrants from the French overseas territories that contradict the negative, one-dimensional appraisal of French immigration policies by political activists and scholars alike. In a similar manner, Dorsch’s focus on the experience of students that participated in the regulated student exchange programs between Cuba and African nation states shows that personal experience and memory can differ dramatically from institutionalized perceptions of the same processes. Memory, we are again reminded, is always dependent on who does the remembering and at what specific point

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in time. This is also manifest in Timm’s contribution. She shows that national narratives in postcolonial Jamaica often emphasize the role of the two main political parties in the run-up to independence. Such narratives, however, overshadow the transnational roots of nationalist thinking in the Jamaican community in New York and the important influence of the emigrants on the island’s political developments. By drawing our attention to the less prominent inner-Caribbean dynamics and exchanges, Smith, too, reminds us of the importance of looking at histories beyond the dominant narratives of watershed events like the Haitian Revolution, the labor rebellions in Jamaica in 1938, or the Cuban Revolution. His contribution examines migration processes between Jamaica and Haiti in the 19th century, which so far have been given little consideration due to a focus on 20th century migration, political turmoil, and environmental catastrophes. The contributions to this volume developed out of a conference that took place in July 2012 at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin called “Crossroads of the World: Transatlantic Interrelations in the Caribbean.” Scholars from different disciplines and the three circum-Atlantic continents engaged in a fruitful dialogue about migration and processes of exchange, memory, and memorialization in the context of cutting-edge Caribbean research. Interestingly, the initial puzzlement of Caribbeanists coming together in Berlin was expressed several times during the congress. The question “What on earth does Berlin have to do with the Caribbean?” soon became a sort of running gag that was repeatedly referenced by participants, as at one of our evening get-togethers in a Jamaican restaurant in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Nonetheless, the connection was already more than obvious by that point and it was not nearly as farfetched as some had initially thought. The participants were literally in the process of experiencing Berlin as a meeting ground for Caribbeanists, where transatlantic connections from diverse parts of the world were being investigated from different institutional settings and once nationally rooted research traditions. Anthropologists and historians, as well as practitioners of Cuban Santería living in Berlin and others, came into dialogue in this city, though not for the first time. 2 2

Research on the Caribbean in a transatlantic dimension has some tradition in Germany as is exemplified by the regular work and publications of the German Anthropological Society’s (DGV) regional group “Afroamerika” with its focus on African diasporas, including those of a Transatlantic Caribbean. One meeting of this group resulted in a more intensive exchange with Stephan Palmié, the results of which were published in the volume Afroatlantische Allianzen edited by Heike Drotbohm and Ingrid Kummels in 2011. As an outcome of these academ-

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Not only were we able to enter into a productive dialogue about the Transatlantic Caribbean as scholars with distinct points of departure, but it also became clear that many of us examined our research questions by tracing multi-directional flows of histories, people, ideas, and practices. This precise approach can be understood by applying the trope of dialogue, for as the following contributions united in this volume demonstrate, it entails an effort to understand reciprocal processes of exchange that characterize the Caribbean region in its transatlantic dimension. Outline of the book’s contributions

James Lorand Matory opens the discussion with a reflection on the multidirectional exchange processes between Africa, Europe, and the Americas and critically engages with prominent metaphors of African diaspora cultural history. Starting with his own biographic approach to Africa as an African-American, Matory reconstructs the work of 20th century scholars that were academically and politically involved in searching for the African roots of American culture. He first distances himself from Herskovits’ metaphor of (African) survivals (1941), with its notion of Africa as the (unchangeable) past of the American present. Moreover, he criticizes the metaphor of creolization (Mintz/Price 1976) which he contends failed to recognize the particular actors, sites, and moments that were actively engaged in the creative transformation of cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. Matory finally contrasts the notion of memory as it is used by Bastide (1955) and his successors and encourages us to instead focus more on the processual character of commemoration – the way people in the Americas selectively remember aspects of African cultural practices in an endless struggle over the meaning and usage of gestures, words, and memories. Based on an impressive range of empirical research on the Yoruba religions in West Africa, US, Brazil, and the Caribbean, Matory introduces the metaphor of an “Afro-Atlantic Live Dialogue” in order to trace the longstanding interweaving of connections between people, ideas, practices, publications, and commerce around the Yoruba religions that circulated in

ic dialogues, James Lorand Matory decided to stay with an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award at Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute for Latin American Studies during the entire year of 2014. The Caribbeans’ transatlantic circuits in literary production, arts and knowledge transfer have also been studied by Germany-based Caribbeanists such as Fleischmann (1984; 2007); Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger (2011); Bandau/Zapata Galindo (2011).

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the Atlantic world. Genealogies of cultural reproduction are strategically constructed in a context beyond that goes beyond nation and region. Matory sharpens our understanding of the conflictive dynamics in the negotiation of African tradition in the Americas, which are not to be viewed as onedimensional legacies of the past, but rather as actively and continuously renewed practices in different periods and locations in the Atlantic world. The question of how to broaden scholarship on Atlantic exchange processes is also a key theme in Stephan Palmié’s contribution. In taking up the theoretical engagement with Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and the notion of countermodernity, Palmié reconsiders his own approach to Afro-Cuban traditions. Building on central impulses from C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Aimee Césaire, Fernando Ortiz, and Sidney Mintz, Palmié foregrounds the dark and violent side of “Atlantic modernity”, which, as Gilroy has already stated, is inextricably intertwined with “part of the ethical and intellectual history of the West as a whole” (Gilroy 1993: 49). He focuses on José Antonio Aponte, a leader of an Afro-Cuban cabildo, 3 who organized an insurrection against the Spanish colonial administration in 1812. Palmié recognizes him as a subaltern personality who was “railing against a violent Atlantic modernity […] by fusing into a counterhegemonic vision of […] Western learning available to him.” He indicates the lessons that can be derived from such figures, histories, and struggles for understanding the Black Atlantic, while demonstrating that “modernity” is by no means opposed to “tradition” and Africa is much more than an objectified Western projection of a “celebration of origin.” In this sense, Palmié criticizes any essentialist use of the Black Atlantic as a synonym for black or African people or the African diaspora in genealogical and racial terms, privileging instead an epistemology that traces routes of intercontinental movement and exchange. He finally calls for more scholarship that expands the Black Atlantic to include other regions, languages, and sites in empirical research and consequently critically engages with it in its theoretical and epistemological implications. Hauke Dorsch focuses on the transatlantic trajectories and biographies of Mozambican students who studied in Cuba with the internationalist educational exchange program offered by the island’s socialist government in the 1970s and 1980s to allied African countries. The specific experiences of students allow for insights into unexpected outcomes in these south3

Cabildos de nación were fraternal associations in the Spanish colonies. During the 18th and 19th century enslaved and free Africans in Cuba relied on them as their main institution of social bonding.

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south alliances. Cuba developed policies for a global expansion by imagining itself to be the spearhead of an Internationalist “Red Atlantic”, a term coined by Markus Rediker and further elaborated on by Dorsch to denote a particular transatlantic connection within the framework of the Black Atlantic. This collaboration was designed as a measure to free “third-world countries” from neocolonial dependence on the north, mainly the US and Europe. Yet, as the example of Miguel shows, not all of the students in this program willingly followed the institutionalized paths foreseen by the Cuban and Mozambican state officials, specifically by duly returning to their respective homes as expatriates and integrating into the workforce of their countries of origin after having completed their studies. Dorsch uncovers multiple examples of Mozambican students successfully developing their own strategies of internationalization, such as during their maritime voyage to Cuba, or when attending the schools built for them on Isla de la Juventud in Southern Cuba, or when unexpectedly migrating to third countries due to marriage. These experiences resulted in divergent perceptions and individual actions which likewise compose the “Red Atlantic.” Dorsch’s approach allows him to skillfully read against the grain of the official narrative of the internationalist and anti-imperialist south-south collaboration by highlighting alternative circumventions of what was a “regulated” institutionalized exchange Stefan Rinke approaches the “Transatlantic Caribbean” by reassessing the encounter between Columbus and the indigenous population in the Americas during his search for a passage to India. While the year 1492 is usually perceived as a turning point in world history, or seen as the beginning of the modern era, Rinke draws our attention to the often neglected perspective of the inhabitants of the islands in the Caribbean, for whom the event was also a major turning point. On the basis of new insights from archaeological as well as ethno-historical research, Rinke interprets the indigenous people as active persons whose actions were informed by their worldview, culture, and ritual practices. Thus, rather than being passive victims, as which they were often portrayed, they were in fact in dialogue with the European colonizers and contributed to shaping the course of events. Rinke further reminds us that Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean came in the wake of other fundamental changes, including altered perceptions of geography and spatiality resulting from voyages like Vasco da Gama’s and the revolution in print media, which allowed Columbus to promote his expeditions as the “discovery” of the New World. These developments go a long way toward explaining why it is Columbus’ sojourn that is remembered as the “discovery” of the Americas, and not the

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earlier journeys of the Vikings. In light of the dramatic upheavals in Caribbean societies after centuries of colonialism, the cruelty of slavery, and the massive demographic changes resulting from the involuntary settlement of millions of enslaved Africans, the “Day of Guanahani” deserves to be seen as a turning point that not only forever changed and shaped the Caribbean region, but also laid the foundation for the transatlantic interrelations that initiated a truly global experience affecting other regions as well. Maja Horn’s examination of Dominican modernity likewise shows how much hegemonic Western discourses have influenced our perception of events and their consequences. She offers critical reflections on the country’s postcolonial path and the specific theoretical contribution for Latin American critical thought and Atlantic modernity deriving from this experience. Horn argues that while scholars usually choose to study the prominent case of Haiti in relation to Western modernity and its heroic historiography of resistance and anti-colonial struggle (in 1804, Haiti became the first independent republic in the Americas after an insurrection of enslaved people), the particular postcolonial history of its neighbor-state Dominican Republic has largely been overlooked or only perceived in opposition to Haiti. Yet, the Dominican experience demonstrates a very particular insertion into modernity, which has been strongly influenced by European and US imperialism and Western political thought. Horn reconstructs how national racial discourses of Anti-Haitianism during the dictatorships of Trujillo (1930-61) and under its successor Balaguer (196678; 1986-96) were shaped by the geostrategic racial project and the political vocabulary of US imperialism in the first half of the 20th century. She emphasizes how Trujillo strategically connected the project of Dominican modernity to “enlightened” Western modernity by employing anti-Haitian sentiments that pointed to Haiti’s alleged “savagery” and “backwardness.” At the same time, he mobilized racial thoughts of white supremacy – thoughts which continue to be difficult to break away from. To understand Caribbean political culture and theory, Horn urges that we have to consider how it is interrelated with the two sides of Western modernity (one “dark,” one “enlightened”), US imperialism, legacies of European colonial powers, racism, and divergent narratives of revolution and modernity. By centering on the personal experiences of migrants arriving in France from French overseas departments and territories, Kristen S. Childers is able to elaborate on this migration within the context of colonialism and postcolonial racial discrimination. She offers a novel interpretation of France’s policy of institutionalized migration in the 1960s, whereby it attempted to orchestrate migration processes through the newly established

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Office of Migration from the Overseas Departments (BUMIDOM) from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion in response to the country’s need for cheap labor. Scholars as well as activists lobbying for the independence and separation of the Antilles have mainly portrayed this national migration institution as an example of the exploitation of the formerly colonized and an expression of the persistence of racism in France that, moreover, helped fuel growing independence movements among Antilleans on both sides of the Atlantic. Aimé Césaire, for instance, criticized these policies as “genocide by substitution.” The high expectations created by BUMIDOM’s advertising of their programs, which promised great employment opportunities, were indeed in conflict with the harsh domestic reality of racist discrimination and the placement of migrants in low-paid jobs. However, based on her own collected oral accounts, Childers argues that many immigrants emphasize in retrospect the advantages of the new economic and personal opportunities which their journey over the Atlantic nevertheless provided. This holds especially true for women, who often faced bleak prospects in the Caribbean and for whom a new life in France offered a chance for economic and social independence. In another interesting twist, Childers contrasts the experience of Antillean migrants in France with the often deplorable situation of Haitian immigrants in the Antilles, who more often experienced xenophobia and discrimination from Antilleans rather than signs of solidarity. Ingrid Kummels analyzes how internationally mobile artists from the Caribbean have been engaged in globalizing and popularizing music and dance genres from the Caribbean in the 1920s and 1930s, a period commonly known as the Jazz Age. Applying Matory’s concept of dialogue in order to analyze the economic, political, literary, and musical dimensions of interactions within the Atlantic world, Kummels focuses in particular on Caribbean musicians, singers, writers, and artists who initiated such dialogues and thereby actively encouraged processes of appropriation of Caribbean cultures both in their country of origin and their diasporic setting. Highlighting Paris as a center for Afro-(Latin) American music, she reconstructs how Afro-Caribbean and US African-American artists and intellectuals encountered in Paris the stereotyped fascination of European intellectuals for art nègre, perceived in terms of Eurocentric primitivism. Josephine Baker’s performance of the “Danse des Sauvages” as a so called “authentic African” expression was a field of debate which provoked interventions from Antillean intellectuals like the Martiniquan Jane Nardal. Kummels next analyzes dialogues in which Antillean actors were able to influence the dynamics of the then very modern fascination with exoticism

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and primitivism for their own ends. She also draws her insights here from her own fieldwork on the Cuban female Son septet Anacaona, who performed in Paris in 1938. Kummels shows how these dialogues were the sites for diverse formulations of diasporic Caribbeanness, ranging from gendered versions such as Anacaona (a female Taino political leader during the time of Columbus) and reconceptualizations of the national character of music and dance to more encompassing horizons of identity such as black latinité – the simultaneous love for Latin America and Africa. Katrin Hansing also examines music and culture as vehicles for border-crossing exchange and turns her attention to young black Cubans who currently embrace Jamaican Rastafarian culture. By studying the spread of Rastafari and Rastafari-influenced cultural expressions in Cuba, Hansing offers insight into a local reinterpretation of this globalized cultural and spiritual movement that originated in Jamaica in the 1930s. She shows how Rastafarian culture and messages were introduced and disseminated predominantly through music, images, and other cultural forms, and how they appeal in particular to the disadvantaged and disillusioned young people suffering from racism and a lack of economic opportunities in Cuba. Based on the expressions of this group collected during fieldwork done in Havana, Hansing demonstrates how they find meaningful and inspiring messages in the ideas of black empowerment advocated by Rastafarians in order to confront a social reality of persistent racism in Cuba – a reality that is often silenced in the official ideal of a socialist society based on racial equality. She further describes the ease with which the protagonists combine elements of Rastafarian spirituality with elements of Afro-Cuban religion Santeria, one of the most prominent religions in Cuba based on West African Yoruba traditions and influences from spiritism and Catholicism. Hansing’s contribution vividly brings to light the growing popularity of Rastafari in Cuba, which reminds us of the continuing need to reevaluate social constructions and representations of “blackness” and the different sources and origins of African heritage in Cuban society today. Claudia Rauhut analyzes the search for African traditions and their religious appropriation in Cuba as a relevant practice to counter the colonially based racist perception of African-based religions in the Americas. Based on extensive fieldwork in religious settings in Havana, she focuses on a religious project in Havana led by babalao (priest) Víctor Betancourt, who claims in particular to reform Cuban Santería by restoring “lost African rituals.” These practices are usually described in other Afro-Atlantic religions as “re-Africanization,” which connotes a broader complex of appropriation of “African-style” rituals and cosmologies in the Americas by

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simultaneously eliminating Christian influences. In the Cuban example, however, Rauhut shows that Betancourt’s “reform project” of Santería is by no means a unidirectional adoption of timeless and spaceless “WestAfrican versions” of the Yoruba religion. It rather constitutes a mutual, transatlantic ritual exchange, which its leader therefore conceptualizes as a “restoration of religion” between practitioners from Cuba, the Caribbean, Latin America, the US and Nigeria on a level playing ground. Rauhut interprets the particular positioning of Betancourt as the self-assertion of a very Cuban conception of this religion that is shared by many practitioners. Betancourt claims exclusive expertise of Cuban rituals within the global emergence of what has recently been proclaimed as “Yoruba world religion.” Rauhut furthermore interprets this current religious agency as a way for actors to “re-make” and “re-write” Afro-Cuban ethnography, which has suffered from misrepresentations for some time due to the legacy of colonial racist values. Rauhut finally concludes that such micro-perspective empirical studies of the different trans-local variants of the “reAfricanization” in Afro-Atlantic religions enlarge our understanding of what it means to be Yoruba from an actor’s perspective in diverse sites of the Atlantic world. Félix Ayoh’Omidire examines a further example of the global spread and recreation of Yoruba religions. Focusing on the little-researched case of Venezuela, he proposes that the country needs to be considered part of the religious historiography of the “Yoruba Atlantic Diaspora.” This term was introduced by Falola and Childs in 2004 and usually pertains to countries with large populations of African descendants, like Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, or Trinidad and Tobago. In Venezuela, Ayoh’Omidire argues, factors such as its proximity to those countries as well as recent political and economic developments have led to the emergence of a Yorubanized identity construction. This practice was initiated with the arrival of Cuban Santería and mediated since the 1960s by the immigration of Cubans who once lived in the USA or Puerto Rico to Venezuela. Omidire describes how Santería was first transformed in the 1980s through a process of “Venezuelarization” and then focuses on more recent developments and actors who engage in the reYorubanization of Santería. He defines re-Yorubanization as a process of engagement with “direct sources” of the Yoruba religion and the Yoruba people from Africa. As a direct consequence, transatlantic religious networks of Yoruba religion which connect people from Nigeria, Cuba, Venezuela, the USA, Trinidad and Tobago, and Colombia have continued to grow and to expand. These networks, however, are sometimes accompanied by conflicts and rivalries between the followers of the Cuban-style tradition

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and those of a more Yoruba-African tradition. Language barriers between Yoruba, English, and Spanish, as well as divergent interpretations between different generations of worshipers may contribute to this opposition. Ayoh’Omidire emphasizes that the growing Yoruba practice in Venezuela and its reciprocal influence on practitioners from Africa and Cuba is an example for what Matory calls “Afro-Atlantic Life Dialogue.” He furthermore advocates including the concept of a “Yoruba Atlantic” as a complement to the existing one of a Black Atlantic in order to grasp these complex dynamics. If Venezuela seems to be a somewhat surprising location within what might be termed the Transatlantic Caribbean, the city of Berlin might initially appear to be even more unlikely as the site of Lioba Rossbach de Olmos’ study on the Santería religion. Rossbach de Olmos examines the history and conditions of Santería practice in Germany, including the specific experience of the former German Socialist Democratic Republic and within the context of reunited Germany after 1989. She reconstructs the religious biographies of people from different national, regional, and religious backgrounds, highlighting the example of the German Santero Mark Bauch. Bauch considers himself to have always been a spiritual person and at first started practicing Buddhism. In 2009, he was initiated into Santería by a Berlin-based Cuban dancer and practitioner of Santería and by a Venezuelan Santera also living in Berlin, who combines practices of Cuban Santería and the Venezuelan Maria Lionza religion. Inspired by various religious influences over the years, Bauch finally combined and embraced distinct practices of Buddhism, Cuban Santería, and the Venezuelan Maria Lionza religion. Rossbach de Olmos thus shows that the biographies of priests give evidence of transatlantic movement between the US, Cuba, Germany, Venezuela, and Nigeria. Analogous to the Caribbean, which is often conceived as a laboratory of cultural transformation, she argues that Berlin has recently become an important site for the Caribbean diaspora. The German capital is a place where new religious and cultural experiments are being conducted. Using the theoretical frame of transculturality (referring to German philosopher Welsch,1999), Rossbach de Olmos suggests that when we analyze cultural and religious mixtures, we should not regard them not as an exception, but rather as the norm. Cultural transfers are also at the center of Gesine Müller’s contribution. Her comparison of the literary production of the former French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean reveals a complex web of exchange processes between what are often categorized as centers and peripheries. By showing how French literature influenced writers in the Spanish Em-

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pire, Müller’s examination illustrates how literary ideas transcended classic imperial boundaries. Such cultural flows are clearly visible in the outcomes of literary production, though it is often difficult to trace the specific interaction that inspired other types of cultural production. Müller’s approach foregrounds authors and writers and their political, journalistic, ethnographic, and historiographic activities. These actors absorbed cultural and philosophical trends in their travels from different countries and in different languages, and they were also widely read. Above all, the metropolitan centers have played a special role in these processes of exchange. This perspective cautions us against a simplistic, one-dimensional view of the interaction between one group of thinkers in the former colonial “motherlands” and another group in the former colonies. It instead highlights the agency of the writers in the former colonies who took their inspiration from the cultural and literary production of several countries. Especially in regard to the movement for abolition, Müller shows how critical ideas were influenced to a large degree by exchange, not a unidirectional flow of thoughts. Her comparison further underscores how the capacity of France to absorb contributions from the colonies significantly strengthened the French Empire. The weaker cohesive power of Spain encouraged writers from former Spanish colonies to interact with other centers of literary production and critical thought in France, Great Britain, and the US. In her empirically based analysis of the emergence of anticolonial nationalism in Jamaica, Birte Timm also demonstrates how important travel and migration experiences were in the development of new ideas and political activism in Jamaica. By tracing the routes and experiences of Jamaican emigrants and their encounters with African-Americans, Africans, and immigrants from other colonies in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and by also investigating their exposure to radical black-nationalist thought, as well as socialist and anti-colonial positions, Timm uncovers forgotten transnational roots of the decolonization movement in Jamaica. The disappointment resulting from many activists’ experiences with both the black-nationalist and socialist movements and their futile efforts to merge race and class approaches was fertile soil for the seeds of Jamaican nationalism planted by Jamaican emigrant W. Adolphe Roberts. He had been inspired by Latin American freedom struggles and Bolivarian concepts of Pan-Americanism and approached the Jamaicans in Harlem. The anti-colonial pressure group that evolved became the spearhead of anticolonial thought and activism in Jamaica and significantly influenced the development of local politics. Timm shows that the migration experiences led to a more outspoken form of radical anti-colonialism that was not only

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unprecedented on the island, but was also met with skepticism and reluctance. While current political parties have each tried to rewrite history in their own self-serving way, Timm’s study on the Jamaica Progressive League follows the routes of the activists and their various intellectual influences and ultimately proves the influence of migration and metropolitan experiences in the development of anti-colonial nationalism in Jamaica. Matthew Smith reminds us the importance of the often-neglected topic of migration within the Caribbean. Reflecting on why these histories have not been memorialized, he argues with Troulliot that collective memory is always selective and purposeful. It thus predetermines which narratives of the past are integrated into the historical canon, whereby they are usually ones that support and legitimize the self-image of the current nation state. Smith’s empirical insight into the circuits of migration between Haiti and Jamaica in the 19th century reveals histories that have been overshadowed by national narratives and a strong research bias on 20th century migration. Migration in the 19th century was largely political, however, and created important networks spanning between Jamaica and Haiti that heavily influenced politics in Haiti and still hold sway in the present. Smith describes a lively transnational space that offered room for maneuvering, especially for political exiles, and the conspiring of rebellions and counterrebellions. It is noteworthy that nearly all presidents have been exiled during their careers. Smith highlights the agency of these migrants and shows that the networks they created were instrumental in providing opportunities for migration and (legal and illegal) commercial exchange, familial connections and intermarriage, especially in the second generation. Framing these insights in terms of Foucault’s concept of “counter-memories,” Smith joins other authors in this volume in urging researchers to shift their focus on less prominent histories of mobility and processes of transfer in order to bring to light the hidden histories that are often overshadowed by powerful master narratives. Acknowledgements

We would finally like to express our gratitude to the following persons and institutions for their support: First of all, we wish to thank the contributors of this volume who also participated in the conference “Crossroads of the World: Transatlantic Interrelations in the Caribbean” in 2012. We also thank Stephan Palmié who was unable to attend the conference, but who also contributed an original article. Further, we thank all colleagues with whom we have been able to share ideas and reflections on

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Caribbean research in an inspiring dialogue over the years and with whom we continue to closely collaborate, in particular the Society of Caribbean Research (socare), the Regional Work Group of “Afroamerika” within the German Anthropological Association (DGV), and our colleagues at the Institute for Latin American (LAI) at Freie Universität Berlin. Moreover, we wish to thank the publishing house transcript, Dr. Christopher Reid, who revised the English text, as well as Ximena Aragón, secretary at the LAI, and the student staff Karina Kriegesmann, Arja Frömel, and Oliver Tewes for their support in copy editing and layout. We finally wish to thank the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for the generous financial support for the conference in 2012 and the publication of this book.

Berlin, October 2014

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References

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Mignolo, Walter (2000): Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, Walter (2011): The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Durham: Duke University Press. Mintz, Sidney (1985): Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York: Viking. Mintz, Sidney/Price, Richard (1976): An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past. A Caribbean perspective. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Olupona, Jacob K./Rey, Terry (eds.) (2008): Òrìşà Devotion as World Religion. The Globalization of Yorùbá Religious Culture, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. Ortiz, Fernando (1940): Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar (Advertencia de sus contrastas agrarios, economicos, historicos y sociales, su etnografia ysu transculturacion). Prologo de Herminio Portell Vila; introduccion por Bronislaw Malinowski, Havana: Jesus Montero. Palmié, Stephan (2002): Wizards and Scientists. Explorations in AfroCuban Modernity and Tradition, Durham: Duke University Press. Palmié, Stephan (ed.) (2008a): Africas of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religions, Leiden: Brill. Palmié, Stephan (2008b): Introduction: on Predications of Africanity. In: Stephan Palmié (ed.), Africas of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religions, Leiden: Brill, pp. 1-37. Palmié, Stephan/Scarano, Francisco A. (eds.) (2001): The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Phaf-Rheinberger, Ineke (ed.) (2011): Historias enredadas. Representaciones asimétricas con vista al Atlántico, Berlin: Ed. Tranvía Verlag Frey. Peel, J. D. Y. (1989): “The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethnogenesis.” In: Elizabeth Tonkin (ed.), History and ethnicity, London: Routledge, pp. 198-215. Putnam, Lara (2013): Radical Moves. Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rauhut, Claudia (2012): Santería und ihre Globalisierung in Kuba. Tradition und Innovation in einer afrokubanischen Religion, Würzburg: Ergon Verlag (Religion in der Gesellschaft, 33).

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Rosaldo, Renato (1989): Culture and Truth. The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston: Beacon Press. Thornton, John (1998): Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400-1800. 2nd, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (1992): “The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier to Anthropological Theory.” In: Annual Review of Anthropology 21, pp. 19-42. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (1995): Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press. Verger, Pierre (1968): Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le Golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos, du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, Paris: Mouton (Le Monde d'outre-mer, passé et présent. 1. sér.: Études,). Yelvington, Kevin A. (2001): “The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean. Diasporic Dimensions.” In: Annual Review of Anthropology 30/1, p. 227-260.

From “Survival” to “Dialogue”: Analytic Tropes in the Study of African-Diaspora Cultural History J. L ORAND M ATORY

Before I ever physically visited Africa, I met a Cuban santera – as the practitioners of the African-inspired Santería, or Ocha, religion are called – who taught Spanish at Howard University, in Washington, D.C. Five gold bangles on her arm quietly announced Dr. Contreras’s devotion to and protection by the Yoruba-Atlantic goddess Ochún. 1 I suspected mystery in their meaning before I knew what they were, and so I reached out with an inquisitive touch. With serpentine speed and balletic grace, Contreras withdrew them just beyond my reach. Following the map laid out by Roger Bastide's African Religions of Brazil ([1960] 1978), I stopped over in Brazil, retracing what he and William Bascom (1972) identified as the great arc of Yoruba influence in the Americas. Consequently, Yorubaland was the capital of the Africa that I sought. I have been in love with Africa since I was five years old, partly owing to a book. Physically, all that is left of my Illustrated Book about Africa by Felix Sutton and H. B. Vestal (1959) is the front cover and the first thirty pages of text and vivid lithographs, along with the strips of masking tape with which my mother attempted, on multiple occasions, to repair it. Through these pages, I learned of the desert aoudad, the Egyptian cobra, the rock hyrax, the fennec, and the bustard, as well as the “jungle” okapi, most of which I had never seen in the zoo. I would spend many more years searching for these creatures in American zoos, game parks, pet shops, and 1

I would like to thank Claudia Rauhut for her thoughtful editing and preparation of this article.

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books. Nothing in the book, however, fascinated me as much as what were called the “plate-lipped Sara women,” the kente-draped Ashanti, the “blueveiled Tuaregs,” the Bedouin falconer, the leg-o-mutton-sleeved Herero woman, or the “Watusi” dancer with his red skirt, dance wands, and colobus-fringed headdress. I have since come to regard this indiscriminate merging of African ethology and ethnology as racist, but this book became the seed, or the roots, of my equally indiscriminate love for Africa and longing to embrace her. My late sister and role model Yvedt also loved Africa. She followed her passion for African art – a passion stoked by the books and danced lectures of Yale University art history professor Robert Farris Thompson, a white man from Texas – and connected our family to a great black pilgrimage cycle, which, from the 1960s until the present, has made the journey to Africa almost as important a rite of passage for bourgeois African Americans as the tour of Europe has been for bourgeois Euro-Americans. Before that time, in the early 1950s, my maternal aunt and her family had lived in Liberia. By the 1970s and 1980s, their ultra-modern New Jersey split-level was full of African art, not unlike the kind that Picasso had popularized in modernist European circles at the beginning of the century but was new to our recently-secularized and -suburbanized family. My Liberian-born cousin ultimately married a Nigerian, as I did, and now both lives and works bi-continentally. A paternal first cousin became Muslim and married a Senegalese man. In the 1940s, long before any of these events, my parents had been introduced to each other by a Nigerian classmate of theirs at Howard University, a man who (like at least one other Howard classmate of theirs) repeatedly hosted my and my sister’s late-20th-century visits to Nigeria. My past decades of research in West Africa, Brazil, Cuba, and the black-ethnic populations of the United States have in many ways been devoted to the question of what makes me African American, apart from my physical appearance and the social encumbrances that my family and I tend to share with other descendants of enslaved Africans. The sort of cultural connections that seemed so obvious to Afro-Brazilianists and AfroCubanists and are so readily named by Brazilians and Cubans have been vigorously debated among North Americans. This chapter considers how our choice of scholarly language is shaped by real, human lives. It also asks wheather the cask of our descriptive discourse flavor the wine of our panAmerican relationship with Africa?

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Metaphors and Tropes

The phenomenon that I wish to reconsider in this essay is the cultural history of the African diaspora. I`ll analyze some of the central analytic metaphors and tropes of anthropological research about that diaspora – starting with “survival,” “creolization,” “memory,” and ending with some reflections on my earlier proposal of the metaphor “dialogue” (see Matory 1999). Though this analytic metaphor arises from my research on Africandiaspora religion in Brazil, Cuba, Nigeria, and the United States, It also helps us understand the similar historical dynamics of music, dance, politics, education, and so forth around the Atlantic perimeter and other heavily traveled transregional complexes. Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1980) argues that metaphors structure all of our language. They are pervasive. They both reflect and produce behavioral choices that are as arbitrary as any other aspect of culture. For example, much US American parlance about the verbal exchange of ideas analogizes such exchange to warfare, as in “I shot his ideas down” and “She blasted his argument out of the water!” (Lakoff/Johnson 1980: 4). Any given metaphor compares one thing (a “target,” which is in need of clarification) to another (a “source,” whose nature is concrete and clear enough to clarify the target by analogy). In doing so, argue Lakoff and Johnson, the metaphor also “highlights” a number of similarities between the compared objects and “hides” various dissimilarities. Thinking of an argument as a war, for example, highlights its competitive nature and naturalizes the motive of mutual destruction between the participants. Metaphors and other figures of speech, or tropes, pervade even our scholarly language, in which settings I call them “analytic” metaphors and tropes. Here I hope to clarify what is highlighted and hidden by the preeminent analytic tropes in the study of African-diaspora cultural history. Among the realities that most of these analytic tropes hide are the messy, real-life experiences of the researcher. The alternative analytic language that I propose arises from an unflinching look at the often well-known realities and personal experiences that previous generations of ethnographers and theorists of diasporas have tended to bracket. For each analytic trope I discuss, I tell a story about the dimensions of cultural history that it highlights, as well as the equally valuable dimensions of cultural history that it hides, and, sometimes, the effect that its usage has had on the cultures so described. Hence this text might be construed as autobiography. However, it is also a history. Alongside the other essays in this volume, it is an intellectual history of ethnography in which a range of

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authors have studied transnationally mobile populations and cross-border identities. We root these discussions not in high-flown theory and secondary references but in the messy currency-changing, language-switching, passport-inspecting, bribe-demanding, police-and-customs-supervised, and generally boundary-filled world of physically itinerant lives. As intellectual history, this essay excavates the under-recognized, under-examined, and under-exploited scholarly precedents of transnational ethnography in the study of the African diaspora, a task I share with other colleagues in this volume (see also the contributions in Yelvington 2006). As event history, it retraces the ignored Afro-Atlantic precedents of today's much-vaunted transnationalism. This reexamination of the long-charted routes of black Atlantic cultural history also offers both a theoretical model and a critique of the language we have used to describe the forms of translocal, transethnic cultural intercourse that have long shaped intra-African cultural history – along trade routes, at the convergence of Tutsi and Hutu, Hausa and Fulani, Bantu and “pygmy” or Khoisan, “Arab” and “African,” and so forth. But it also offers models for an improved description of newer transnational communities, as well. What do existing analytic metaphors highlight and hide about translocal cultural formations? How do such metaphors reshape local social life? Survivals

Melville J. Herskovits was once the whipping boy, but he is now the preeminent model, of African-American talk about our cultural connection to Africa. The metaphor of “survivals” – or recalcitrant leftovers from a people's historically original state – is the linchpin of his analysis. He asks, What aspects of African culture “survived” in the Americas? Where did they “survive” and how (Herskovits [1941] 1958)? I argue that Herskovits's choice of an analytic metaphor begs the question of what he is looking for and where he will look to find it. For Herskovits, the term “survival” described the ancient and timelessly African practices left over – in any given New World black population – from earlier stages of acculturation to the dominant Euro-American culture. This metaphor implies (and Herskovits's argument assumes) that Africa is the past of the American present. It assumes that Africa is so changeless and isolated from the rest of the world that 20th-century Dahomean culture, for example, could provide evidence of the culture that reached Haiti in the 18th century and has survived ever since then. According to the “survival” metaphor, Africa is to the past as the black Americas are to the present.

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Herskovits was one of a cohort of scholars in the 1920s and 1930s, some of whom agreed and some of whom disagreed with the importance and depth Herskovits accorded to these African “survivals.” But they all employed this analytic metaphor and a host of its cousins, including “memories,” “heritage,” “retention,” the sartorial metaphor of “vestiges” – which literally suggests clothing – and their logical entailments. Hortense Powdermaker (1939) for example, shared Herskovits's doubt that captivity had rendered African Americans – in an extension of the clothing metaphor – entirely “culturally naked” (Powdermaker cited in Herskovits [1941] 1958: 29). Herskovits’s major contribution was to amplify these metaphors by inverting the sartorial image of the “vestige.” Hence, rather than the African American wearing his or her Africanness on the outside, he or she is said to contain or embody that inheritance as an unconscious “underlying logic” or “bent” within apparently Euro-American external forms, such as being filled enthusiastically with the Holy Ghost in the midst of Sunday meetings at my grandfather’s Church of God in Christ in the State of Virginia. Nonetheless, all of these analytic metaphors suggest that African Americans` contact with Africa is limited to the past and that the “survival,” “memory,” “vestige” or “retention” resembles a self-existent, unchanging object bequeathed to the living by dead forebears. This unchanging object will appear, over time, behind different masks, but the object remains the same. In imitation of Afro-Brazilianist Arthur Ramos, Herskovits called this masking “syncretism.” The paradigm case is the Afro-Latin American “masking” of African gods behind the statues and lithographs of Catholic saints. For Herskovits, syncretism was “the tendency to identify those elements in the new culture with similar elements in the old one, enabling the persons experiencing the contact to move from one to the other, and back again, with psychological ease” ([1945] 1966: 57). In the classic example, Herskovits employed the term to describe Haitians’, Brazilians’, and Cubans’ use of the images of Roman Catholic saints in the worship of iconographically similar African gods. 2 For example, among

2

Note that the use of the syncretism trope links Herskovits and his followers to a rather different figuration of Africa’s “ethnohistorical” links to the Americas. Herskovits’s elder, Raimundo Nina Rodrigues in Brazil; his contemporary Fernando Ortiz in Cuba; his junior colleague, the French sociologist Roger Bastide; and their followers emphasized the consequences of “transculturation” (Ortiz), the “interpenetration of civilizations” (Bastide), and similar forms of AfroEuropean cultural hybridity in shaping whole national cultures, rather than

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Santeros in Cuba and its diaspora, statues of Saint Bárbara, patroness of firefighters, are used to represent the Yoruba-affiliated god of thunder, lightning, and fire, Changó. By extension, Herskovits regarded “shouting” in black North American Protestant churches as a syncretic survival of African religious practice – that is, as an African disposition toward the practice of spirit possession adapted to and hidden behind a Western Christian name and conception of God. In their day, Herskovits’s “survival” and “reinterpretation” metaphors helped highlight what many people had overlooked – the reality of cultural continuity and transformation in African-American history. However, one might justly be dissatisfied with Herskovits’s and the Herskovitsians’ relative inattention to diverse contextual meanings of apparently similar signifiers. For example, highlighting the formal similarities among possession by the Holy Spirit in North America, the river goddess Yemọja in Nigeria, and the eponymous sea goddess Iemanjá in Brazil might lead the analyst to overlook the radically different theologies and ritual complexes that buoy them. Herskovits’ model was far more attentive to psychological and unconscious “dispositions” than to agency and strategy in the reproduction of cultural forms. What, for example, might be any given actor’s motive (beyond inertia) to reproduce an African cultural form, or to identify such a form as “African”? Such an actor is likely to have alternatives to the African-looking form, and might risk reprisal or disapproval for adopting even the most camouflaged of non-Western forms. And he or she might choose to interpret that form as non-African in origin. Are antecedent and intergenerational “dispositions” or the desire to hold onto the past (now trendily called cultural resistance) sufficient explanations for the genealogy of African American cultural choices? In 1976, Sidney Mintz and Richard Price’s influential revision of Herskovits’ method embraced the conventions of mid-20th-century sociocultural anthropology, rejecting Herskovits emphasis on genealogies of inheritance and favoring, instead, the idea that any cultural practice should be interpreted in terms of how it is integrated into its contemporaneous social context. However, today’s anthropologists have come to doubt the integrity of any given culture and to recognize the diversity and contradic-

merely the effects of an ironic African continuity on the black minority and its neighbors.

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tory relationship among local discourses, it is not clear that Herskovits’s critics are more correct than he. Creolization

The second most influential analytic metaphor in African American Anthropology is “creolization” – a model indebted to Sidney Mintz and Richard Price ([1976] 1992). It emphasizes the New-World social institutions, organizations, and sanctioned spaces that made the practice of African creative models possible in the Americas. According to Mintz and Price, African-American populations came to the Americas equipped not with whole and particular African cultures but with the hodgepodge of beliefs and practices that the culturally heterogeneous “crowds” of Africans brought to any given New World locale. New, African American cultures formed in the spaces and around the aspects of social life where the dominant planter class allowed African-American cultures to be distinctive. Moreover, argue Mintz and Price, these newly African-American cultures took shape quickly and enduringly – first, on the slave ships and then in the early years of any given American slave society. They formed quickly because they had to address the local need for people of diverse aboriginal cultures and languages who were laboring under the same plantation labor regime to communicate and cooperate immediately with their masters and with each other. »The rapidity with which a complex, integrated and unique Afro-American religious system [or, presumably, other cultural system] developed” and stabilized in a particular American locale is shown to be analogous to the rapidity with which the local creole language variety developed and stabilized.« (Mintz and Price 1992: 22-26)

Their creole language metaphor, particularly when it is interpreted in the light of the white-dominant plantations that are the prototypical setting of this model of cultural history, suggests that African-American cultures are internally systematic and bounded local systems. They are walled off by the slaves' alleged immobility, the masters' restrictions, and the long-term stability of the resulting local social systems. No longer could we follow Hers-kovits in merely counting up the African shreds and patches that decorate otherwise Euro-American shirts and pants – the arbitrarily ordered and nonfunctional heirlooms that Herskovits traced to the African past. What I will argue is that the political and demographic contexts shaping African American cultures are seldom produced through a once-and-for-all

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departure from Africa and are seldom isolated from a broader, circumAtlantic context. I submit that, unlike languages (as they are conventionally understood), African-American cultures should not be considered integrated, internally systematic, and bounded in discrete units; they are crosscut (à la Bakhtin; for example, 1981) by multiple transnational languages, discourses, and dialogues. Collective Memory

An important analytic metaphor that regularly overlaps with the “creolization” metaphor is “collective memory” and “forgetting.” Advocates employ these terms to highlight what they regard as the chief mechanism of sociocultural reproduction and the chief mechanism of diasporas’ relationship to their homelands. Roger Bastide (1960), Joan Dayan (1995), Karen McCarthy Brown (1989), and others have followed Maurice Halbwachs (1925) in arguing that the preservation of myths, for example, can occur only when the social relationships or places to which these myths refer or the institutions to which they are relevant remain intact. Bastide argues, for example, that the Yorùbá goddess Yemọja continues to be thought of as a mother in Brazil because lower-class Afro-Brazilian families tend to be what Bastide calls “matriarchal” ([1960] 1978). Though Bastide understood Candomblé to be a socially structured but involuntary “memory” of Africa and 1980s ethnographers of Candomblé tend to regard it as the product of white, bourgeois manipulation, these scholars were probably quite aware that leading figures in the 19th- and early 20th-century Candomblé – such as Martiniano do Bonfim, Felisberto Sowzer, and Joaquim Devodê Branco – were transatlantic travelers who frequented Lagos and Porto Novo (Matory 2005). These travelers were often fluent in English or French, and like some of their counterparts in Afro-Cuban religions, many studied in Anglophone West African mission schools, where their teachers were Anglophone Africans. Consequently, on their return journeys from Lagos to Bahia and Havana, they carried with them not just the memories of a past Africa but also the cultural nationalism of contemporary Lagos, which was then a British colony. In Lagos, rising British racism during the 1880s and 1890s had inspired a lively literary and cultural movement called the Lagosian Cultural Renaissance, which documented the diverse regional practices that this movement would redefine as “Yoruba” culture and proclaimed the unique dignity of that culture (Matory 1999: 82-86).

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This new “Yoruba” ethnic identity amalgamated a number of previously distinct cultural strands. The term Yoruba appears to come from a term that the Hausa people applied to Ọyọ, a savannah kingdom that would only later be amalgamated with the Ẹgba, the Ẹgbado, the Ijẹbu, the Ifẹ, the Awori, and so forth within the same, pan-ethnic identity (ethnic groups in what are now Nigeria and the People’s Republic of Benin). This pan-ethnic identity probably first took shape on the slave ships in the Americas. Many African-American ethnic identities were named by maritime slave traders after the African port of embarkation, where captives of diverse ethnic affiliations were normally gathered together. Thus, Gerhard Kubik (1979) notes that the ethnonyms that came to describe Africans in the New World were initially little more than “trademarks.” The bearers of these trademarks thus became ethnic groups for themselves in the Americas. Rather, they came to think of themselves as unified ethnic groups for a series of accumulating reasons. They did so, first, because people gathered from the same African port were, in the Americas, often selected by the same buyers for their similar technical skills and, second, because the Roman Catholic Church often missionized them through trademarktargeted brotherhoods. The cultural similarities they then discovered in the Americas had probably held little conscious importance in the context of their lives in Africa, much as Nigerians who live in Nigeria today seldom cognize themselves as members of “the black race.” Only when they move to the West, where their appearance places them in a visible minority and subjects them to an experience of skin-color-based discrimination, do they come to think of themselves as “black.” Similarly, there had been few occasions for the 19th-century denizens of Oyo, Ekiti or Ijebu to think of themselves as one people. In the context of pre-colonial 19th-century hinterland of the Bight of Benin, Africa, the differences among their respective language varieties and political organization almost certainly mattered vastly more to them than the relative similarities among themselves that they discovered in the Americas, where they came to live among speakers of what we now call Efik, Ewe, Twi, KiKongo, Tupí, Spanish, Portuguese and so forth. Only then did Oyo, Ekiti, Ijebu people and so forth likely come to think of themselves as united under terms like “Lucumí,” “Nagô” and, only later still, “Yoruba.” Thus, the Lucumí in Cuba and the Nagô in Brazil were among those “trademark” groups that initially became ethnic groups for themselves in the Americas. Only much later did their ethnic counterparts in Africa receive the name Yoruba. They first received the name “Yoruba” not in what is now called Yorubaland but in Freetown, which is now the capital of

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Sierra Leone. Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1809-1891) had been one of the captives from the interior of the Bight of Benin whom the British Royal Navy rescued from the slave ships whose traffic the British had outlawed in the early 19th century. The British typically resettled these “recaptives” in Freetown, where, like many recaptives, he was educated after the Western model by missionaries. Crowther would eventually become a bishop of the Church of England. In the service of the missionary project, he cobbled together a new and hybrid dialect intended to be equally comprehensible to the Oyo, the Egba, the Egbado, the Awori, the Ijebu, and so forth, who, again, had never previously thought of themselves as a single ethnic group. Crowther and his collaborators reduced that language to writing – the first book in this language was the Bible – making it into an emblem of the new ethnic identity (Matory 1999). Much of its vocabulary came from the diaspora, as thousands of Cuban Lucumís and Brazilian Nagôs who had either secured their manumission or been expelled from their Latin American host societies “returned” to Africa and settled in the British Protectorate of Lagos. They were later joined by thousands of other “returnees” from Freetown. Together, they established a thriving creole society in Lagos, whose core was built by Brazilian hands in Brazilian architectural style. Their hybrid, written language, which Crowther named “Yoruba,” became the first shared symbol of a common identity with the same name, and its capital was not Oyo but Lagos. Particularly in the context of the struggle against Hausa hegemony in the Nigerian nation-state, some Yoruba nationalists resent what they see as the potential implication that today’s Yoruba people are not a timelessly obligatory unit of cooperation. They argue that, even in the absence of the term “Yoruba,” this collective identity had existed from time immemorial, since the rulers of the kingdoms that are now called “Yoruba” all claim descent from a dynasty founded centuries earlier in the city of Ile-Ifę. On the other hand, partisans of Ile-Ifę’s defining role also tend to include the non-Yoruba kings of Benin City among the descendants of the Ifę dynasty. Projecting the “Yoruba” identity onto Oyo and thereby establishing its existence before the 19th-century would be like identifying US “American” as primordial because our system of governance has British roots, which we also share with Australians. US Americans intermittently invoke the British crown and the English language as symbols of a pan-Anglophone political and cultural alliance. For example, advocates of US intervention during the world wars invoked this notion in order to persuade anti-interventionists that we should put ourselves at risk in order to rescue England from the Germans. It worked, but it would be absurd to call this alliance “American”

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or project “Americanness” back onto the originators of the British political system. However, historicizing such strategic invocations of Anglophone identity in no way delegitimizes them. It simply recognizes the noninevitability, the agency and the optionality that are elements of every human identity and identity choice. Just as the returnees helped to create Yoruba identity in West Africa, so did the products of West African cultural nationalism transform Latin American cultures. For example, the 19thcentury founder of Afro-Brazilian studies (Rodrigues 1900) and the 20thcentury founder of Afro-Cuban studies (Ortiz 1906; 1916) read the publications of the Lagosian Cultural Renaissance and cited them as proof of Yoruba superiority to other Africans. They cited this literature in the defense of the Yoruba-affiliated denominations in Brazil and Cuba – to the exclusion of their “Congo,” “Angola,” “Mayombe,” and Efik-related counterparts. The “collective memory”– based literature on the African diaspora contains several rich discussions of the ways in which changing social conditions and political needs shape the selective reproduction, transformation, and meaningful reinterpretation of past cultural forms. Diaspora scholars would do equally well to recognize that commemoration is always strategic in its selections, exclusions, and interpretations. 3 But why call such cultural reproduction memory – a term that hides rather than highlights the unending struggle over the meaning and usage of gestures, monuments, words, and memories? This analytic metaphor implies the organic unity of the collective “rememberer,” anthropomorphizing society rather than highlighting the heterogeneity, strategic conflicts, and unequal resources of the rival agents who make up social life. Of course, experts on the psychology of personal memory know how complex, variable, and socially conditioned it is. For example, personal memories are reshaped by conversations and conflicting collective interests. However, if we are seeking a clear metaphoric source that makes the unclear process of cultural reproduction easier to understand, isn’t it unwise to choose a metaphoric source whose implications and entailments are themselves so unsettled and so unclear? In daily life and everyday language, who thinks of personal memory as quintessentially strategic or as subject to the conflicting agency of subjects with 3

Of course, the literature addressing sociocultural reproduction beyond the African diaspora in terms of such tropes as cultural memory, social memory, and collective memory is also broad and deep, addressing agency and strategy among different themes and to variable degrees, e.g., Appadurai (1981); Malkki (1995), Comaroff and Comaroff (1987); Connerton (1989); Werbner (1998).

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different resources to propagate their versions of the past? Metaphors are usually chosen for the concreteness and clarity of the source, which enables the metaphor to clarify what is otherwise unclear or inchoate about the target (Fernandez 1986). As the literature on “social memory” demonstrates, the source itself (that is, personal memory) needs just as much clarifying as the target (that is, the collective interpretation and reenactment of the past). Invoked casually, the comparison of collective cultural practices to the recording system of an individual mind projects onto collective social reproduction a certain passivity, involuntariness, absence of strategy, and political guilelessness and neutrality that seem quite foreign to the processes that have in fact shaped African and African American cultures over time. In general, the “memory” metaphor complements the nationalist personification of the nation and its tandem fiction of innocent, pristine, and primordial folkways, which give proof that the nation has always been one and is rooted in God and Nature, rather than human strategy or history that could have turned out some other way. Among the unavoidable failings of the “memory” metaphor is that by making a figurative person of the collective rememberer, this analytic metaphor risks concealing the fundamental pluralness of the agents of this “collective memory.” Any memory that might be called collective is ready ground for sharp disagreements and interested rival constructions, and any form of personal memory describable in terms of “sharp disagreement” and “interested rivalries” would be considered non-normative – or sick. In fact, as richly suggestive as all of them have been, the “survival,” “reinterpretation,” and “creolization” metaphors share the potential for similar underestimations of heterogeneity and conflicting strategy in socio-cultural reproduction. They lend themselves to the premise that, like the survivor of a disaster, like the interpreter of a text, or like a creole language, any given Afro-Atlantic culture is self-existent, internally integrated, bounded, and possessed of its own agency and autonomous authorship. That is to say, to the degree that it is like a person’s memory, as conventionally conceived, any given Afro-Atlantic culture must not be rent by multiple and contradictory discourses, languages, perspectives, and interests; and that each such Afro-Atlantic culture has evolved in organic isolation or discreteness from the others. An alternative metaphor might represent these cultures not as selfexistent but as organically part of a dialogue – less as evolving langues or as isolated readers of self-contained national pasts than as interacting and mutually transformative sets of participants in a conversation. The meta-

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phor of dialogue places traditions – or strategically constructed genealogies of cultural reproduction – into a context beyond nation and region, a context from which they are rarely extricable. The Metaphor of “Dialogue” and its Antecedents

In the same year, art historians Michael D. Harris (1999) and Moyo Okediji (1999) and I (Matory 1999) simultaneously but independently published essays likening the transformative exchange of people and ideas between Africa and the Americas to a “dialogue.” The empirical fact that people of the African diaspora have traveled, carrying goods and ideas among various locales on the Atlantic perimeter, has long been known. The intercontinental movement of corn, cassava, cowpeas, peanuts, tobacco, palm oil, and cowries has, over the past five hundred years, wrought incalculable demographic and political changes everywhere on the Afro-Atlantic – changes dwarfing the oft-cited consequences of Europe’s importation of the potato. Afro-Atlantic peoples were not only victims but also major agents of these seismic shifts, during and long after the transatlantic slave trade. Focusing on the migration and commerce between Bahia (Brazil) and West Africa, Pierre Verger described this phenomenon in terms of a tidal metaphor – “flux et reflux” (“ebb and flow,” Verger [1968] 1976). Yet this ongoing transatlantic exchange of people and goods also shaped the welldocumented political and cultural histories of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, and South Africa. Such transatlantic exchange is also the foundation of Zairean/Congolese Soukous music, of Senegalese president Léopold Senghor and Fort-de-France mayor Aimé Césaire’s widely cited Négritude poetry, and of Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism – all of which have origins and reciprocal outcomes in the African diaspora. The Afro-Atlantic dialogue is economic, political, literary, and musical. Just as Africa and its diaspora are linked, diverse African-diaspora locales are linked to each other by migration, commerce, and the mutual gaze among them, which are the subject of Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993). Drawing examples primarily from the English-speaking black populations of England, the United States, and the Caribbean, Gilroy retheorizes the scope and mechanisms of cultural reproduction that he sees posited in the nationalist and racist cultural histories of black people in the West. For him, the cultural exchanges among diasporic locales undermine and falsify the boundaries that nationalists imagine around the races, nations, and cultures of the Atlantic perimeter. Thus, for Gilroy, the ships that carry ideas and cultural artifacts between locales are more emblematic of black Atlantic

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culture than are the national boundaries and watery divides that separate one locale from another. In the place of continuous forms of “memory” constituting geographically bounded cultural units, Gilroy prioritizes the “discontinuous” forms of cultural reproduction by which ideas and images from one place constantly amplify and modify the cultural genealogies of other places (see also Roach 1996). Gilroy's Black Atlantic argues further that the shared cultural features of African-diaspora groups result far less from shared “survivals” or cultural “memories” of Africa than from black Atlantic populations' mutually influential responses to their shared exclusion from the benefits of the Enlightenment legacy of national citizenship and political equality in the West. In charting the history of Anglophone black Atlantic culture, Gilroy’s “ship” metonym prioritizes cultural exchange across territorial boundaries over the territorially divergent but uninterrupted “memory” of Africa posited by Bastide and followers of Melville J. Herskovits. Yet Gilroy remains curiously comfortable with the notion of the African diaspora's continuous “memory” of slavery. For example, Gilroy believes that black Atlantic ballads about lost love symbolically commemorate slavery. But when genres inaugurated by one ethnic group, nationality, or race are adopted by another (such as soul music in Jamaica, reggae in Puerto Rico, or rumba in West Africa and Congo/Zaïre), whose collective past is being “remembered,” who is the rememberer? Weren't the regimes of slavery in the different “remembering” communities, nations, and regions different? Wouldn't the diversity of musical genres suggest that the rememberers are diverse and at least partially constituted by nationality or locality? Yet Gilroy, like transnationalism theorist Arjun Appadurai (1990), represents the territorial nation and the local identities it generates as contradictions to (rather than agents or optional objectives of) these ship-borne cultural crossings. Yes, local identities are in dialogue with each other across borders, but strategically bounded identities continue to structure much of the dialogue. That is, the exchange of ideas, objects, and personnel certainly crosscuts national, ethnic, and other social boundaries. However, numerous and powerful social actors retain a stake in defining and policing those boundaries. The power to speak on behalf of a group, to protect its monopoly on certain resources or means of livelihood, and to determine access to those resources and means, keeps collective identities passionately alive and makes them impossible for cross-cultural interlocutors to ignore. I recognize this reality every time I pass through customs.

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Hence, the fact of extensive exchange across locales and populations should not blind us to the fact that reifications of the bounded social group – such as those implicit in arborescent metaphors and other organismic metaphors of society (i.e., the notion of society as a living body) – perform real and powerful work on behalf of the social and political actors who invoke them. And no such actor can neglect to acknowledge them, in even the most translocal of interactions. And if, for Gilroy, “collective memory” usefully highlights something about Afro-Atlantic people’s relationship to their past, why is the “memory” of Africa selected for denial in Gilroy's model? The credibility of this representation of black Atlantic cultural history relies less on disproof of Africa's role than on a silence about it. I offer, then, the briefest summary of an alternative analytic metaphor in the cultural history of the black Atlantic. The Afro-Atlantic Dialogue

The metaphor of “dialogue” would instead highlight the ways in which the mutual gaze between Africans and African Americans, multidirectional travel and migration between the two hemispheres, the movement of publications, commerce, and so forth have shaped African and AfricanAmerican cultures in tandem, over time, and at the same time. It highlights the ways in which cultural artifacts, images, and practices do not simply “survive” or endure through “memory”; they are, rather, interpreted and reproduced for diverse contemporary purposes by actors with culturally diverse repertoires, diverse interests, and diverse degrees of power to assert them. As in a literal dialogue, such interpretations and reproductions can also be silenced, articulated obliquely, paraphrased, exaggerated, or quoted mockingly as well. My metaphor of “Afro-Atlantic dialogue” (Matory [1994] 2005; 1999; 2005) suggests that Gullahs and Sierra Leoneans, Yoruba people and the New World worshipers of the gods that became “Yoruba” (despite the originally Christian uses of this ethnonym), African Americans, black Britons and Jamaicans, and “light” and “dark” Brazilians are not discrete systems or cultures but participants in a continuous, mutually transformative dialogue. No local population is an isolated collective rememberer of a self-contained national past. Rather, recollections and other performances are responses to the claims of other actors and self-proclaimed classes of actors. Ethnic or national groupings articulate the boundaries that separate them not insofar as they have historically been insulated and isolated from

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one another but insofar as they have engaged in complementary dialogue, including competition and confrontation, with each other. The metaphor of Afro-Atlantic dialogue places traditions – or strategically constructed genealogies of cultural reproduction – into a context beyond nation and region, into a larger, transoceanic context. Local cultures do not result merely from inheritance or from the local inertia of quick-forming, slowchanging systems. Rather, actors produce their cultures in dialogue. Yet that dialogue is not a conversation among equals. It draws together more powerful and less powerful actors. Relative wealth, linguistic proficiency, nationality, and unequal access to the means of communication and reward distinguish one class of actors from another. On the other hand, the “dialogue” metaphor does posit one type of equality: temporal equality. It posits the radical coevalness (see Fabian 1983) of Africa, Latin America, and the United States in a dialogue that, even following the conclusion of the slave trade, has continually reshaped all of these regions. In other words, Africa is not to its diaspora as the past is to the present. Rather, Africa is an ongoing interlocutor in the cultural history that shapes us all – no less in North America than in Latin America and the Caribbean. Equally evident is the fact that metaphors through which we think of our African-American connection to Africa shape how we live our lives. For me, a Yoruba proverb sums up this phenomenon well: “Ewe ti d’ọşę” – “The leaf has become the soap.” Though it usually refers to how longresident outsiders become insiders to the community, it also suggests that a leaf wrapping that once gathered up and shaped a quantity of soap eventually disappears into that soap ball, and only the historically wise are aware that the shape of the soap ball derived not from the soap but from a nowinvisible leaf. Such is the role of analytic tropes in reshaping the social realities that they once only poetically described. It is when the metaphor dies that it becomes the most inescapable model of and for a lived reality. Hence, in the 1970s and 1980s, the “roots” and “survivals” metaphors offered African Americans a new way of imagining ourselves and of interacting with Africa. These metaphors modeled and mimed our increased willingness to dress, marry, worship, and conduct religious or heritage tourism in ways that we understood to reflect a timelessly African past and our continuous connection to it. A new understanding of our “kinship across the seas” persuaded us – in the Free South Africa Movement and the movement to stop the atrocities of Sudanese Arabs against that country's black population – to intervene in the African present.

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Conclusion

The study of the African diaspora has generated a series of productive analytic metaphors, highlighting the cultural, historical, economic, and political dimensions of diaspora with increasing refinement over time. Yet much that the existing analytic metaphors in Afro-Atlantic studies have led us to overlook is productively highlighted in a new metaphor – one that represents homelands not as the past but as the contemporaries of their diasporas, and diverse diasporic locales not as divergent streams but as interlocutors in supraregional conversations. Africa and its American diaspora reflect the effects of an enduring dialogue and a dialectic of mutual transformation over time. The dialogue metaphor is not intended to posit equality of influence or power among the interlocutors, just their continuous and meaningful presence in each other’s cultural history and self-construction. Indeed, as the greatest of the imperial powers, England and the United States have furnished the means for certain black “interlocutors” – i.e., Anglophone – to “speak” far louder than others. Though I question the likeness of Afro-Atlantic creole lifeways to quick-forming, bounded, and internally integrated “languages,” the analytic metaphor I propose builds on the legacy of the linguistic analogy. I must emphasize that “dialogue” is a metaphor and is not intended to suggest that all or even most aspects of Afro-Atlantic cultural exchange and reproduction are linguistic. Not all aspects of this exchange and reproduction are like language, but even the paradigmatic aesthetic forms of the Afro-Atlantic world – dance and music – bear traces of it and bear comparison to it. For example, Afro-Atlantic music regularly includes lyrics, imitates the tones and patterns of speakers’ mutual responsiveness, or is emically understood to “speak to” people and to “call” gods. But, of course, music involves techniques and produces feelings beyond the range normally associated with speech. Nonetheless, I am arguing that the cultural reproduction of dispersed ethnic groups, neighboring ones, and ones surrounding ocean perimeters regularly share in the coeval and interactive qualities of dialogue, and that those who dominate the verbal and written interpretation of the gestures and artifacts of social life exercise a disproportionate influence on the social consequences of those gestures and artifacts (e.g., Matory 1999). Perhaps, at least in our analytic language, culture is better spoken of in the singular and regarded as a process than denominated in the plural, and cultures should not be regarded as discretely countable things. As countable

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and discrete things, cultures are but provisional, debated, and evanescent assertions by political leaders, marketing experts, and unreformed anthropologists. The Afro-Atlantic is one of the most important transnational cultural fields of the past five hundred years. Yet it has long engaged in a mighty dialogue with the Middle East and the Indian Ocean as well. Various AfroAtlantic interlocutors have embraced and transformed Islam (see, e.g., I. M. Lewis 1989; Lincoln 1973) and even Hinduism (see Rush 1999) for their own purposes. Cuban Santeros employ Chinese porcelain vessels and “syncretize” the orichas with various avatars of the Buddha and the Chinese boddhisattva Kwan Yin. Moreover, this model of mutually transformative interregional communication in the history of culture is applicable to the lifeways of non-black populations of the Atlantic perimeter as well. Indeed, there is no natural reason to isolate the “black Atlantic” from the Atlantic world as a whole, any more than there is a reason to isolate the Atlantic perimeter from the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and Far Eastern regions with which it has long interacted. The field of Atlantic history has similarly examined the politics, economics, and ideas that have united the Americas with Europe, not the least of which constituted the slave trade (see Bailyn 1996). Like “Atlantic history,” the “Afro-Atlantic” construct highlights the politics, the economics, the ideas, and above all the will of a specific group of people to communicate and shape each other’s lives. Hence, by the efforts of people who reason strategically about their sameness and their diversity – and therefore about the pasts that unite and divide them – the Afro-Atlantic world has always been focused rather than bounded. Like Gilroy’s “black Atlantic,” the logic of the “Afro-Atlantic dialogue” highlights the under-examined mobility and agency of black people in creating this world and the specific role of black consciousness in the creative and historical making of black distinctiveness. Like Robert Farris Thompson’s “black Atlantic,” “Afro-Atlantic dialogue” restores Africa, Africans, African cultures, and Americans’ vision of Africa to a central role in the making of the black Atlantic world. Borrowing Fabian’s parlance, this model posits the “coevalness” of Africa and the Americas, rather than imagining present-day Africa as the past of the black Americas. The world’s future is likely to reflect much that the past and present of the African diaspora is already available to teach us. Diasporas and homelands continue to make each other over time, and they are shaped by a dialogue among numerous other coeval interlocutors of unequal power and unequal access to the means of communication.

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Now that many of us not only study and travel to Africa but also have African immigrant neighbors and spouses, I ask you to imagine how much more productive the dialogue might be if we recognized its rich precedents – precedents that have involved as much commerce, musical exchange, mutual religious conversion, and transatlantic struggles against European domination as survivals of a four-century-old past. And why limit the implications of this model to recent centuries? The Swiss editor of a prestigious European journal of biblical studies told me that his pet peeve is people who translate texts without a full knowledge of the language and cultural context of the original writing. Provoked by the fact that his own contribution to his field and his personal comparative advantage were so close to the time-honored convictions of my own discipline, I decided to challenge him and myself. I asked why we should not also consider the possibility that textual language was also shaped by the inter-cultural and inter-linguistic exposure of the authors. He conceded that the succession of translations of a text might help to reveal earlier meanings and contexts that have been lost, but he refused the idea that the people who first articulated the oral forms of biblical stories or the people who wrote them down may have been multilingual (like the editor and me), that their syntax and word choices may have been influenced by calques and borrowings (as are his English and my German), or, therefore, that the inter-linguistic context of a text might add valuable new insights to the study of its intra-linguistic context. He insisted that I was assuming something entirely wrong about premodern human life. He repeated the oft-heard dictum that, before the invention of the bicycle, the vast majority of people never traveled more than ten kilometers away from home. What about nomads and pastoralists, I asked, and long-distance traders, who, though small in number, were probably disproportionately influential in local storytelling traditions? Had the ancient Hebrews themselves not reported their origins in Ur of the Chaldees, in present-day Iraq, their capture and enslavement of numerous indigenous Canaanites, their captivity in Mesopotamia and Egypt? Did the Acts of the Apostles not report the regular convergence of linguistically diverse populations and the miracle that the Holy Spirit suddenly enabled the disciplines of Christ to speak languages that would enable them to proselytize these numerous strangers? Did the Greeks and the Romans not conquer and enslave people from far and near, integrating them into the heart of their households, where they would influence the master’s children from birth? The conversation ended in a total stalemate, with this highly esteemed scholar feeling that he was right because he knew for a fact that

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only the most assimilated and educated of slaves were allowed to educate elite children. So, he concluded, the ancient world was entirely different from the lessons that I had drawn from American slavery. So the lessons of the Afro-Atlantic, to his mind, simply did not apply to the ancient Mediterranean or Levant. As I confessed to him, I am no expert on the ancient Mediterranean, and my confidence in the applicability of the translocal “dialogue” model is much greater beginning with the Islamic period, during which it is impossible to understand West African life without acknowledging the flows of ideas, books, gold, and slaves that circulated on camelback around the vast and continuous desert sea between the western Sahara and the Gobi. However, I could not help but feel that he was as proud of his intensive knowledge of specific ancient languages as I was of my intensive experience of translocal flows. So I must entertain the possibility that I have underestimated the importance of bounded local places in human cultural history. But I am equally suspicious that my interlocutor’s convictions arose from insufficient attention to the physical metaphor of the text. For those who have not read Bakhtin, or do not take him seriously, the physical boundedness of a book or a manuscript may resemble proof that meaning systems and the populations that create them were, until some recent disruption, equally bounded. Perhaps it is the religious systems I study that make me comfortable with the normalcy of mutually transformative dialogue among apparently separate places and populations. The Afro-Atlantic religions – such as West African Yoruba orisha-worship, Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santería, or Ocha, and Haitian Vodou – think of life and worship as a continual transaction between this world and another, with surprising and unpredictable results. That other world is talked about simultaneously as another plane of existence and as another geographical place. Like foreign influences, new revelations come from the other world all the time, and they are welcome. To the same degree, the textual traditions of the Abrahamic religions emphasize the fixity of texts, the authority of their original, God-given meaning, and the careful exclusion of texts that can be judged non-original. Just as metaphors shape how we see the world, they also emerge from the parts and aspects of the world at which we choose to look.

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References

Appadurai, Arjun (1981): “The Past as a Scarce Resource.” In: Man 16, pp. 201-19. Appadurai, Arjun (1990): “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” In: Public Culture 2/2, pp. 1-24. Bailyn, Bernard (1996): “The Idea of Atlantic History.” Working Paper No. 96-01, International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, Harvard University. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981): The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bastide, Roger ([1960] 1978): The African Religions of Brazil. Transl. Helen Sebba. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Brown, Karen McCarthy (1989): “Systematic Remembering, Systematic Forgetting.” In: Sandra Barnes (ed.), Africa’s Ogun, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp 65-89. Comaroff, John L./Comaroff, Jean (1987): “The Madman and the Migrant: Work and Labor in Historical Consciousness of a South African People.” In: American Ethnologist 14/2, pp. 191-209. Connerton, Paul ([1989] 1995): How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dayan, Joan (1995): Haiti, History, and the Gods, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Fernandez, James W. (1986): Persuasions and Performances: the Play of Tropes in Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gilroy, Paul (1993): The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice ([1925] 1952): Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Harris, Michael D. (1999): “Departures and Returns: African Artists in the West.” In: Michael D. Harris (principal author), Transalantic Dialoque: Contemporary Art in and out of Africa, Chapel Hill: Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, pp. 10-31. Herskovits, Melville J. ([1941] 1958): The Myth of the Negro Past, Boston: Beacon. Herskovits, Melville J. ([1945] 1966): “Problem, Method and Theory in Afroamerican Studies.” In: Frances S. Herskovits (ed.): The New World Negro, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 43-61. Kubik, Gerhard (1979): Angolan Traits in Black Music, Games and Dances of Brazil: A Study of African Cultural Extensions Overseas, Lisbon:

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Junta de Investigações Científicas do Ultramar/Centro de Estudos de Antropologia Cultural. Lakoff, George/ Johnson, Mark (1980): Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, I.M. ([1971] 1989): Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. Lincoln, C. Eric ([1961] 1973): The Black Muslims in America, Rev. ed. Boston: Beacon. Malkki, Liisa H. (1995): Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Matory, J. Lorand (1999): “The English Professors of Brazil.” In: Comparative Studies in Society and History 41/1, pp. 72-103. Matory, J. Lorand ([1994] 2005): Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, originally University of Minnesota Press. Matory, J. Lorand (2005): Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Mintz, Sidney/Price, Richard ([1976] 1992): The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective, Boston: Beacon. Okediji, Moyọ (1999): “Returnee Recollections: Transatlantic transformations.” In: Michael D. Harris (principal author), Transatlantic Dialogue: Contemporary Art in and out of Africa, Chapel Hill: Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, pp.32-51. Ortiz, Fernando ([1906] 1973): Los negros brujos: Apuntes para un estudio de etnología criminal, La Habana: Ciencias Sociales. Ortiz, Fernando (1916): Hampa afro-cubana Los negros esclavos; estudio sociológico y de derecho público, La Habana: Revista bimestre cubana. Powdermaker, Hortense (1939): After Freedom: A Cultural Study of the Deep South, New York: The Viking Press Roach, Joseph (1996): Cities of the Dead: circum-Atlantic performance, New York: Columbia University Press. Rodrigues, Raimundo Nina ([1896/1900] 1935): O Animismo Fetishista dos Negros Bahianos, Rio Civilização Brasileira, published as a series of magazine articles in 1896 (in Revista Brasileira); publised as a single volume in French (L’animisme fétichiste des Nègres de Bahia) in 1900. Rush, Dana (1999): “Eternal Potential: Chromolithographs in Vodunland.” In: African Arts, Winter 1999, 32/4, pp. 60-75.

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Sutton, Felix/Vestal, H.B. (1959): Illustrated Book about Africa, New York: Grosset and Dunlap. Verger, Pierre ([1968] 1976): Trade Relations between the Bight of Benin and Bahia from the 17th to the 19th Century. Transl. Evelyn Crawford, Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press. Werbner, Richard (1998): “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory and Reinscription in Zimbabwe.” In: Richard Werbner (ed.); Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, London: Zed., pp.71-102. Yelvington, Kevin (ed.) (2006): Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press and Oxford: James Currey.

On Talking Past Each Other, Productively: Anthropology and the Black Atlantic, Twenty Years On S TEPHAN P ALMIÉ

Let me begin these reflections on the twentieth anniversary of Paul Gilroy’s book The Black Atlantic with some personal reminiscences about an event that occurred in the fall of 1989. 1 Fresh out of graduate school at the time, I was attending a conference on “Slavery in the Americas” held at a Franconian castle a few kilometers west of what was, at the time, the GermanGerman border. On the morning of November 9, I presented a rather anxious critique of Sidney Mintz and Richard Price’s essay An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past (1976). I say “anxious” because Mintz was one of the panelists at that conference, and because I presented a – however sympathetic – revision to what has come to be known as Mintz´s and Price’s “rapid early synthesis” or “creolization” model. What I argued was that while African cultural formations would not have survived the Middle Passage intact, Mintz and Price might well have underestimated the power of African models of consociation in shaping the historical and ethnographic realities of what became Afro-Atlantic societies – especially when, as was the case in Cuba, they came to inform institutional modes of social aggregation tolerated (or even provided) by the local colonial powers (Palmié 1993). Later that day in November 1989, there was a reception held by the French Embassy, which had sponsored parts of the event. Champagne was 1 An earlier version of this essay was presented at the CUNY Graduate Center conference “The Black Atlantic@20” October 24, 2013. My thanks go to its organizers Duncan Faherty and Kandice Chu. I also want to thank Yarimar Bonilla, Colin Dayan, and Michael Ralph for their comments and critique.

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flowing in unexpected quantities, and the chargé d’affaires gave a rousing speech that – despite (or because of) my Huguenot name – I didn’t understand. All I kept hearing was “le mur … le mur.” As it turned out, the Berlin Wall had fallen a few hours earlier, and everyone soon rushed off to the TVs in their hotel rooms, suddenly less interested in debating the history that slavery was than in observing the history that seemed to be unfolding before us. The conference eventually produced a fine volume, but it really was toast after that evening. By the time I drove back to Munich two days later, the highways were jammed with GDR Trabant cars streaming west. We all know the rest of the story. A world order of some duration and considerable consequence was to come to an end soon after, its spaces of experience transforming as its horizons of expectation dissipated into futures past (Koselleck 1985). As the Second World began to implode and the Cold War was coming to its end, one could sense the kind of triumphalism that would soon come to inform the capitalist millennial prophecies of the likes of Francis Fukuyama and (albeit with a different inflection) the clash-of-civilizations jeremiads of Samuel Huntington. Certainly, a dispensation in which “history” had become conceivable as a struggle between capitalist liberal democracies and their socialist totalitarian adversaries had ended. But might one not say that the histories of racism, unfreedom, and human resilience in the face of the terror and moral chaos of racial slavery that we reflected on back at that Franconian castle had all but come to an end? Once German reunification had been ratified less than a year later, it left some 55,000 Vietnamese, 12,000 Mozambican, 4,000 Cuban, and 1,000 Angolan contract workers and at least 10,000 students and trainees from former Socialist brother countries stranded in what had become the eastern states of the German Federal Republic (Howell 1994). Soon after – in September 1991 – the first in a series of deadly racist riots broke out. It was directed against just such marooned non-white Internationalist emissaries from socialist CMEA (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) member countries, and it proved not only how embarrassingly prone to racist violence the former citizens of the socialist GDR could be, or how scand-alously complicit the now-liberal democratic police force could become in such incidents, but also – and this is the point – to what degree the revenants of the inhuman past that inaugurated the dark and violent “Atlantic modernity” that stood at the center of our discussions of slavery back at that Franconian castle in 1989 were still haunting our present worlds.

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A few years later, The Black Atlantic was published, and it transformed my perspective on one of the most chilling diagnoses and denouncements of “modernity,” Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Perhaps this was because I now no longer read that Frankfurt School classic as a German, but rather as an anthropologist of the Caribbean: the region where – as C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Aimé Césaire, Fernando Ortiz, or Sidney Mintz had long argued – modernity (as we know it) made its first appearance. It did so not only in the form of astonishingly vast and complex agro-industrial factories in the field as early as the second half of the 16th century, but also in exemplifying what Horkheimer and Adorno called the “identity of domination and reason”: the calculated reduction of human beings to mere factors of production creatively destroyed in the service of what Marx mistakenly saw as “primitive accumulation” (there was nothing “primitive” about it!), with all the severance and annulment of moral ties and legal safeguards that modern, industrial racial slavery came to imply, and which might have made Caribbean sugar plantations a historically more appropriate staging ground for Giorgio Agamben’s argument about “bare life” (1998) than the modernity belatedly instantiated in the Nazi concentration camps. No British Industrial Revolution without West Indian slavery, says Eric Williams, correcting Marx’s fundamental error. Caribbean plantation slaves were the first truly modern people, asserts C.L.R. James. At the end of colonialism stands Hitler, adds Aimé Césaire. I would defend these propositions any time. But it was Paul Gilroy who specified the intellectual ground on which they could be defended – not the least, I would argue, by spelling out that the horrors of New World plantation slavery were decidedly neither a historical aberration nor a “special property” of the descendants of its victims. They were – and are – “part of the ethical and intellectual history of the West as a whole” (Gilroy 1993: 49). No need to express surprise at the thought that Newton, Locke, or even Montesquieu had monies in the slave trade. Nor could we pretend that they did not know what misery their metropolitan pursuit of rational self-interest wrought. “This, my dear gentlemen,” says the horribly mutilated slave who hobbles across Candide’s path in Suriname, “is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe.” Voltaire, like all the others, knew. The Black Atlantic also made me look at the results of my own ethnographic and archival work in a different light. It was Gilroy’s (1993: 55) call for “a primal history of modernity […] from the slaves’ point of view” to be reconstructed from the “traces of black intellectual history” indicative of a “counterculture of modernity” (Gilroy 1993: 55, 48) that led me to

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write my second book Wizards and Scientists. It also gave me the ammunition to defend its subtitle against Duke University Press’s marketing department. “Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition?” they wrote me. “Surely you mean Tradition and Modernity.” In reply, I once more rehearsed the argument at the core of that book – namely that what we today tend to label Afro-Cuban religious traditions not only grew out of a process of violent modernization but are also entirely coextensive with the modernity that the supposedly rational secular West claims for itself. The two came into being simultaneously, joined at the hip, as it were, and it is only the moment of disavowal, so characteristic of self-conscious “modernism,” that obscures this fact. This, of course, holds equally true for the kind of modernism that underwrites a romantic, arguably primitivist, and certainly North American Afrocentricity that succeeded the mid-20th century Pan-Africanist moment – objectifying “Africa” in its celebrations of “origins” rather than engaging contemporary political realities on a truly Atlantic let alone planetary scale (cf. Edwards 2001). A word about the trope of “tradition” is in order here. In The Black Atlantic, this trope largely figures in a manner akin to Reinhard Koselleck’s (1985) argument that modernity has always needed its “asymmetrical counterconcept” of tradition in order to perform the labor of the negative. Gilroy appears to vacillate on the issue, occasionally deploying the term “the changing same,” which, of course, harks back to LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1963). Rather more often, however, he falls back on modernistic construals of it as the seemingly static, essentialist foil against which modernity’s progress might be assessed. This, however, is only one way to mobilize the term. There is also Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1978) version of “tradition,” which is extracted from its shopworn Hegelian context, and repurposed to designate more or less localized, more or less extensive, and certainly all but internally homogeneous, let alone conflict-free, “long conversations”: a chain of practical and discursive engagements whose participants need agree only on the ethical and moral worth of keeping the debate alive. This is what I tried to excavate more than a decade ago in analyzing the case of José Antonio Aponte, an early 19th century free Afro-Cuban artisan, visionary artist, and, I would add, critical theorist who became implicated in what the Spanish colonial authorities – and many scholars today – regard as a conspiracy of major proportions (Palmié 2002). When the police raided his workshop in 1812, they found not only a library that he had painstakingly assembled over many years but also a mysterious “book of images” he had produced himself. Partly painted and written by hand,

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partly consisting of collages assembled from images cut from books and other sources, the book appeared to contain pictures of the fortifications of Havana that – or so the Spanish colonial authorities thought – might represent an ingeniously encoded master plan of the conspiracy. The fact that Aponte had a small gallery of New World revolutionary heroes in his workshop – Toussaint, Dessalines, Jean-Christophe, and George Washington – didn’t help him either. And so they sat down with him for five days in March of 1812 and had him flip through page after page and explain the contents, before rushing him off to the gallows without giving him so much as a trial. For all we know, the book was destroyed along with its creator in the storm of violence unleashed by the colonial regime. But the lengthy record of Aponte’s deposition survives, and the young Chilean anthropologist Jorge Pávez Ojéda, who has produced the best transcription so far (cf. Pávez Ojéda 2006), the Harvard art historian Linda Rodríguez, and I are currently working to come up with a critical edition that will not only establish the astounding extent of Aponte’s erudition but also assign him a rightful place in the subaltern counter-traditions of modernity that Gilroy alerted us to. This is not the occasion to delve into the details of what Aponte chose to tell his interrogators, but it is clear that – much like his contemporary artisan-visionary William Blake – Aponte was railing against a violent Atlantic modernity dawning at the time, and did so in much of the same way: by fusing into a coherent counterhegemonic vision an eclectic array of Western learning available to him (Greek and Roman mythology, Renaissance emblematics, sources on the grandeur of Egypt and Abyssinia, Baroque allegoricism, etc.). I have been chided for arguing a decade ago that it doesn’t matter whether Aponte was or wasn’t implicated in any real or merely imagined anticolonial, anti-slavery conspiracy on both factual (Childs 2009) and theoretical (Buck-Morss 2009) grounds. I still don’t think it matters, particularly when it comes to what one might call the insurrection of subjugated knowledge that Aponte had most certainly aimed to incite. Perhaps we can agree that Aponte anticipated Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987) in both method and message by a good 150 years. At any rate, the most decisive answer that Aponte ever gave to the question of why he went through the trouble of producing the book clearly betrayed what Nicholas Dirks (1990) called “the sign of the modern”: “for reasons of History” is what Aponte said. But having elaborated on The Black Atlantic’s impact on my own work, let me now say a few words about its role in shaping the regional subfield

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of the discipline that I inhabit. More so, perhaps, than any other scholarly book since the publication of Melville J. Herskovits’ Myth of the Negro Past in 1941, and Sidney Mintz and Richard Price’s An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past in 1976, Gilroy’s book would seem to have altered the terms of debate in regard to the anthropology of African-American societies and cultures. Surprisingly, however, apart from a plethora of citations, a few critiques on matters of principle, 2 and some rather more specific gripes about Gilroy’s exclusion of Africa from the Black Atlantic’s purview, 3 anthropologists have not really engaged The Black Atlantic as a source of theoretical insights that might be operationalized in ethnographically-based work. At least at first glance, this is quite remarkable, given that literary scholars such as Joan Dayan (1996), Louis Chude-Sokei (1996), and Laura Chrisman (1997), as well as political scientists like Neil Lazarus (1995) offered harsh criticism of Gilroy’s book early on. All of them, in one way or another, converged on the issue of Gilroy’s aestheticization of the political – a point that was, again rather surprisingly, appreciated (if in a somewhat different manner) by only one of Gilroy’s early anthropological critics, Brackette Williams (1995). To be sure, part of the reason why anthropologists seem to have failed to systematically engage Gilroy’s Black Atlantic may well lie in its success in impacting a much wider field of scholarship, particularly the forms of text and media-based criticism that sail under the label of Cultural Studies and that were rapidly gaining institutional ground at the time. Especially in its American versions that uneasily fused Geertzian hermeneutics with a poststructuralist politics of representation (rather than Althusser with Gramsci, as in the British case), Cultural Studies tended to elicit rather allergic reactions among anthropologists back then, and still do so to this day. 4 This is a fairly trite point, however. To my mind, it would be far more interesting to make the argument that Gilroy’s insistence on categories of movement, instability, and non-linearity in delineating the contours of the analytical field he called “the Black Atlantic” coincided rather too well with some of the concerns of an anthropology recently awakened from a prolonged epistemological slumber (Mintz 1996; 1998) and rudely confronted not only with multiple modernities but also with pervasive and often historically old forms of translocal social 2 See Williams (1995); Scott (1997); Chivallon (2001); Yelvington (2001); Palmié (2002); and Nassy Brown (2005).

3 See, e.g., Piot (2001); Matory (2005). 4 Cf. Turner (1993); Sahlins (2002); and the 1996 Manchester GDAT (Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory) volume edited by Wade (1997).

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imaginaries and fields of action that fly in the face of anything we previously considered appropriate units of ethnographic analysis. 5 Gilroy, of course, had been paying attention to the ferment brewing in the social sciences during the tumultuous 1980s, when (American) anthropologists found themselves grappling both with the belated impact of dependency and world systems theory upon their disciplinary practices, and with the so-called crisis of representation in the empirically based social sciences more generally. The irony in all of this is patent: at a time when our colleagues discovered the value of (indiscriminate) conceptual borrowing as a means to rejuvenate our discipline’s mission, others (Gilroy among them) had already been busying themselves writing about just such matters. Even a cursory look at the anthropological mots du jour in the early 1990s will bear this out. Take “transnationalism,” a concept, remember, pioneered in business schools across the capitalist West to characterize corporate entities beyond national taxation and jurisdiction long before it entered anthropology’s purview; “globalization,” a creation of First World post-WWII political science as a counterpoint to Soviet “Internationalism;” “creolization,” a linguistic concept misappropriated by the late 1980s to designate cultural mixture; “syncretism,” the subject of Christian theological boundary maintenance for a good millennium; and “mestizaje,” a concept as old as the hills in its Hispanic American context of germination, and only adopted into our disciplinary jargon after it had been re-purposed by literary theorists such as Gloria Anzaldua. Whether in the writings of James Clifford (1988), Ulf Hannerz (1987), Roland Robertson (1992), Arjun Appadurai (1990), James Ferguson, and Akhil Gupta (1992), to mention only a few names – household ones by now – anthropologists and other social scientists appeared so much in tune with what Gilroy argued that the specifics of his contribution simply fell by the wayside: The Black Atlantic merely seemed to confirm what we had already begun to know. 6 Yet, if all this had begun to dawn upon anthropologists working in “classical” ethnographic localities in the years immediately preceding the publication of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, then consider another irony: African-Americanist anthropologists had faced such problems all along. From its very inception at 5 See Kearney (1995) for an early overview. 6 Ask your colleagues today what the phrase “Black Atlantic” brings to their minds and you will see: the concept has come to be taken for granted to such a degree that its original content no longer matters much. It has, and I regret having to say this, all too often degenerated into a mere slogan, a brand name for a certain kind of scholarship, or, perhaps even more problematically, as Edwards (2001) eloquently pointed out, into a synonym for the “African Diaspora” (cf. Zeleza 2005).

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the turn of the twentieth century in the work of pioneers like Raymundo Nina Rodrigues or Fernando Ortiz, the central problematic of this field of inquiry was defined in terms that transcended, and thereby bound, vast geographical and temporal expanses. What they initially set out to explain was the existence, within their own societies, of modes of thought and behavior that appeared too alien, too obviously tied to a history of forced transatlantic mass migration to be written off as locally bred forms of deviance from the cultural norms of the respective postcolonial elites. It was, of course, Melville Herskovits who first systematized such early glances across the Atlantic into a coherent, though theoretically and methodologically naïve, research agenda. He did so by fusing the concept of culture areas with the historicism of its philological precursor theories, thereby imparting African-American anthropology with an epistemological orientation that David Scott (1991; 1997) has rightfully critiqued as a theoretically stale and politically dubious “verificationism” working to (often unilaterally) authorize ab-original “roots” instead of investigating truly historical “routes.” Thus, if African-Americanist anthropology may be said to have genuinely anticipated contemporary forms of translocal theory and even produced “multi-sited ethnographies,” it did so in a fashion that most of us would nowadays dismiss as crudely mechanistic and ahistorical. What in the world might commend a regional sub-field where Tylorian notions of cultural “survivals” survived into the last third of the twentieth century? And which did so, we might add, not only in the writings of post-Herskovitsian academic originseekers (such as Africanist historians like Paul Lovejoy or John Thornton), but also among the academic and non-academic proponents of what Gilroy excoriated as “absolutist” agendas investing heteronormative and ethnoracially redemptive virtues in an “African Past” that is as modern in origin as the symptoms of racist domination its proponents aim to counteract! 7 Here, The Black Atlantic unquestionably broke new ground. Gilroy’s disruption of any simple linear historical relation between African and AfricanAmerican cultures, his polemic against any search for “roots,” and his call for an epistemology aiming to trace “routes” of intercontinental movement and cultural exchange posed – and still poses – a powerful challenge to the

7 Like it or not, the US “Afrocentrism” that Gilroy railed against is arguably no less a stream of the composite countermodernity he is concerned with than the histories of English working class resistance recounted by his British New Left social history precursors, who Gilroy critiqued for their insularity – or, for that matter, than the chauvinistic origins of American Pan-Africanism (Adeleke 1998).

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anthropology of African-American cultures. 8 Arguing that the demographic, economic, and cultural flows (and counterflows) between Africa, the Americas, and Europe represented the initial focus and fulcrum of the emergence of Western “modernity,” Gilroy urged the recuperation of a “countermodernity” that arose among enslaved Africans and that has since become a template for a set of increasingly global processes of cultural and ideological production that an anthropology of capitalist modernity can ill afford to ignore. Yet in contrast to Gilroy, who was content with tracing out the contours of such a “countermodernity” in the writings of Black American intellectuals and artists, we might not only be able to probe the validity of such conceptions in an ethnographic manner but also more effectively address critiques about the peculiarly parochial nature of his original formulation. Of course, Gilroy never claimed to have provided more than a heuristic metaphor. But as many of his critics have charged – not altogether unjustly – the “tenor” of that metaphor remained strongly inflected by Gilroy’s engagement with Anglophone and particularly US AfricanAmericanist scholarship, and so to some degree undermined its own goal to destabilize “rooted” epistemological positionalities. The job of remedying this, however, should be ours. Rather than bickering about the limitations of The Black Atlantic (and with 20 years of hindsight, at that!), it behooves us to explore the continued salience of Gilroy’s contribution by foregrounding epistemological vantage points that remained peripheral to his original account. What might the “Black Atlantic” look like when viewed not from South London or New Haven but, say, from Dakar, Kinshasa, or Cape Town, Salvador de Bahia, Cartagena, or Buenos Aires, Havana, Paramaribo, or Port-au-Prince, or, indeed, Amsterdam, Moscow, Lisbon, or Berlin? The question strikes me as all but trivial, and some answers have already emerged.

8 This is equally evident in the discipline of history, where an earlier focus on “Atlantic Studies” (Bailyn 1996) came to converge with a principally salutary move on the part of Africanist historians to belatedly occupy themselves with Africa’s diaspora (see Armitage 2002 for an astute review of “Atlanticism” within his discipline). I will cite some examples of such scholarship in what follows. But it should be noted that few such historians claim – or even give credit to – Gilroy’s work as a source of inspiration. Even one of the more balanced reviews of this literature (Chambers 2008: 157) thus apparently finds little to recommend in “Gilroy’s conception of the subject [i.e. the Black Atlantic] as a sociology of late modernism, a sort of hyper-hybridity,” seeing it as “at odds with much of the historical work since then” [emphasis in the original] – which in some instances might be seen as an attempt to “re-root” what Gilroy “routed.”

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Over the past two decades, diverse “Atlantics” have proliferated: Francophone and Lusophone ones that embrace not just, say, Senegal, Martinique, Angola, or Brazil, but that spill over into the Pacific to Mozambique and Reunion as well. Work on colonial Latin American metropoles – such as Herman Bennett’s (2005) work on 17th century Mexico City – has revealed circuits of identity formation and solidarity that evolved along trajectories of movement crisscrossing between Seville, Lisbon, the Canary Islands, slave trading entrepôts such as Cape Verde, Luanda, or São Tome, and the cities of New Spain. My own work on José Antonio Aponte (Palmié 2002) shows a world vision that had Abyssinia, Egypt, Rome, Madrid, Havana, the United States, and revolutionary Haiti as its cardinal points. Thanks to Robert A. Hill’s (1983-2011) indefatigable labors, today we can speak of a – however contradictory – Garveyite Atlantic that reached from Newark and London to Kingston, Santiago de Cuba, Panama City, Monrovia, Freetown, and the mining districts of South Africa. Garvey’s Afro-Orientalist contemporaries, for example Noble Drew Ali, Rabbi Arnold Josiah Ford, and Elijah Muhammad – and later Malcolm X – inserted Palestine and Mecca into the picture (Dorman 2013). Neither was the rise of such “Black Atlantics” confined to New World diasporic situations. Surely, the self-consciously Afro-Portuguese communities that arose in Senegambia as early as the 16th century (Brooks 1993; 2003; Mark 2002) inhabited a “Black Atlantic” of sorts, as did the ethnically heterogeneous coastal African “gurmetes” and “crewmen,” some of whom came to belatedly indigenize in Liberia under the ethnonym “Kru” (Brooks 1972, Martin 1985). As the fragments of the late 18th century diary of the Efik slave trader Antera Duke (Forde 1956) or the letters written by his colleagues to their British counterparts (Lovejoy/Richardson 2001) show, the cosmopolitan merchant elites of Old Calabar were keenly aware that Liverpool and Barbados were part of their “world.” Indeed, what Mamadou Diouf (2000) calls the vernacular cosmopolitanism of the Murid Brotherhood’s far-flung trading networks might be taken to constitute a “Black Atlantic” countermodernity that belongs in this category of Black Atlantics arising on, or emanating from, the African continent itself. And just as the Jamaican Maroons zealously guard the British charter of their independence against the Jamaican state’s claim to sovereignty over them (Bilby 1997), so too have the horrors of the Sierra Leonean civil war apparently prompted members of the former Freetown Krio elite to cast glances westwards across the waters from where some of their ancestors once returned to the African homeland (Knörr 2011). Few, if any, of these countermodernities, were unreflective ones – of this we can be certain.

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And here a (however parenthetical) note on the predication “counter” in Gilroy’s phrase “counterculture of modernity” might be in order. As someone who cannot help but conduct his research under the long shadow cast by Cuba’s formidable ethnographer and polymath Fernando Ortiz, I have always preferred to read Gilroy’s notion of such a culture in a contrapuntal, rather than merely antithetical, way. Not to put too fine a dialectical point on it, but as my last two examples may make clear, the “modernities” cooked up in Europe and its elsewhere were cut from the same cloth, and indeed they “made each other”: an “Atlantic Counterpoint,” in don Fernando’s sense (Ortiz 1947), that was layered in culturally polyphonic discord and harmony, and polyrhythmic temporalities rather than structured by mere antiphony. A second note of concern I want to sound here pertains to the predicate “Black” and its role in the discursive economy established by the reception of Gilroy’s book. Gilroy himself never minced words when it came to arguing against racial essentialisms. Yet the way in which his contribution has, at times, been taken up betrays considerable nonchalance when it comes to the question of what is (or isn’t) “Black” about the Black Atlantic. This occurs to such a degree that “African origins” sometimes appear to uncannily return as a geobiological determinant of membership in such an Atlantic. This tendency is particularly striking among historians (e.g. Chambers 2008), who, while admirably detailing the intercultural complexities involved, nonetheless imply that the “Atlantic” under study is one staffed by people variously and variably regarded as “African” or “Black” (whether on genealogical or phenotypical grounds, or both). But what could these terms possibly have meant to the actors whose lives these scholars chronicle? We can be sure that few of the human beings violently abducted from the African continent ever thought of themselves as “Black,” let alone as “Africans,” before such horrible fates befell them (Palmié 2008). I have no quibbles at all with Gilroy’s original formulation of the Black Atlantic as a historically traceable “structure of feeling” determined by what DuBois (1997) diagnosed as “double consciousness,” and analytically mobilized to hasten what Stuart Hall (1996) called “the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject.” But for precisely that reason I would take issue with the – all too common – reduction of the Black Atlantic to an academic vehicle for the unthinking and commonsensical reproduction of the kind of American “racecraft” that Karen and Barbara Fields (2012) have so eloquently denounced. I cannot do justice to the issue in the space allotted to me here. So let me just say that I would side anytime with J.A. Rogers (1972), who argued that the question of who a Black person is (and is not) must remain unanswerable except on the grounds of locally and historically particular structures of

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domination and exclusion, as well as solidarity and hope, at work in any (or every) specifiable instance. With that in mind, let me cast the net even more broadly and controversially, and mention work in Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitorial archives – such as that of Luiz de Barros Mott (1988) and James Sweet (1996) – that has brought to light what we (using anachronistic language) could call a multiracial but still conspicuously Black “queer Atlantic” – not only among sailors, soldiers, and buccaneers, but also among masters, slaves, and freed people, as well as urban prostitutes (male and female) and their multifarious clients. At least in the Iberian Americas, the contours of such an Atlantic became visible in the record once they were hauled before the Inquisition for charges of “sodomy.” Residues of such an Atlantic might survive in the female homoerotic relationships known in Suriname as “mati” (Wekker 2006) – the very same term, we should note, that fellow sufferers during the Middle Passage to Suriname gave to shipmate companions of the same sex, and that Mintz and Price once interpreted as the kernel of African-American kinship systems. We should probably count James Baldwin and poor Bayart Rustin among the denizens of such a queer Atlantic. And the disputes between J. Lorand Matory (2005; 2008) and Oyewumi Oyerunke (1997) about gender in Yorubaland and Brazil might be taken to speak to its continued existence. Even “Red Atlantics” have come into sight, as in the work of Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh (Linebaugh 1982; Linebaugh/Rediker 2000; cf. Redker 2004), who trace the scant indications of a multihued “Atlantic” (rather than “national”) conglomerate of revolutionary traditions across the antagonistic archives of the 18th and 19th century Anglophone Atlantic basin.9 But what I have in mind here is a literalization of their ex-post-facto metaphor in the short-lived – and now explicitly “red,” i.e. Socialist – Atlantics (Dorsch 2011) that emerged during the Cold War years and came to revolve around Havana, Moscow, East Berlin, or even Beijing, with peripheries, in turn, centered on (e.g.) Manely’s Kingston, Nyerere’s Dar es Salaam, Burnham’s Georgetown, Ortega’s Managua, Bishop’s St. George’s, or Neto’s Luanda. These were social and intellectual constellations constituted by the flows of Internationalist exchange that came to such sorry ends after the events with

9 The question this literature aims to address is perhaps best formulated by Linebaugh (1982), who notes that the seeming hiatus in the English radical tradition between the second half of the 17th century and the 1790s can be solved by looking towards the Atlantic (to which England exported much of its domestic malcontents, and where its colonies bred not only new miseries but also new forms of agitation).

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which I began this essay, and they have yet to be adequately explored. Still, let’s not forget here what a kick Langston Hughes got out of joining a Soviet work brigade in picking cotton – if not in Stalin’s homeland, the People’s Republic of Georgia, then in the USSR’s Deep South of Uzbekistan (Moore 1996; 2002), which, we might note, was not far from the site of a major center of historical African displacement in Abkhazia (Fikes/Lemon 2002). 10 Let us also not forget that some Cubans to this day think (not entirely wrongly, I would argue) that their troops drove a decisive nail into Apartheid’s coffin by routing South Africa’s army in the battle of Cueto Canavale. Some, I should say. Others who nowadays find themselves confined to Havana’s crumbling Soviet-style high-rise slums of Alamar deplore Cuba’s revolutionary investments in such Internationalist missions. Yet others, like one of my oldest friends on the island (let’s call him Pablo), one of the very few Cubans ever sent to study anthropology in the Soviet Union, will reminisce with wistful bemusement about the four years of his youth he spent as a “cherny” (Black person) at the University of Leningrad. But he will also talk with shame, anger, and profound sadness about his involvement in classified research in war-torn Angola’s Mbwila province, and in eastern Cuba, where he was subsequently sent to conduct ethnographic research in preparation of the flooding of several villages to secure the electrical supply driving Cuba’s progress towards Socialism. Pablo, who regards himself as a descendant of carabalí slaves and Canarian immigrants, is now an initiated practitioner of regla de ocha, an Afro-Cuban religion that has been hailed by some as an incipient “world religion” (Olupona/Rey 2008). As such, he is a veteran of several temporally and spatially overlapping – all the while distinctly contradictory, even antagonistic – “Atlantics”: Red, Black, and neoYoruba. Pablo lives in a house that, in a prior Atlantic dispensation, was built by Standard Oil for its refinery workers (and might, in the future, be repossessed by its corporate heirs). I once talked Pablo into recording a life history. He agreed, but broke down in tears after a few hours, and I let it go. How astounding then (or not!) that Lioba Rossbach de Olmos’s (2009) interviews with the pioneers spreading Afro-Cuban religiosity to Germany yielded several stories that reached back well into the GDR past, when her oricha-worshipping interlocutors were originally recruited to socialist Internationalist missions as students and contract workers. Like many others, they got stranded in Central Europe once the “Red Atlantic” they had been part of fell 10 And which was right around the time when the CPUSA (Communist Party of the United States of America) endorsed Stalinist nationality policies as a solution to “The Negro Question” (Foster 1947)!

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apart as a geopolitical – and socially inhabitable – historical formation.11 Their trajectories, in most instances, seemed the opposite of my friend Pablo’s: from the clandestine practice of Afro-Cuban religion under GDR-surveillance (some of them got busted and even sent back) to inhabiting what we, with a nod to Appadurai (1990), might call an emergent post-socialist global orichascape – yet another Atlantic of sorts, and one that has increasingly become web-borne (Palmié 2013). To be sure, the terms on which some such “Atlantics” – in reality, worlds with their own coordinates of experience and expectations – had once been imaginable are “futures past” by now. To some of these futures we rightly ought to wish good riddance. But perhaps we ought to mourn some of them too. If we, to some degree or other, are all “conscripts of modernity,” as David Scott (2004) has put it, “leftist” (let alone “postcolonial”) “melancholia” is nonetheless the mood to resist in going forward. One way to do so is to engage in not just critical but rigorously self-reflexive scholarship on the “Atlantics” that may be emerging right in front of our eyes – whether in new readings of the archive or among our ethnographic interlocutors. If the concept of a Black Atlantic still has traction, and I think it does, then it is because it alerts us to the scripting forward of the “tradition” that it bespeaks, and so prods us to attend to the ongoing transformations of the spaces of experience and horizons of expectations this tradition keeps generating. Whether or not – and to whatever extent – we agree with Gilroy’s initial formulation, we are indebted to him for that.

11 This is now merely a curious footnote to an untold story of geopolitical speech acts rendered infelicitous by future events, but in 1972, on the occasion of Comandante Fidel Castro’s visit to East Berlin, Cuba renamed an islet in the Bay of Pigs in honor of one of East Germany’s revered communist ancestors, Ernst Thälmann. By 2001, it seemed to have dawned on some citizens of reunited Germany that Castro’s gesture could have constituted a cessation of the island, and so possibly might enhance the Federal Republic of Germany with the claim to a Caribbean island dependency: a however uninhabited and desolate part of a post-Fascist German Atlantic (even Thälmann’s 12-foot tall statue was gone by then, blown away by Hurricane Mitch). See “DDR unter Palmen,” July 19, 2012 (http://einestages.spiegel.de/s/tb/25061/1/ernst-thaelmann-insel-fidel-castrossymbolisches-geschenk-an-die-ddr.html, accessed November 29, 2013).

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Hannerz, Ulf (1987): “The World in Creolization.” In: Africa 67, pp. 546-59. Hill, Robert A. (ed.) (1983-2011): The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, Berkeley: University of California Press. Horkheimer, Max/Adorno, Theodor W. (1972): Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Herder and Herder. Howell, Jude (1994): “The End of an Era: The Rise and Fall of G.D.R. Aid.” In: The Journal of Modern African Studies 32, pp. 305-328. Jones, Leroi (Amiri Baraka) (1963): Blues People, New York: Morrow. Kearney, Michael (1995): “The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism.” In: Annual Review of Anthropology 24, pp. 547-565. Knörr, Jacqueline (2011): “Das Coming-Out der Diaspora als Heimat. Kreolische Identität in Sierra Leones Nachkriegsgesellschaft.” In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 136, pp. 331-356. Koselleck, Reinhart (1985): Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Cambridge: MIT Press. Lazarus, Neil (1995): “Is a Counterculture of Modernity a Theory of Modernity?” In: Diaspora 4, pp. 323-339. Linebaugh, Peter (1982): “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook.” In: Labour/Le Travail 10, pp. 87-121. Linebaugh, Peter/Rediker, Marcus (2000): The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Boston: Beacon Press. Lovejoy, Paul/Richardson, David (2001): “Letters of the Old Calabar Slave Trade, 1760-1789.” In: Vincent Carretta/Philip Gould (eds.), Genius in Bondage. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, pp. 89-115. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1978): After Virtue, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Mark, Peter (2002): “Portuguese” Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Martin, Jane (1995): “Krumen ‘Down the Coast’: Liberian Migrants on the West African Coast in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries.” In: International Journal of African Historical Studies 18, pp. 401-423. Matory, J. Lorand (2005): Black Atlantic Religion, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Matory, J. Lorand (2008): “Is there Gender in Yorùbá Culture?” In: Jacob K. Olupona/Terry Rey (eds.), Òrìşà Devotion as World Religion, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 513-558.

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Mintz, Sidney W. (1996): “Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: The Caribbean Region as Oikumene.” In: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, pp. 289-311. Mintz, Sidney W. (1998): “The Localization of Anthropological Practice: From Area Studies to Transnationalism.” In: Critique of Anthropology 18, pp. 117-133. Mintz, Sidney W./Price, Richard (1976): An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective, Philadelphia: ISHI. Moore, David Chioni (1996): “Local Color, Global ‘Color’: Langston Hughes, the Black Atlantic, and Soviet Central Asia, 1932.” In: Research in African Literatures 27, pp. 49-70. Moore, David Chioni (2002): “Langston Hughes 1902-1967: Colored Dispatches From the Uzbek Border.” In: Callaloo 25, pp. 1115-1135. Olupona, Jacob K./Rey, Terry (2008): “Introduction.” In: Jacob K. Olupona/Terry Rey (eds.), Òrìşà Devotion as World Religion, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 3-28. Oyeronke, Oyewumi (1997): The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Palmié, Stephan (1993): “Ethnogenetic Processes and Cultural Transfer in Afro-American Slave Populations.” In: Wolfgang Binder (ed.), Slavery in the Americas, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, pp. 337-363. Palmié, Stephan (2002): Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in AfroCuban Modernity and Tradition, Durham: Duke University Press. Palmié, Stephan (2013): The Cooking of History: How Not to Study AfroCuban Religion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pávez Ojéda, Jorge (2006): “Texto, conspiración y clase: El Libro de Pinturas y la política de la historia en el caso Aponte.” In: Anales de Desclasificación 1, pp. 665-772. Piot, Charles (2001): “Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic.” In: South Atlantic Quarterly 100, pp. 155-170. Rediker, Marcus (2004): “The Red Atlantic; or, a Terrible Blast Swept over the Heaving Sea.” In: Bernhard Klein/Gesa Mackenthun (eds.), Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, New York: Routledge, pp. 111-130. Robertson, Roland (1992): Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, London: Sage. Rogers, Joel A. (1972) [1946]): World’s Greatest Men of Color, London: Collier Macmillan.

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Rossbach de Olmos, Lioba (2009): “Santería Abroad: The Short History of an Afro-Cuban Religion in Germany by Means of Biographies of Some of Its Priests.” In: Anthropos 104, pp. 1-15. Sahlins, Marshall (2002): Waiting for Foucault, Still, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Scott, David (1991): “That Event, This Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World.” In: Diasporas 1, pp. 261284. Scott, David (1997): “An Obscure Miracle of Connection: Discursive Tradition and Black Diaspora Criticism.” In: Small Axe 1, pp. 19-38. Scott, David (2004): Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Durham: Duke University Press. Sweet, James H. (1996): “Male Homosexuality and Spiritism in the African Diaspora: The Legacies of a Link.” In: Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, pp. 184-202. Turner, Terence (1993): “Anthropology and Multiculturalism: What Is Anthropology that Multiculturalists Should Be Mindful of It?” In: Cultural Anthropology 8, pp. 411-429. Wade, Peter (ed.) (1997): Cultural Studies Will Be the Death of Anthropology, University of Manchester: Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory. Wekker, Gloria (2006): The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora. New York: Columbia University Press. Williams, Brackette (1995): “Black Atlantic – Review.” In: Social Identities 1, pp. 175-192. Yelvington, Kevin A. (2001): “The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean: Diasporic Dimensions.” In: Annual Review of Anthropology 30, pp. 227-260. Zeleza, Paul Tijambe (2005): “Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic.” In: African Affairs 104, pp. 35-68.

Trans-Atlantic Educational Crossroads: Experiences of Mozambican Students in Cuba 1 H AUKE D ORSCH

Strolling through Maputo’s streets at an early stage of the Southern African part of my research on African students in Cuba, I was addressed by a young man, who asked me if I spoke English. He explained to me that he worked in import and export and traveled between South Africa and Mozambique, and he wondered if I was South African. When I answered that I came from Germany, the conversation immediately switched to German, and he explained that he had lived in Germany for some time and had family there. Then he asked whether I was a tourist in Mozambique, and I told him about my research. Again he switched languages, this time 1

This contribution is the shortened and revised version of an article published in the special issue of Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Vol. 136, No. 2, 2011, which focuses on Afro-Atlantic alliances, edited by Heike Drotbohm and Ingrid Kummels (Dorsch 2011). Research for this contribution was conducted in the context of the SFB/FK 560 at the University of Bayreuth and its research group on South-South relations, directed by Katrin Hansing. We focused on CubanAfrican collaborations in the fields of education and medicine. Katrin Hansing worked with Cuban doctors who went on missions to different African countries or who, at the time of our research, still resided in Mozambique and South Africa, whereas I spoke with students from a number of African countries who today study in Cuba, as well as with returnees in South Africa and Mozambique who went to school or university in Cuba at some time during the past four decades. We conducted our research in Cuba, Mozambique, and South Africa together, which is why I will often write of “us” when referring to fieldwork. Furthermore, I would like to stress that the following arguments benefited greatly from our discussions on these subjects. Research took place in Cuba from September 2004 to March 2005, and in Mozambique and South Africa from August 2005 to March 2006. See Hansing/Dorsch (2005); Dorsch (2008a, 2008b).

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explaining in Spanish with an obvious Cuban accent that he had studied for several years in Cuba. In the weeks to come, Miguel 2 would tell me his life history, which exemplifies the role of agency in the Afro-Atlantic world. Miguel, born in 1969 in a small town to the North of Maputo, lost his father at an early age. He lived a not-too-happy life in rural Mozambique with only little support from his sister’s family. One day he was told in school about the possibility to study in Cuba, and he decided that he would seize this opportunity for a free education. In 1985, at the age of 16, he was chosen to be sent to the Isla de la Juventud, the Isle of Youth, to complete his secondary education in one of the four schools for Mozambicans built on that small island that was a few kilometers south of mainland Cuba. He soon became annoyed by the rigid discipline of the school, and after some conflicts with his professors he decided to leave the school and try to make a living on the main island. He traveled to Havana, slept in the streets, made friends with some Cubans, camouflaged as an inhabitant of Cuba’s Oriente province (famous in Cuba for its high percentage of Afro-Cubans), and got himself a fake ID card that would allow him to move freely in Havana. He survived as what could be called a hustler, that is, he illegally sold goods to tourists, and went shopping for Cubans who at the time were not allowed to enter “dollar stores” – those stores were accessible to him due to his foreign student identity card. He lived an exciting life in Havana and Varadero, and made friends with other hustlers and petty criminals until the police finally caught him and identified him as a foreign student. He was expelled from Cuba and sent back to Mozambique. After only half a year of indecision in Maputo, he took the chance to get onto a flight to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) by pretending that he had finished his education in Cuba and was thus prepared to work in the GDR. As it turned out, the work was quite menial, so he had no problem doing it without the formal education he was supposed to have received in Cuba. To his pleasure, he discovered that he had Cuban co-workers. Together they partied and dreamed of Cuba. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he moved from East to West Berlin, then to Bavaria, and married a German woman and had a child with her. Some years later, the relationship ended, which was why he left his wife and child and went to work in South Africa. He now travels constantly between South Africa and Mozambique. Back in Maputo, he enjoyed his friendships with Cubans and other Latin Americans living in Mozambique. He listened to Cuban music and played it as a DJ at Cuban 2 Miguel is a pseudonym.

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parties, and he practiced his Spanish and cultivated his nostalgia for Cuba. Although his biography may not be what Mozambican and Cuban officials anticipated when they designed educational exchanges between the two countries, he leads a successful trans-Atlantic life – and when asked about his desires, he said that he desperately wanted to see his family in Germany, but more than anything else he longed to go back to Cuba. This was more than just a situation every field researcher dreams of, i.e., instead of seeking out your informants, they actually approach you. Additionally, Miguel’s story turned out to be interesting for its statesponsored, seemingly well-organized, but nevertheless surprising transAtlantic trajectories, which is why I chose his biography as the starting point for this contribution, which discusses the negotiations of identity and social position of Mozambicans engaged in education and careers between Maputo and Havana. This paper will briefly introduce Cuban-African relations after the Cuban Revolution, and will look at the experiences of Mozambican students in Cuba in the 1970s and 80s, as well as at their reintegration in Mozambique. In order not to overemphasize Miguel’s agency, I will show that agency was severely constrained by institutional contexts. I will therefore describe the context of how the students were selected, sent abroad, assigned their subjects, sent back home, and finally integrated into the work force – or how the state failed to integrate them into the work force. It is mainly at this point of return that Mozambican students’ agency and identity comes into play. 3 So far, trans-Atlantic crossings have been associated with other stories than that of Miguel. The Middle Passage – the forced transportations of millions of Africans to the Americas – continues to be the first point of reference when thinking of the African Diaspora. However, for nearly two decades the Afro-Atlantic has been imagined not only as a space of cruel suffering but also a sphere of intellectual and cultural exchange, especially between musicians, authors, and other travelers from Africa and its diaspo3

As this study focuses on the special situation of Mozambican and other African students in Cuba and the formers’ return to Mozambique, the general questions concerning the influence of globalization on education, although important in this context, cannot be discussed here. Suffice to say that there are a growing number of studies on the migration of academics , on the global character of academia, and on the ideas of global standards of education and a growing commercialisation of universities (Stichweh 2000; Meyer/Ramirez 2000; Hayes/ Wynyard 2002; Meyer 2005). With regard to the influence of globalization on Cuban universities, see Vázquez Castro/Dominguez Menéndez (2002).

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ra. Paul Gilroy’s “The Black Atlantic” (1993) marked an important turning point in the conceptualization of the Afro-Atlantic world, inspiring discussions in the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, history, and literary studies, which have now also come to include the Pacific and Indian Oceans (Dorsch 2000; Lovejoy/Trotman 2003; Goebel/Schabio 2006; Rossbach de Olmos 2009). Gilroy describes the culture of the Black Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity, expressed in literature and popular music, which is, due to the experience of slavery, skeptical of the Western promises of freedom and progress, including Marxist ideas of the liberating character of labor. However, Gilroy’s Black Atlantic is not focused on slavery, and his discussion of the African diaspora is decisively antiessentialist and skeptical of Afrocentric nostalgia. For him, ships serve as metaphors for a historiography that is not constrained by nations and borders. He describes those ships that carried not only slaves but also traveling intellectuals, musicians, and seamen from all shores of the Atlantic Ocean as “living micro-cultural, micro-political system[s] in motion” (Gilroy 1993: 4). When following Mozambican students on their journeys from Maputo to Havana, we shall see that this was the how they experienced their ships as well. Focusing on the trajectories of individuals such as Miguel and on the grass-roots level in Afro-Atlantic studies has been very rewarding. Following Gilroy, some authors, mainly historians, realized the potential of looking at the political microcosms of ships, and that of looking at the agency of individuals in contexts that seem to allow no agency at all: passages on slave ships or on ships transporting convicts or indentured laborers (Christopher/Pybus/Rediker 2007). Focusing on this micro-level does not necessarily mean losing sight of the broader horizons. An example can be found in those authors who, in paraphrasing Gilroy, introduced – sometimes ironically or skeptically – the concept of a “Red Atlantic” as a space of exchange of ideas of resistance, of a class consciousness brought by seamen from port to port during the heyday of the British Empire. It is a space where rebels, slaves, religious utopians, and Luddites formed a multiethnic and truly Internationalist working class that opposed planters, merchants, and royal officers, who were the representatives of an Atlantic bourgeoisie (cf. Rediker 2004; Armitage 2001, 2002). Thus, focusing on a small number of political or religious radicals helped historians understand that not only laborers and convicts crossed the Atlantic, but that the naval transAtlantic exchange also had a crucial meaning for the spread of revolutionary or red ideas throughout the Atlantic world. Naturally, Cuba after the revolution imagined itself as representative of this Internationalist “Red

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Atlantic” (without of course using the term, which was coined only recently), as a nation of the global South that freed itself from neocolonial dependence in 1959. Cuba’s socialist government claimed to stand for a future partnership of the countries of the South, and to represent an avantgarde of the tri-continental movement of the nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that would end Northern American and European imperialist dominance of the globe (D’Estefano Pisani et al. 1994). An icon of this “Red Atlantic” is of course the image of Che Guevara, based on the photograph by Alberto Korda (Ziff 2006). This image may be found on t-shirts all around the Atlantic Ocean, and is probably as popular as Bob Marley’s image. Fittingly enough, Guevara himself went to Africa to fight as a guerillero for Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who was later elected the DR Congo’s first president after the downfall of Mobuto in 1997 (Guevara 2000; Risquet Valdés 2000), which leads us to the history of Cuban-African relations after the Cuba Revolution. Cuba’s Activities in Africa: Socialist Internationalism and Afro-Latin “Blood Bonds”

In order to understand the interplay of Internationalist and Afro-diasporic discourses in the educational programs for African students in Cuba, I will provide a rough overview of the relations between the Cuban government and its African counterparts, which apparently started in earnest only after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The new government, under the leadership of Fidel Castro, quickly established close contacts with African independence movements and governments. Isolated from its ‘natural’ sphere of interest, the neighboring countries in the Caribbean and in Central and South America, due to US hegemony in the American hemisphere, and because of the region’s governments’ fears of the Cuban Revolution being exported, Cuba turned to other countries of the South, mostly African and Asian countries that already showed some sympathies for socialist politics (Suchlicki/Fernandez 1985; D’Estefano Pisani et al. 1994; Ritter/Kirk 1995; Erisman 2000). Starting in 1961, Cuba supplied Algeria’s National Liberation Front with arms and medical personnel, and shipped wounded fighters and war orphans to Cuba. In the same year, Sékou Touré’s Guinea was the first African country to send students to Cuba. Cuba sent a group of Cuban guerrilleros led by Che Guevara to Congo-Kinshasa in 1965. But it was Cuba’s long-lasting engagement in the Angolan fight for independence and the subsequent civil war, and Cuba’s military support against South African

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aggression in Namibia and Angola, that had a deep impact on Cuba’s selfimage as an Internationalist nation leading the South. Over the last 40 years, the Cuban government has signed agreements with the governments or independence movements of nearly all SubSaharan African nations concerning the sending of students to Cuba. Cuban higher education often focuses on applied fields, that is: the state admits a high number of students to educational programs in medicine and health services, agriculture and technical studies. These fields are regarded as important for the development of the nations of the South. Literacy and education programs were seen as means to free the nations of the South from neocolonial dependence on the North, mainly the US and Europe. 4 The programs that sent African students to Cuba were seen as part of the struggle between these two ideologies – socialist Internationalism as the worldview and practice of the exploited peoples of the South and their allies in the socialist countries of Europe on the one hand, and what was called imperialism and is today referred to as neoliberal globalization as a worldview and a practice of the exploiting North on the other hand (Gleijeses 2002; cf. also Mesa-Lago/Belkin 1982; Gálvez 1999; Guevara 2000; Risquet Valdés 1999; 2000). During the 1980s and 1990s, large numbers of primary, secondary, and pre-university students were sent mostly to the Isla de la Juventud. This island, formerly known as Isla de Pinas (Isle of Pines), is characterized by agriculture and pine forests. The students’ extracurricular activities thus included agricultural work, hiking trips, and possibly visits to the model pri-son, a panopticon-like building where Fidel Castro was jailed. They were allocated to schools erected specially for these foreign students. The costs for these programs were split, with Cuba paying the larger part, and covering education, accommodation, school uniforms, etc., and with the sending countries’ governments paying for travel expenses, their national teachers, and sometimes pocket money for the students (McManus 2000; Stubbs 1989: 98-101). Up until the year 2000, some 35,000 students from thirty-seven “Third-World” countries had been schooled on “La Isla” (Risquet Valdés 2000: 96). But following the collapse of the socialist camp in Eastern Europe and Cuba’s resulting economic problems – an era called the “Special Period” in Cuba – the number of foreign students dropped dramatically. Only a few secondary-school students from foreign countries

4

On the Cuban literacy campaigns, see Keeble (2001). González López (2002) offers an overview on the literature about Cuban-African relations.

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remain in Cuba today. However, many foreign university students continue to study different careers, mostly medicine or nursing, but also agriculture, veterinary medicine, sports, computer science, social communication, law, art, film, sociology, the Spanish language, economics, accounting, and others. 5 According to official numbers of the Cuban Ministerio de Educación Superior, nearly 43,000 foreign students finished their studies in Cuba at a secondary or university level between 1961 and 2004, of which nearly 30,000 came from sub-Saharan Africa. Of those, 8053 came from Angola, the largest single national group, and another 3764 from Mozambique. This changed recently. During our research, in the 2004-2005 academic year, of the nearly 1800 sub-Saharan African students that graduated in Cuba, 344 came from South Africa and more than 200 from Mali, but less than 50 came from Mozambique. Generally, the number of students sent by each nation was indicative of the political relations Cuba had with the respective African countries. Ideas of an Afro-Atlantic connection informed these education programs. It is important to note that Fidel Castro and other Cuban politicians and intellectuals justified Cuba’s activities in Africa by referring not only to Cuban foreign political or economic interests and to socialist Internationalism, but also to the common historical experience of slavery and colonialism that African and Latin American countries shared. They would also refer to the debt Cuba owed Africa because of enslaved Africans’ contributions to Cuban culture and to the building of the country. Castro took this line of thought even further by referring to the “common blood” of Cubans and Africans (cf. Castro 1989; Mandela/Castro 1991). There is a striking contrast between this official Cuban recognition of the contribution of its Black population and discourses in the USA or Brazil, which for a long time have downplayed these contributions in order to prevent reparation claims. Not surprisingly, Castro’s statements were therefore greatly appreciated by authors from the African Diaspora, especially in the USA (cf. Walters 1993: 315).

5

Apart from the references cited, information on the establishment of the schools and programs that provided African students with education in Cuba was gathered during our field research, mainly through interviews with (former) students and professors, and with state officials in all three countries, as well as through participant observation. I would like to thank those who helped us and supported our research.

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Mozambican Students in Cuba – Crossing the Atlantic as an Educational Experience

The recruitment of students in Mozambique shows that this project was ideologically charged from the start. According to the statements of some former students, professors, and officials, academic merit and modest social background were the most important criteria for selection. Thus, at first, children from rural and socially disadvantaged backgrounds who performed well at primary school were contacted, and their parents were asked whether they would allow them to travel to Cuba for secondary and eventually higher education. These seem to be very objective criteria, but when listening to the accounts of other probably more critical former students, things sound a bit different. First of all there were rumors – supposedly spread by the South African media – that students were subject to forced labor, and even slavery, in Cuba, and that their education would consist entirely of indoctrination into socialist ideology. Some students also told me that pressure was put on their parents to prove that they were not reactionaries who believed those rumors, but that they were partisans of the FRELIMO, the Liberation Front of Mozambique (Frente da Libertação da Moçambique), and thus would willingly give up their children to support the development of the young nation. 6 The FRELIMO was at the time the governing party in a socialist oneparty state. After gaining independence from Portugal in 1975, the FRELIMO government sought support mainly from the socialist camp, and

6

The information on the process of selecting the students as well as on daily life in Cuban schools was provided by former professors and a large number of former students in Mozambique who were sent to Cuba from 1977 onwards. The issue of the widespread fear that students were being indoctrinated into socialist curricula rather than being ‘properly’ educated has been discussed by other authors (e.g., Nazario 1985: 88-89). Most of the (former) students interviewed had a slightly different perspective on this issue. Some in fact complained about a lack of political discussion in the classrooms, rather than an “over-politicized” education, while others appreciated the additional historical and political information they received during their studies. Students spoke of the emphasis that was placed on issues such as the common interests and struggles of Southern countries, and the importance of education, public health, and social welfare for an independent nation. Many felt that what they learned was patriotism rather than socialism, and many said that they appreciated being made more aware of the needs of their homelands and local communities. For more information on education in Mozambique, see Mário (2003); Mazula (1995); Marshall (1993). For the situation of higher education generally in Africa, see Zeleza /Olukoshi (2004).

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from very early on received aid from, and sent students and workers to, the Soviet Union, the GDR, Cuba, and other mostly Eastern European socialist countries. After independence, the FRELIMO government was attacked by a military group called RENAMO, the Mozambican National Resistance (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana), which was supported by South Africa’s apartheid government, and which feared a socialist blockade of its borders (Dinerman 2006). Given the lack of schools and school buildings in Mozambique, the aim of sending students and teachers to Cuba was to have the students educated there as quickly as possible and then brought back as cadres. They would then be able to build up the country after the war of independence, in the face of continuing destabilization from RENAMO forces. In order to give these children a feeling of responsibility and urgency from the start, they were told that they were tomorrow’s leaders of Mozambique and that they were to represent Mozambique in Cuba. 7 In 1977, the first group was sent to Cuba, or more precisely to the Isla de la Juventud. Students told me that they crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a ship called “Rossiya,” which they claimed once belonged to the German dictator Adolf Hitler but had been used by the Soviets after the Second World War. 8 On board, they became acquainted with the canon of world literature, including works by Balzac, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. Through the dangers they encountered and the experiences they had during this journey, they learned to separate the world into two camps: one governed by imperialist forces, and another in the process of being liberated by progressive forces. Traveling along the South African coast involved a 7

8

Apart from the lack of school buildings and trained teachers in Mozambique, there might have been other reasons why Cuban and Mozambican authorities did not decide to simply send Cuban teachers to Mozambique – as they did in Angola, for example (Hatzky 2008). Although there were some attempts from the Cuban side to establish closer ties to Mozambique’s FRELIMO, the relations remained somewhat distant, probably because of an unfortunate meeting of the FRELIMO’s leader Eduardo Mondlane with Che Guevara in Dar Es Salam in 1965. Whatever the reasons, Cubans did not enter FRELIMO camps in either Tanzania or Mozambique itself (Gleijeses 2002: 227). The “Rossiya“ was indeed originally a German ship called the “Patria,” built in 1938. As a residential ship for German marines, it would not have been used by Hitler personally, but it made into the history books when the post-Hitler Third Reich government of General Dönitz was arrested on board the “Patria.” In 1945, it was taken over by the British and renamed the “Empire Welland.” In 1946 it was handed over to the Soviets and again renamed, and it sailed the seas as the “Rossiya” before being destroyed in Pakistan in 1985. See: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patria_(Schiff, 1938), November 29, 2013.

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certain amount of danger, and the fear of being attacked by the apartheid regime’s navy. The port of socialist Angola’s capital Luanda was a safe haven, and a group of Angolan students joined them there. The Westernoriented nation of Senegal allowed them to stock up on food and water, but not to land on Senegalese territory. On board, too, they learned a lesson: the Russian seamen were whites that represented the future, non-racist “New Man” of socialism. They supported and helped the students, rather than exploiting them in the way White colonials or the likes of Hitler had done. In Cuba, the students received a huge welcome ceremony that included a speech by Fidel Castro. This was an experience that, as some of the students said, taught them the difference between friend and foe and, as it seemed at the time, between past and future, knowledge and ignorance. Subsequent groups of students were sent by plane, and thus missed out on this educational maritime experience. Finally, three schools were built for Mozambican students. Each school had space for about 600 students. The age of the students differed (most were between 12 and 15 years of age, but the oldest were in their twenties). All of them had finished primary school in Mozambique, and some had already started secondary school. In Cuba they received half a year of language training and then continued their schooling. The last group was sent in 1990, at the beginning of Cuba’s “Special Period.” They were taught by Cuban as well as Mozambican teachers. The latter were brought there in order to keep students in contact with Mozambican culture and to teach them the Portuguese language, Mozambican history, and geography with a focus on Africa and Mozambique and political education. The Cuban teachers taught Spanish, the sciences, technical subjects, sports, and universal history. The aims of the education in secondary schools on the Isla were to educate revolutionary cadres and to teach a scientific worldview, which, according to the educational policy of the Cuban Communist Party, was interpreted as materialist or as “ateísmo cientifico” (scientific atheism). Following the dominant doctrine of national liberation, teachers tried to enforce national instead of regional, ethnic, local, or religious identities, which were seen as hindering a nation’s development and were said to be used by reactionary forces in the interests of imperialism. This materialist and nationalist worldview was not only taught in the classroom but also normalized through extracurricular activities. First, the students were allocated to schools according to nationality. Contact with students of other nationalities was reduced mostly to officially organized meetings. Students were encouraged to use Portuguese as their language of communication – to such an extent that some forgot their

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maternal language. LPs – mostly with revolutionary songs praising the FRELIMO – and newspapers were brought from Mozambique. These were meant to keep the students up to date on events in their home country, but they also transmitted national – i.e., the governing party’s – perspectives. Additionally, the students were taught the dances of different provinces of Mozambique, which they were to perform at regular events in other schools, whether Mozambican, Cuban, or those of any other nation. The students thus had the different regions of their country inscribed into their bodies – they got to know the nation through sound and movement. School discipline in general was seen as being very strict, and in fact discipline was a subject most interviewees referred to: it was presented to them as being at the basis of a modern revolutionary society. They described everyday life in schools as being organized to the very least detail in military-like manner, from the wake-up call at 6 a.m. to lights-off at 10 p.m. In addition to classes and homework, this everyday life also included agricultural work. Collective excursions were organized, even on weekends, but these were not compulsory for students. Agricultural work as a means to enforce national unity was at the time still compulsory for Cuban students, and this was of course the background for the rumors in Mozambique that students were being sold into slavery in Cuba, working in the fields instead of being educated. Interestingly, most students had positive memories of this agricultural work, which, it seems, was not very demanding. Discipline and surveillance notwithstanding, students found ways to gain some space for freedom. For example, they used the less regulated night hours to run away from their respective schools and visit other schools and befriend Cubans or students from other countries. When life in school became virtually unbearable in the early 1990s because of Cuba’s economic problems after the fall of the socialist camp, which resulted in the lack of food and other materials in the schools, students protested in order to receive a stipend. When these protests became increasingly violent and teachers got hurt, a number of students were sent home. But in the end the students succeeded in obtaining their stipends. Once they were granted stipends in dollars, they used this advantage to do business with Cubans, who at the time were not allowed to own dollars, and thus were unable to buy the desired Western goods in the so-called dollar stores. Ironically, the dire economic situation of the “período especial” (“Special Period”) thus transformed African students from formerly poor subjects in need of Cuban support into attractive and almost wealthy proprietors of foreign currency. These business deals were a way of raising the students’ stipends – and for

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some even a way of cheating their Cuban business partners. In rare cases, students like Miguel ran away from the Isla and made it to the mainland, where they survived for some time before being expelled by the Cuban authorities. These examples show that Mozambican students as individuals and as a group found ways to circumvent strict controls and used the abilities they learned at school for ends that were different from those taught. Those students who were successful enough in school to be asked to continue their studies in Cuba were sent to universities or polytechnics. Students did not exactly choose their own careers; instead, the Mozambican government applied for a certain number of places in special careers. Cuba offered what it could, and students could then choose between three or so careers, and thus continue their studies on the main island. Mozambican students described life at the universities and polytechnics as being less strictly regimented. They established closer contacts to Cubans and to students of other nationalities. They now received stipends from the Mozambican state and pocket money from the Cuban government. They were allowed to go out where and with whom they wanted, and they established friendships and romantic relationships. Many felt that they had finally arrived in Cuba. Reintegration into Mozambican Society: An Elite Seeking a Position

According to a Mozambican official of the Ministry of Education, the process of the students’ reintegration was “very unproblematic” (Interview, January 22, 2006). On their return, they were allocated to different work places according to their education, whenever possible. They were readily accepted by their colleagues, and their Cuban education was appreciated and respected. They were regarded as good professionals, as having discipline, and they turned out to be successful in their respective professional fields. They were ready to work in the provinces, whereas those educated in the West expected to continue to live the urban, metropolitan lifestyle they had become accustomed to in the West. Furthermore, in contrast to those who had studied in the West, nearly all of those who studied in Cuba came back to Mozambique, not only thanks to tight controls in Cuba but also because of the education there, which stressed patriotic responsibility and humility. Not surprisingly, things appear a bit more problematic from the perspective of the students. It is important to note that from 1989 onwards the FRELIMO changed its politics, gradually evolving from what we could call

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a communist party towards a social-democratic party, opening up the country for Western investment (Mazula 2000; Abrahamsson/Nilsson 1995; Boetius 2002). From the start, the cubanitos (little Cubans) as some former students call themselves, and a term that I will use here – encountered colleagues who had doubts concerning the quality of Cuban education, and some even spoke of a particularly negative image of Cuban education, or socialist education more generally, in Mozambique. It was not considered as good as Western education, nor was it considered competitive enough for the new Mozambique. Therefore the cubanitos were confronted with the opinion that they had obtained their jobs only because of their assumed proximity to the FRELIMO. They were immediately forced to demonstrate their abilities, and had to struggle for acceptance. Thanks to the quality of the education and their internalized discipline, they were quite successful with it, many said. But obviously they were not welcomed the way they were told they would be: as the country’s future elite. Most of the cubanitos I spoke to were professionally well established: many had mid- or upper-level jobs in the public sector, and many also had similar positions in private enterprises. Some had even started businesses themselves. Initially, when the students came back from Cuba, the Mozambican government was often not able to provide them with enough jobs in their respective fields, partly because in many instances infrastructure had been destroyed due to the civil war. Furthermore, students were desperately needed in other professional fields, or simply forced to join the army. Consequently, once they were free to choose work for themselves, many started a profession outside the field they were educated in. Many interviewees stressed the fact that, despite the resistance and problems they faced when coming back, today one can find cubanitos who work as national directors, heads of departments, sectional heads, ministers, professors, presidents of city councils, etc. But there were others who complained about the lack of work arrangements from the state, which, they said, resulted in people with diplomas living on the street and working at menial jobs, which they regarded as a waste of money and potential. The former students maintained the very Cuban or socialist idea that the state should provide its citizens with work, should help organize the individual’s life, and should plan the economy and the work force. In fact, Mozambique was a country that adhered to these principles when the students left, but it had opted for a more “westernized” concept of the dynamic power of the free market by the time the cubanitos had returned. This change notwithstanding, the students’ education itself and their achieved abilities in different subjects allowed for a reorientation on the job

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market and broad knowledge in the sciences, philosophy, history, and the arts, and helped them make their way in modern Mozambican society. When asked for their personal views on the value of their education and experiences in Cuba, many mentioned that first of all it meant growing up, and then that they were thankful to have received an education, to have learned discipline, to have achieved a new level of (self-)consciousness as Mozambicans and Africans, and, as some of them would say, to have become civilized through, for example, knowledge of “classical literature,” or of table manners. They often described themselves in terms of nationality, civilization, and modernity, as opposed to others – especially those who had not received an education – who they described with attributes like “tribal,” “local,” “backward,” “eat with their hands” etc. The students surprisingly used exactly those same terms that in colonial times differentiated an “assimilado” from an “indígena” in Portuguese diction. Cuban education was also successful in establishing and stabilizing national identities: Most interviewees stressed that thanks to their time in Cuba, they returned as Mozambicans and not as Changan, Makonde, Northerner or Maputoan, and that they had established friendships in the most diverse provinces, regardless of people’s ethnic, religious, or regional affiliations. Some were organized in associations for people who had formerly studied in Cuba or in those with a general Internationalist perspective. These associations organize events in memory of Mozambican or Cuban revolutionaries. Apart from keeping the memory of these individuals alive, the events also serve as nostalgic meetings of cubanitos. The meetings allow communication with others about common experiences and feelings of political or cultural estrangement from Mozambique. Confronted with the obvious differences in values between their socialist education and their everyday capitalist lives, many of the interviewees either talked about the need to adapt or simply denied the differences by referring to shared values like modernity: they stressed the role cubanitos played in developing the country. One interviewee even stated: “The Cuban education is at the basis of Mozambican modernization.” Another cubanito offered a rather broad definition of socialism as a social process guided by the sciences, and thus concluded that Mozambique was on its own way to socialism. These strategies to bridge cognitive dissonances between the two differing worldviews may at the same time have functioned as ways to negotiate the two different educational experiences or, to put it biographically, to negotiate the two different identities involved in being both Cuban and Mozambican at one and the same time. It is therefore no surprise that

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most interviewees spoke of two homelands, and nearly all of them, including Miguel, expressed the desire to at least revisit Cuba one day. Conclusion

When I asked the former students from Mozambique what this transAtlantic experience meant for them, many said that thanks to Cuban education they had developed a modern worldview, a national identity, had received ‘civilization,’ and that all of this helped them make their way in Mozambique. One could try to explain the disturbing proximity of Cuban socialist and Portuguese colonial values concerning the idea of what defines a civilized person. One could analyze the official Cuban political discourse as one that as yet remains unquestioned by post-modern interventions. One will find few examples of Black Atlantic countercultural positions, but rather an ongoing everyday racism in Cuba and paternalist positions among its elites, which could be explained through their roots in modernist and especially Marxist evolutionist ideology. These positions may appear conservative or disturbing, but it seems that they, at the very least, helped many Mozambicans who returned from Cuba find their place in a modernized African society being transformed by globalization. Ironically, the students’ experience of a “Black” or “Red Atlantic” did not result in their developing a counterculture to modernity, but rather in their gaining the know-how for successful integration into post-socialist Mozambique. Using Miguel’s activities for making a living in Cuba, Germany, South Africa, and Mozambique as an introduction to this chapter, I wanted to stress the point that, although the students were strongly influenced by the two competing global ideologies and their agency was determined by the need to negotiate these, improvisation still played an important role. Despite his problematic experiences with the Cuban authorities, Miguel continued to support Cubans in Mozambique, and highly valued Cuban culture – and thus turned out to probably be closer to the ideal of the altruistic humanist of the South than some Cubans and Africans active in these programs, who over the years had become quite cynical about their outcomes (cf. Hansing/Dorsch 2005). Miguel also improvised with regard to the possibilities at hand. His improvisations are, of course, an extreme example of how far an individual would go in order to overcome or circumvent the constraints put in his way by the state, but they also show that even tightly regulated crossroads may open the way to surprising trajectories.

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References

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Gálvez, William (1999): Che in Africa – Che Guevara’s Congo Diary, Melbourne, New York: Ocean Press. Gilroy, Paul (1993): The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, Massachussets Harvard University Press. Gleijeses, Piero (2002): Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Goebel, Walter/Schabio, Saskia (eds.) (2006): Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology, New York: Routledge. González López, David (2002): “Relaciones Cuba-África: Marco para un bojeo bibliográfico.” In: Estudios Afro-asiáticos 24/3, pp. 601-630. http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0101546X2002000300007#tx01 (February 1, 2008). Guevara, Ernesto Che (2000): The African Dream – The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo, London: Harvill. Hansing, Katrin/Dorsch, Hauke (2005): “45 Jahre Süd-Süd-Solidarität? Cubanische Mediziner in Afrika, afrikanische Studenten in Cuba.” In: Ila 291, pp. 10-13. Hatzky, Christine (2008): “‘Os Bons Colonizadores’: Cuba’s Educational Mission in Angola, 1976-1991.” In: Safundi – The Journal of South African and American Studies 9/1, pp. 53-68. Hayes, Dennis/Wynyard, Robin (eds.) (2002): The McDonaldization of Higher Education, Westport, Conn./London: Bergin & Garvey. Keeble, Alexandra (2001): Con el espíritu de los maestros ambulantes – La Campaña de la Alphabetización Cubana, 1961 / In the Spirit of Wandering Teachers – The Cuban Literacy Campaign, 1961, Melbourne/New York/Havana: Ocean Press. Lovejoy, Paul E./Trotman, David Vincent (eds.) (2003): Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, London/New York: Continuum. Mandela, Nelson/Castro, Fidel (1991): How Far We Slaves Have Come! New York et al.: Pathfinder. Mário, Mouzinho et al. (2003): Higher Education in Mozambique, Oxford: James Currey; Maputo: Imprensa & Livraria Univeritária, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. Marshall, Judith (1993): Literacy, Power, and Democracy in Mozambique – The Governance of Learning from Colonization to the Present, Boulder et al.: Westview Press. Mazula, Brazão (1995): Educação, cultura e ideologia em Moçambique: 1975-1985, Porto: Fundo Bibliográfico da Língua Portuguesa/Edições Afrontamento.

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Mazula, Brazão (2000): A construção da democracia em Africa – O caso Moçambicano, Maputo: Ndjira. McManus, Jane (2000): Cuba’s Island of Dreams – Voices from the Isle of Pines and Youth, Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Mesa-Lago, Carmelo/Belkin, June S. (eds.) (1982): Cuba in Africa, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh. Meyer, John W. (2005): Weltkultur – Wie die westlichen Prinzipien die Welt durchdringen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Meyer, John W./ Ramirez, Francisco O. (2000): “The World Institutionalization of Education.” In: J. Schriewer (ed.), Discourse Formation in Comparative Education, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp. 111-132. Nazario, Olga (1985): “Cuba's Relations with Africa in the Eighties: Scope and Limitations.” In: J. Suchlicke/ D. Fernandez (eds.), Cuban Foreign Policy: The New Internationalism, Coral Gables: University of Miami, North-South Center for the Institute of Interamerican Studies, pp. 68-98. Rediker, Markus (2004): “The Red Atlantic, or, ‘A Terrible Blast Swept over the Heaving Sea.’” In: Bernhard Klein/ Gesa Mackenthun (eds.), Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. New York: Routledge, pp. 111-130. Risquet Valdés, Jorge (1999): 40 Años de solidaridad de Cuba con África, Havana: Editorial Si-Mar. Risquet Valdés, Jorge (2000): El segundo frente del Che en el Congo – Historia del Batallón Patricio Lumumba, Havana: Casa Editora Abril. Ritter, Archibald/Kirk, John (eds.) (1995): Cuba in the International System: Integration and Normalization, London: Macmillan. Rossbach de Olmos, Lioba (2009): “Was ist mit dem Schwarzen Pazifik im Schwarzen Atlantik? Paul Gilroys ‘Black Atlantic’ im Spiegel (afro)kolumbianischer Begebenheiten.” In: Heike Drotbohm/Lioba Rossbach de Olmos (eds.), Kontrapunkte. Theoretische Transitionen und empirischer Transfer in der Afroamerikaforschung, Marburg: Curupira, pp. 41-58. Stichweh, Rudolf (2000): Die Weltgesellschaft – Soziologische Analysen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Stubbs, Jean (1989): Cuba – The Test of Time, London: Latin American Bureau. Suchlicki, Jaime/Fernandez, Damián (eds.) (1985): Cuban Foreign Policy: The New Internationalism, Coral Gables: University of Miami, NorthSouth Center for the Institute of Interamerican Studies.

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Turning Back to the Turning Point: The Day of Guanahani in 1492 in Global Perspective S TEFAN R INKE

When Columbus set foot on Guanahani in 1492, he did not doubt that his “discovery” was of utmost importance. In the first letter to his sponsor Luis de Santángel, written during the return trip in 1493, he describes his deed as a triumph for Christianity at large – a Victory which, according to the admiral, was to bring wealth and salvation to mankind (Kolumbus 2000: 36-37). Indeed, contemporary observers in Europe were also convinced of the global significance of the event. Did this conviction, however, persist over the long run? What did the arrival of Columbus mean for the people living in the Caribbean? Was the Day of Guanahani indeed a turning point in global history? What kind of globality are we talking about? What happened on the October 12, 1492?

As for what occurred on October 12, 1492 with the first contact between Europeans and the Lukku-Cairi (or Lucayans), we only know what Las Casas (1986, vol. 1) has recorded from the perspective of Columbus. Las Casas’ version seems plausible as it presents elements that repeated themselves in other moments of first contact with different regions of the continent in the half century that followed: »At two hours after midnight the land appeared, from which they were about two leagues distant. They hauled down all the sails […] passing time until daylight Friday, when they reached an islet of the Lucayas, which was called Guanahani in the language of the Indians. Soon they saw naked people; and the admiral went

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ashore in the armed launch, and Martín Alonso Pinzón and his brother Vicente Anes [Yáñez], who was captain of the Niña. The admiral brought out the royal banner and the captains two flags with the green cross, which the admiral carried on all ships as a standard, with an F and a Y, and over each letter a crown, one on one side of the cross and the other on the other. Thus put ashore they saw very green trees and many ponds and fruits of various kinds. The admiral called to the two captains and to the others who had jumped ashore and to Rodrigo Descobedo, the escrivano of the whole fleet, and to Rodrigo Sánchez de Segovia; and he said that they should be witnesses that, in the presence of all, he would take, as in fact he did take, possession of the said island for the king and for the queen his lords, making the declarations that were required, and which at more length are contained in the testimonials made there in writing.« (Columbus 1989: 63-65)

First, there was the formal act of taking possession. Only then do the inhabitants of the island come into view. Columbus allegedly looked at them with the eye of a missionary. He also disparagingly depicted the natives as poor and naïve and emphasized that they were without arms and thus defenseless. When exchanging gifts and trading goods, they behaved like the inhabitants of the coast of Guinea, which Columbus had himself experienced years before. In exchange for the (from a European perspective) useless pearls of glass and colored bonnets, the island people brought weapons, cotton, and parrots. Although this did not especially impress Columbus, who had hoped for gold, the admiral was glad to see that the islanders were obviously well-suited to be labourers. From this account, it is clear that Columbus was particularly interested in calculating the economic benefits of the trip – unsurprisingly, of course, given the considerable size of the investment. A main element in Columbus’ text is the material assessment of the autochthonous people. The hidden agenda was to find answers to the following questions: Can the natives be exploited? Can they be defeated? Where is the gold? The aspect of Christianization had only a legitimizing function. From the few available sources, we can also grasp Columbus’ effort to relate the events to his own imagination and expectations based on his experiences in the Atlantic, on the Iberian Peninsula, and in Africa (Phillips 1992: 1-12). Thus, in emphasizing the nakedness of the Lucuyans, Columbus refers to the “Golden Age” and to a paradisiacal situation in which nakedness was viewed as pure and positive, but also wild and barbarous. The comparison with the inhabitants of the Canary Islands, the Guanches, and with the blacks from Africa was important for Columbus because he wanted to show that he was on the same latitude as the Canary Islands

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(Fernández-Armesto 2009: 274). Also important to the admiral was to prove that the people on Guanahani were not monstrous, but normal human beings who could be easily Christianized because they did not belong to a sect – in other words, they were neither Jews nor Muslims. Columbus’ diary demonstrates a clear search for signs of “civilization.” He interpreted the people and things that he saw on Guanahani and elsewhere as a sign that he was close to the empire of the Great Khan, which was the real target of his endeavor. Columbus had seen just what he wanted to see. The character of the Lukku Cairi sources who participated in the encounter differs radically from the accounts of Columbus and his entourage. As an illiterate culture, they were classified as the Other by a historiography that from its very beginning put its trust in the written word. Thus, whether praising or condemning him, historians consciously and unconsciously reproduced Columbus’ perspective. However, Ramón Pané, the founder of American ethnography who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, has left behind important information about the language and beliefs of the Taino. In 1498, he wrote his Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios, which was the first text to show a genuine interest in the indigenous population (Stevens Arroyo 2006: 51-70). Just as with the diary of Columbus and many other sources of the period, the original text is lost. We only know about the text through Columbus’ son Hernando, who integrated it into his Historia del Almirante. Of course, Panés text is not from the original author and is also written from a European perspective. We thus have to be careful when using it. Supplementing Pané, there is now a large record of archaeological findings, which contributes to the reconstruction the daily life, the demographic developments, and the origins and myths of the Caribbean at the end of the 15th century (López Baralt 1984; Janiga-Perkins 2007: 13-38). In this process of reconstruction, a final correct version should not be expected. We can only try to assemble aspects of what happened from the surviving remnants. If we take into account the very problematic character of the European sources, however, the task proves to be similar to reconstructing what Columbus did. What do the sources tell us about the perspective of the Lukku-Cairi? The arrival of Columbus and his men likely was a big surprise or even a shock. In contrast to the Europeans who had widened their horizons considerably due to their seafaring in the 15th century, the Lukku-Cairi were not familiar with the experience of encountering human beings from completely different cultures. Their encounters with the Caniba of adjacent islands are not comparable to the moment of October 12, 1492. However, we can

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reasonably suspect that they tried, much like the Europeans, to integrate what they saw and experienced into their own knowledge system. It is possible that they considered the newcomers to be an unknown group of Caniba from neighboring Bohio – a suspicion that must have evaporated once the strangers began to distribute gifts (Keegan 2007: 19). The shamans of the Lukku-Cairi in the particular might have suspected the strangers had come from a supernatural dimension. According to their religious beliefs, this could only relate to Coaybay, the World of the Dead. From the perspective of the Lukku-Cairi, there were good reasons to believe this, given that the supposedly worthless objects, like glass pearls, caps, and little bells, had a supernatural significance in the Lukku-Cairi imaginary. The red color of some of these objects signified protection against illness. Moreover, producing sounds was a privilege of shamans, and the golden color of the bells resembled their golden talisman, the guanine. The conclusion that the people who brought these gifts were from a supernatural sphere must have been obvious (Oliver 1997). Most of all, the guanine attracted the interest of the Europeans. The Lukku-Cairi must have received some of it through trade with the other Caribbean islands, where it had arrived from the Amazonian region (the indigenous peoples from the Caribbean did not know how to melt metal). Gold objects reached their islands via the trading center of Puerto Rico. These only contained a low quantity of pure gold and were rather a mixture of gold and copper, which produced a special smell that added to their attractiveness. As an imported good, these objects were rare and valuable. In addition, they were often counted among the zemis, that is, objects where the spirits of the Lukku-Cairi dwelled. Zemis, however, did not necessarily have to be made of guanine, but could also be made of stone or wood. From the perspective of the Lukku-Cairi, the interest that Columbus and his men showed when seeing these magical objects was telling proof of the power of the guanine. The Europeans’ efforts to find out where the gold came from, which in the end even led to the kidnapping of six Lukku-Cairi men, would lead to further misunderstandings later on. Indeed, the behavior of the strangers during their short stay on the island might have caused suspicion – among at least some of the Lukku-Cairi – about the newcomers’ supernatural origins (Keegan 2007: 44-45). According to the diary notes, the Europeans moved on to the island of Rum Cay to the southwest of Guanahani. Columbus baptized this island Santa María de la Concepción. Although he was convinced that it would be sufficient to take possession of a single island in order to automatically claim all the others in the vicinity, he did go ashore and repeated the formal

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act there. His self-proclaimed aim was to explore the area “if there were gold there” (Kolumbus 2006: 54). The text of Columbus’ logbook about his very short stay reveals a lot about the actions of both parties. Two of the abducted Lukku-Cairi managed to flee. Their flight proves that they had already stopped believing in the supernaturalness of the Europeans, assuming they had ever held this belief in the first place. The Spaniards unsuccessfully hunted them down. Columbus’ men instead took a man from Santa María prisoner, but the admiral let him go and even gave him gifts in order to help offset the fugitives’ likely negative testimonies among the Indians. This incident shows that Columbus did not completely control his encounter with the natives, even though he himself clung to that perception. Just the same, he had to negotiate, albeit under starkly asymmetrical conditions since technical superiority and power were on his side. The European perspective

Can this event then be counted as a turning point in global history? From a European perspective, the “discovery of America” was undoubtedly among the major crossroads in the history of the world. Hardly anybody questioned this. A closer look, however, reveals the dubious significance of this date. “Discovery” implies something totally new, yet the Vikings had landed at the North American coast some 500 years before (Enterline 2002). “America” was a term that did not even exist in 1492. It implies a unified space that Columbus did not recognize until the end of his life, and which his contemporaries moreover only fully understood with the publication of Amerigo Vespucci’s travelogue Mundus Novus (‘The New World’). What may be defined as a temporal caesura or even as an epochal rupture depends upon the perspective of the observer. Human beings define certain events as turning points in order to grasp their own life stories or those of their communities. While these structures make sense, they also construct a worldview that is consistent with the needs and values of the one telling the story. Since the emergence of professional historiography in the 19th century, historians schooled in European conventions and the concept of the nation-state have controlled the process of construction that leads to periodization. The well-known periodizations that they have constructed result from specific motives that are themselves historically determined. These motives are not be taken for granted, but have to be discussed critically. After all, the turning point for some is not necessarily the turning point for everyone. Europeans have, of course, tried to connect their striving for global dominance with an attempt to dominate the interpretation of

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the world and its temporal division (Skalweit 1982; Raulff 1999; Koselleck 2000; Osterhammel 2006). Columbus himself had no doubt about the significance of his explorations. Yet he tried to integrate the experience of the absolute Other, whom he had encountered with his own eyes, into a horizon of expectations determined by biblical revelation. He thus remained true to conventional thought. A few years later, when the scope of Columbus’ discovery became apparent, contemporaries like Las Casas talked about their own era “as a new time which was not comparable to any other time before” (Las Casas 1986: 380). This understanding of living in a new age, which had commenced with the discovery of the New World, was only reinforced in the following centuries. In the late 17th century, proto-historians for the first time separated the triad of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and “modernity,” the inadequate English translation of the German “Neuzeit” (Jaeger 2009: 159161). In the European version of history, 1492 thus became the preferred turning point, which separated the allegedly dark ages of medieval times from the flourishing of human spirit during the Renaissance (Koselleck 1988: 317). Why did the date of the first arrival of the Vikings not stick? Why do history books not recall the Icelandic Leif Eriksson when we talk about the discovery of America? Eriksson’s voyage did not become part of European knowledge production simply because his feat was forgotten. Columbus, on the other hand, ingeniously used the emerging communications revolution of his time to promote his deeds. He consciously connected his success with the end of the Reconquista and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Thus, his discovery was not a singular occurrence, but rather closely tied to other important events of the year 1492. If we look beyond Spain, it is of course important to mention the creation of the Behaim globe in Nuremberg, the spread of letterpress printing, the other voyages of reconnaissance, and certainly Vasco da Gama’s grand voyage to India along the Eastern route in 1498 (Knefelkamp 2003). It was this massive buildup of events and the constant experience of rapid and unprecedented change that helped create the impression of a temporal caesura. This understanding of revolutionary chronological change went handin-hand with a caesura in Europe’s conception of space that was provoked by the Columbus’ arrival at Guanahani. Again, Columbus did not understand this spatial dimension. At the time, he was only aware of having reached the islands off the coast of Cathay, that is, China. Those who came after him soon realized that he had been mistaken. With the publication of Vespucci’s Mundus Novus in 1502/03, scholars could no longer seriously

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doubt the continental character of the discovered regions, although it took a long time before this knowledge was widely accepted. The European image of the world thus changed profoundly (Auffarth 2005). With Columbus’ discovery, completely new and unexpected spaces opened up. Soon the possibility of traveling around the globe was an acknowledged fact, which contributed to a new global consciousness. After Columbus, empirical facts slowly crowded out the myths of antiquity and the knowledge of ancient and Arab geographers in the explanation of new discoveries. The “new world” was now suddenly being connected with the “old world.” Transatlantic exchange of different kinds gave rise to Europe – until then a rather insignificant appendix of the Eurasian landmass. European kingdoms became colonial lords who would ruthlessly exploit foreign and far-away peoples. Economic exchange made commerce with goods possible that changed the lives of millions. The migrations of men and women– some voluntary, most forced – gave rise to new populations, as people carried with them animals, plants, and disease. With the European expansion to America, Christianity grew into a world religion and made up lost ground to Islam. These interactions, however, did more than change the lives of those directly involved. From a European perspective, the Day of Guanahani was clearly a historical turning point for everyone. The other discoverers

Does this hold true for the “discovered,” too? Unlike Columbus, the Lucayans of the Bahamas did not leave behind written sources of the events of that day in October. It was not only the lack of written sources, however, that led to a narrative in which the indigenous inhabitants were nothing but a passive and voiceless object of European aggression. Generations have perceived them as a part of the wilderness, of nature, in both its promising and threatening dimensions. Indeed, a central aspect of the new European worldview rooted in the moment of discovery was the self-evident understanding of Europe’s world domination (Rouse 1992: 118-121). Thanks to archaeological and ethnohistorical research, the perspectives of the indigenous peoples can today be reconstructed more faithfully than before. That said, the venture clearly entails considerable risk. For a long time, European scholars thought that the indigenous peoples interpreted the contact with the Europeans as a return of their gods. According to this view, the indigenous peoples integrated the events into their messianic belief system. The basis of this interpretation was the idea that indigenous

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societies were “traditional” and thus not capable of rationally making sense of the Other. Of course, this presupposed an idea of rationality which was purely European – but that never troubled the European thinkers. In addition, they did not bother to consider that Columbus himself, their hero, had by no means acted according to these same standards of rationality. Recent interpretations of the sources have demonstrated, however, that the state of affairs looked quite different for many of the newly “discovered” peoples. The various ethnic groups reacted quite pragmatically toward the new contacts and they were quite capable of making sense of the Europeans’ arrival because of their command of historical knowledge, even if it was transmitted orally from one generation to the next. The appearance of the Europeans was doubtless a surprising experience for most. Yet, the intrusion of culturally different peoples who were superior in terms of armaments and technology was not so exceptional in the Caribbean after all. To be sure, the Lucayans of Guanahaní probably took the strangers to be messengers from the realm of the dead. Still, when confronted with the Europeans, they were not at all as helpless as one might suppose (Arrom 1989; Cassá 1992). The indigenous states and societies on the mainland reacted very differently to the European invaders. This was due not the least to the fact that the process stretched over a long period, which had only started in 1492 with Columbus and then extended for several decades and, indeed, centuries. From the indigenous perspective, it makes an important difference whether the first contact happened at the end of the 15th century or not until 40 years later, when the conquerors reached the Inca Empire. By that point, knowledge about the invaders had spread widely. Even in 1570 (historiography usually accepts this year as the point when the Spanish kingdoms finally consolidated), huge parts of the Americas had not yet been explored by the Europeans. Thus, first contact situations would be repeated many times, and they differed from one another to a considerable degree. Nevertheless, the day of Guanahani is also a turning point for the indigenous population. It is possible to make this claim without adopting a Eurocentric perspective, for, in the end, the date marks the beginning of one of the greatest demographic catastrophes in human history. Invasions, foreign dominations, and the transformation of cultures and empires had already characterized the history before Columbus. The ancestors of the Lucayans and Tainos, whom Columbus encountered in the Caribbean, had themselves at one point driven out other peoples, who are still largely unknown to us today. Nonetheless, the European invaders and the African slaves they soon began to import represented completely new challenges

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for the inhabitants of the Americas. Their lives would change radically, giving rise to the conclusion that for them, too, the day of Guanahani was a turning point and the beginning of a global experience.

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References

Arrom, José Juan (1989): Mitología y artes prehispánicas de las Antillas, Mexiko: Siglo 21. Auffarth, Christoph (2005): Neue Welt und Neue Zeit – Weltkarten und Säkularisierung in der Frühen Neuzeit. In: Renate Dürr et al. (ed.): Expansionen in der Frühen Neuzeit. Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Beiheft 34, Berlin, pp. 43-68. Cassá, Roberto (1992): Los indios de las Antillas, Madrid: Mapfre. Columbus, Christopher (1991): The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493, ed. Oliver Dunn/James E. Kelley Jr., Norman: University of Oklahoma. Enterline, James Robert (2002): Erikson, Eskimos & Columbus: Medieval European Knowledge of America, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fernández-Armesto, Felipe (2009): 1492: The Year the World Began, New York: Harper One. Jaeger, Friedrich (2009): Neuzeit. In: Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit. Stuttgart: Metzler, vol. 9, col. 158-181. Janiga-Perkins, Constance G. (2007): Reading, Writing, and Translation in the “Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios” (c. 1498) by Fray Ramón Pané: A Study of a Pioneering Work in Ethnography, Lewiston: Mellen. Keegan, William F. (2007): Taíno Indian Myth and Practice: The Arrival of the Stranger King, Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Knefelkamp, Ulrich (2003): Der Behaim-Globus: Geschichtsbild und Geschichtsdeutung. In: Dagmar Unverhau (ed.), Geschichtsdeutung auf alten Karten: Archäologie und Geschichte, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, pp. 111-128 Kolumbus, [Christoph] (2000 [1493]): Der erste Brief aus der Neuen Welt, ed. Robert Wallisch, Stuttgart: Reclam. Kolumbus, Christoph (2006): Bordbuch, ed. Frauke Gewecke, Frankfurt a.M.: Insel. Koselleck, Reinhart (1988): Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Koselleck, Reinhart (2000): Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Las Casas, Bartolomé de (1986): Historia de las Indias, ed. André Saint-Lu, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho.

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López Baralt, Mercedes (1984): Levi-Strauss en las Antillas: el mito taíno en la crónica de Fray Ramón Pané. In: América indígena (México) 44/4, pp. 663-682. Oliver, José R. (1997): The Taino Cosmos: In: Samuel M. Wilson (ed.), The Indigenous People of the Caribbean, Gainesville: Univeristy of Florida Press, pp. 140-153. Osterhammel, Jürgen (2006): Über die Periodisierung der neueren Geschichte. In: Berichte und Abhandlungen der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 10, pp. 45-64. Phillips, William D./ Phillips, Carla R. (1992): The Worlds of Christopher Columbus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Raulff, Ulrich (1999): Der unsichtbare Augenblick: Zeitkonzepte in der Geschichte, Göttingen: Wallstein. Rouse, Irving (1992): The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People who Greeted Columbus, New Haven: Yale University Press. Skalweit, Stephan (1982): Der Beginn der Neuzeit: Epochengrenze und Epochenbegriff, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Stevens Arroyo, Antonio M. (²2006): Cave of the Jagua: The Mythological World of the Taínos, Scranton: University of Scranton Press.

Theorizing Dominican Modernity: The Crossroads of “Revolution” on Hispaniola M AJA H ORN

The island of Hispaniola was a point of convergence for at least two critical events in the historical and political trajectory of the Americas to which Caribbean thought continuously returns when it seeks to account for the particularity of the region’s modernity. 1) As the first colony in the socalled “New World,” Hispaniola was a key starting point for European conquest and the colonization of the Americas after Columbus’ arrival in 1492. 2) The seminal Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) played out on the Western part of the island, ending European colonization there and leading to the establishment of the first independent Black republic. Much of Caribbean and Latin American critical thought can be characterized as a grappling with the aftereffects of the colonization of the Americas and with the possibility of decolonization, as well as with the forms of physical and psychological oppression, resistance, and liberation vividly highlighted in the Haitian Revolution. Indeed, in the past decade a wave of cultural and literary scholars such as Susan Buck-Morss (2009), Sibylle Fischer (2004), Nick Nesbitt (2008), and David Scott (2004), among others, have returned to Haiti and the Haitian Revolution in order to rethink its relation to Western modernity. Notably, the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighbor on Hispaniola, has been a much less fertile ground for inciting new critical approximations and theoretical proposals. This might have much to do with the fact that the Dominican Republic does not appear, at first glance, to be an especially promising site for critically thinking about resistant, emancipatory, or decolonizing projects in the Caribbean. If Haiti has been both a key prism

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and paradigm for thinking about resistance in the region, such anti-colonial and resistant impulses have been harder to make out in the Dominican Republic, on the eastern side of Hispaniola. Consider, as perhaps the most striking example of this tendency, the Dominican Republic’s seemingly pro-colonial request in 1861, after more than two decades of independence, to actually be reintegrated into Spain’s empire. As scholars both on and off the island have noted, a certain desire remains in the country well into the modern era – in the words of the preeminent Dominican scholar Silvio Torres-Saillant, “a historiographic desire that refuses to delink the narrative of the Dominican people from the experience of their original colonial masters, insisting on identifying the Dominicans of the Republican period with the Spaniards of the colonial era” (Torres-Saillant 2006: 227). The enormous Columbus Lighthouse that was constructed to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the “discovery” of the Americas in 1992 conspicuously symbolizes this historiographic desire. And it is such a desire that continues to inform the official political discourse of the Dominican Republic, which helps explain Sibylle Fischer’s forceful assertion that in the Dominican Republic, “more than anywhere else in the Caribbean, the political process cannot be equated with that of decolonization” (Fischer 2004: 133). Nonetheless, I insist in this essay that thinking through the particular Dominican postcolonial path and the seeming lack of anti-colonial and resistant impulses is a necessary and important complement to intellectualpolitical projects that take the Haitian Revolution as their point of departure. The critical move, in recent scholarship especially, to show how the Haitian Revolution fulfilled ideals that the French Revolution had grandly proclaimed but that it did not live up to, is related to the broader postcolonial theoretical undertaking of revealing Western modernity’s shortcomings in bearing out its own proclaimed ideals and promises, which is particularly evident in the colonial enterprise and the treatment of racial Others. This is without doubt a key critical scholarly undertaking, but I want to emphasize that an equally important one is the attempt to better understand how Caribbean realities were impacted by confronting precisely this doubleedged sword of European and, later, US imperialism and racist beliefs as well as the abovementioned Western political and social ideals that clothed them, however unrealized these proclaimed political and social ideals actually were in Western Europe or North America. To put it in Walter D. Mignolo’s terms, we must better account for the Caribbean’s relation with both the “darker” and the presumably more “enlightened” sides of Western modernity (Mignolo 2011).

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More specifically, in this essay I show how the meanings that “revolution” took on in the Dominican Republic, a country that might seem to be the least revolutionary in all of the Americas, speaks precisely to this double-edged impact of both the “darker” and the more “enlightened” sides of Western modernity. In fact, these transnational dynamics greatly determined intra-Caribbean relations, including on Hispaniola, where local relations between the Dominican Republic and Haiti cannot be understood without taking these global undercurrents into account. The Dominican Republic, unlike its next-door neighbor Haiti and the nearby island of Cuba, is generally not thought to have had a particularly “revolutionary” political history, yet perhaps no other country was as decisively affected by the Haitian revolution as the Dominican Republic. As Fischer insists, “[n]owhere in the Greater Caribbean did the Haitian Revolution have a more immediate impact than in Santo Domingo, and nowhere did it leave a deeper and more warped trace in the collective memory” (Fischer 2004: 131). The reasons for why this trace is particularly warped are manifold, but the most direct impact that the Haitian Revolution had on its neighbor is generally attributed to Haiti’s repeated efforts to unify the island. In 1801, and once again in 1805, Haitian revolutionary heroes, first Louverture and then Dessalines, occupied the eastern part of the island – what is now the Dominican Republic – to abolish slavery on the entire island, unify it, and better defend it from European imperial forces. These first two efforts were short-lived, but from 1822 to 1844 the Haitian president Boyer succeeded in unifying the island, and slavery was permanently abolished. These “unifications” or “occupations” (depending on the historian’s perspective) that followed from the Haitian Revolution are generally pointed to as the origin of long-lasting tensions between the two countries. In the Dominican national imagination, the complex aftereffects of the Haitian revolution have often been reduced to those of a threatening and ultimately more “barbaric” people taking over a hapless Dominican nation. This is not surprising, since much of official Dominican history has been told through the lens of opposition to Haiti. 1 Even in the 20th century, once 1 In the late 20th century, Dominican historians began to revise such simplistic portrayals of the Haitian-Dominican relationship as one of pure antagonism. For example, while historians disagree on Dominicans’ reactions to these invasions, “it is generally agreed that neither in 1801 nor in 1822 was there an anti-Haitian groundswell” (Fischer 2004: 169). It is also widely recognized that the 1822 occupation began with a non-violent, carefully negotiated, and even welcome takeover (ibid: 170).

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Haiti no longer represented an actual military threat to the Dominican Republic, Dominican political history and national identity were constructed in opposition to Haiti. The historian Pedro L. San Miguel, in his important book The Imagined Island summarizes the ever-present dichotomy created between Dominicans and Haitians as follows: »Haitians practiced voodoo, Dominicans Catholicism; Haitians spoke Creole, Dominicans Spanish; Haitians were black, Dominicans were of mixed race or white. More than this, Haitian culture and society were seen as an extension of Africa, whereas Santo Domingo clung to its pure Spanish origins. In short, the ideology of Dominican nationality has been markedly influenced by a sense of contrast, of ‘otherness’: Haiti.« (San Miguel 2005: 39)

At no point did this dichotomy become truer than during the Rafael L. Trujillo dictatorship from 1930-1961, when “anti-Haitianism took on the rank of reasons of State” (ibid: 64-65) and was inextricably written into the dictatorial discourse of Dominican national identity. Trujillo’s conception of the new Dominican modern nation that he was creating relied fundamentally on a differentiation from and vilification of its neighbor that was violently put into practice when the dictatorship’s forces massacred over thirty thousand Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent on Dominican territory in October 1937. Thereafter, in response to international condemnations and political forces, Trujillo paid nominal reparations and formally stepped aside as the country’s president in 1938; however, his grip on the country hardly abated, and neither did the Trujillato’s anti-Haitian discourse. For example, Joaquín Balaguer, one of the Trujillato’s intellectual figureheads, puppet presidents, and later, after the end of the Trujillato, the actual president of the country for a total of 22 years, defended Trujillo’s proceeding with the following words in 1952: »¿Nos hemos detenido a pensar suficientemente, por ejemplo, en lo que sería de la República si se interrumpe la obra de la nacionalización fronteriza, y si otra vez volvemos a quedar expuestos a la penetración sistemática de un pueblo de otra raza en donde cada mujer lleva en el vientre una tabla de multiplicar y en donde las familias viven en un estado de promiscuidad que favorece enormemente su expansión vegetativa?« (1952: 14).

2

2 “Have we paused sufficiently to think, for example, about what would happen to this Republic if the project of nationalizing the border were interrupted, and if we were again exposed to the systematic penetration of another race, wherein

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Balaguer’s discourse reflects how the language of invasion and of racist denigration remained in place long after Haiti represented an actual military threat, and how it came to focus on Haitian migrants and laborers in the Dominican Republic as a “silent” occupation and takeover. Balaguer’s speech also reflects how the Trujillato adamantly insisted that Haitians were “another race,” and Trujillo notoriously emphasized the country’s Hispanic and long-extinct indigenous heritage at the expense of its African heritage. As Torres-Saillant explains, this proclamation in fact reflects how: »[…] the regime gave currency to the term indio (Indian) to denominate the complexion of people of mixed ancestry. The term assumed official status in so far as the national identification card (cédula) gave it as a skin color designation during the three decades of the dictatorship and beyond.« (Torres-Saillant 2000: 1104)

This erroneous emphasis on indigenous elements served to differentiate Dominicans from their Haitian neighbors, who were portrayed as “black and savage.” Dominicans’ rhetorical embrace of the term “indio” and the tendency to racially differentiate themselves through it from Haitians are nowadays often seen by outsiders as particularly askew, if not illogical; yet what is forgotten is how these also strategically responded to an international political context in which European and US perceptions of Haiti rendered this identity construct quite reasonable, and indeed quite in tune with prevalent views at the time. This role of outside racist views of Haiti that helped create and sustain Dominican racial discourses is fleshed out more extensively by Ginetta Candelario in her book Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beautyshops. As Candelario describes, »[…] at various moments throughout the nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth century, US government agents and North American capitalists colluded with [the] Dominican elite in presenting the Dominican Republic as the most ‘Hispanic, Catholic, and white’ of (Latin) American nations against the Haitian Other.« (Calendario 2007: 37)

each woman has in her womb a multiplication table and where families live in a state of promiscuity that greatly favors their vegetal expansion?” (free translation of the author, also quoted in Horn 2014: 31).

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Thus, “the representation of Dominicans and the Dominican Republic as a nation with a minimal degree of ‘pure blackness’” ultimately “should be understood as part of a geopolitically framed racial project of US imperialism that intersected unevenly but importantly with Dominican nationbuilding projects through anti-Haitianist discourses and ideologies” (ibid: 14). Indeed, Torres-Saillant similarly highlights that “[i]t is not inconceivable [...] that the texture of negrophobic and anti-Haitian nationalist discourse sponsored by official spokespersons in the Dominican state may have drawn significantly from North American sources dating back to the first years of the republic” (Torres-Saillant 2000: 1088). Hence, “[i]n large measure the context [in which Dominican identity was being formed, narrated, and displayed] was defined by a triangle of relations between Haiti, the United States, and the Dominican Republic” (Candelario 2007: 36). This triangular – and not binary – relation and the ways it determined the histories of the two nations of Hispaniola, including their successful and failed revolutions, remain insufficiently understood in general. Even as the two sides and their peoples were in direct contact, their encounters were invariably mediated by how dominant Western European and North American imperial forces imagined them. The rhetorical and conceptual repertoires through which the two sides of Hispaniola approached each other were in many ways largely prescribed beforehand. For example, here we might do well to remember Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s key work on the Haitian Revolution and its international reception. In his essay, “An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event,” Trouillot emphasizes how “[t]he Haitian Revolution [...] entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened” because existing “categories were incompatible with the idea of a slave revolution” (Trouillot 1995: 73). 3 As he further expounds: »The events that shook up Saint Domingue from 1791 to 1804 constituted a sequence for which not even the extreme political left in France or in England had a conceptual frame of reference. They were ‘unthinkable’ facts in the framework of Western thought.« (Trouillot 1995: 82, author’s emphasis)

3 In fact, “the key tenets of the political philosophy that became explicit in SaintDomingue/Haiti between 1791 and 1804 were not accepted by world public opinion until after World War II” (Trouillot 1995: 88).

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European and North American thought and politics struggled with and resisted accepting the new reality created by the successful Haitian revolution, and this was reflected in other countries’ lengthy refusals to recognize Haitian independence. This “diplomatic rejection was only the symptom of an underlying denial” that had everything to do with how “the majorities in Europe and the Americas” had “ranked humankind” (ibid: 95). It is within this larger political and social context that the path that Dominican conceptions of Haiti has taken since the mid-nineteenth century – including Dominicans’ views of the Haitian Revolution as a savage takeover – emerges as less aberrant and peculiar than it is nowadays often perceived to be. The general inability to perceive the Haitian Revolution for what it was and the focus on Haiti as a failing and deteriorating nation-state along with the pervasive racism that underwrote both of these views greatly contributed to how Dominican political discourse would define itself in contradistinction to its neighbor. The backdrop of Haitian’s presumed “savagery” and “backwardness” enabled Rafael L. Trujillo’s zealous contrasting discourse about bringing progress and creating a new “modern” Dominican nation-state. In fact, the Trujillo dictatorship employed any and all available rhetorical devices, including the key modern concept of “revolution,” to drive home the idea that proper modernity had been inaugurated in the Dominican Republic by Trujillo, an idea that in many ways continues to hold fast to this day. Notably, the Trujillato liked to present itself as a revolution that tapped into the “idea of historical time” inscribed in the idea of modern revolution, which David Scott describes as “moving upward and onward in a rhythmic series of successive stages” (Scott 2004: 89). On the eve of the 1930 election, Trujillo made a proclamation that insistently described himself as part of a “popular revolution” and then, after “winning” the elections and assuming the presidency on the 16th of August 1930, he described his presidency as “la obra de la revolución” (“the work of the revolution”), which he asserted his government would continue (Trujillo 1946: 12, 18). Three decades later, in 1960, the rhetoric of revolution remained firmly in place; Trujillo declared that the Trujillato “has been our revolution, and it is a gloriously successful one” (Trujillo 1960: 18). As Scott notes, the “narrative of revolution is inseparable from the larger narrative of modernity and inseparable, therefore, from those other cognitive and ethical-political categories that constitute and give point to that narrative – categories such as ‘nation’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘progress’, ‘reason’, and so on” (Scott 2004: 89). The Trujillato was indeed keenly aware of the weight these categories and ideals carried in modern Western politics, and wielded these effusively and

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self-consciously, making them part and parcel of its core political vocabulary. To summarize, the Trujillato’s overarching discourse of modernization was synthesized with a modern political vocabulary refashioned for authoritarian ends – including the term “revolution” along with other terms such as “democracy,” “equality,” “justice,” and “sovereignty” – largely with an eye towards forestalling US interventionist tendencies and retaining US support. In other, more general terms, one could say that Trujillo wielded the rhetoric of the “enlightened” side of Western modernity, not least through his use of the terms “equality” and “liberty” as well as “democracy” and even “revolution,” to keep at bay what Mignolo terms the “dark side of modernity,” i.e., its colonial, racist, and imperial impulses, some of which it also adopted and in turn directed against Haiti. Trujillo’s “revolution” was so extraordinarily successful, sustaining itself for over thirty years and lastingly shaping Dominican political culture, in part because of how it appropriated and wielded this double-edged conceptual sword of Western imperialism and ideals for its own purposes. The moment when Dominican political culture seemed poised to finally achieve a decisive break with the Trujillato and its political culture was again greatly determined by outside imperial forces and their (mis)conceptualization of and response to another key Caribbean event – this time the Cuban Revolution. After Trujillo’s assassination in 1961, the first post-dictatorship elections were held in 1962 – the only truly democratic elections for over a decade to come. Juan Bosch, a renowned writer, won the elections with the opposition party he had formed in exile, the PRD, the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano. Yet after only a few months in power, he was brought down by a military-led coup, which had been precipitated by a virulent defamation campaign driven principally by the Catholic Church with the support of business elites who falsely accused Bosch of having “communist tendencies.” This campaign tapped directly into the anti-communist rhetoric that Trujillo had employed and that had helped him ingratiate himself again with the Americans, who had soured on him as a result of the Haitian massacre. The lasting political effectiveness of discursive maneuvers associated with the Trujillato and some of its key forces, both the military and the Catholic Church, and their ability to forestall the formation of a new political landscape under Bosch, clearly demonstrate how difficult the break with the Trujillato’s legacies – including its rhetorical legacies – would prove to be for the country. Nonetheless, this fateful turn of events furthered the political mobilization of population sectors that had formerly been (forced to be) politically

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passive during the Trujillato, leading to a revolutionary uprising in April 1965 that took place primarily in the capital and that called for the reinstallation of the constitutionally elected president Juan Bosch. When the success of the rebel forces – which included parts of the military (as well as quite a few enthusiastic writers, artists, and intellectuals) – seemed imminent, US forces again occupied the country, driven by the fear of another communist foothold forming in the Caribbean in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. The specter of the Cuban Revolution and its role in US Cold War politics thus had a direct impact on the Dominican political landscape and forestalled what for many Dominicans represented the country’s best hope of making a decisive break with their authoritarian past. The viewpoints and apprehensions that European and US political powers developed in response to both the Haitian and Cuban revolutions thus greatly impacted Dominican political developments and the possibility (or impossibility) of anti-hegemonic forces consolidating in the Dominican Republic. Yet this is only one side of the double-edged imperial project, and what remains less understood is how the other, seemingly more “enlightened” side of Western modernity acted alongside these more obviously problematic political maneuvers. Little or no attention has been paid to how the ideals and vocabulary of modern politics were adopted with fervor as much by Trujillo as by the subsequent semi-authoritarian regime of Joaquín Balaguer (1966-1978 and 1986-1996). That is to say, long before democracy is now said to have taken hold in the country, which most scholarly accounts date to 1978, the country was characterized by a modern political discourse of revolution, democracy, progress, equality, and sovereignty (and by all the trappings of such a discourse). For example, Jonathan Hartlyn – as is typical of most political scientists on and off the island – suggests that the Dominican Republic had “practically no democratic history until well into the second half of the twentieth century” (Hartlyn 1998: 34). Yet this statement is true only if one looks for the indicators associated with democracy as defined by the Western political tradition, while in fact Trujillo upheld a democratic façade through his entire regime, as did Balaguer. Thus, for many decades Dominican citizens were constantly engulfed in a democratic political discourse and engaged in democratic practices such as voting in elections. This authoritarian democratic history and its effects on Dominican democracy thereafter remains an underestimated issue for which we still lack an adequate conceptual apparatus. The Dominican sociologist Rosario Espinal addresses this issue in Autoritarismo y democracia en la política dominicana, where she notes the following:

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»What needs to be studied more thoroughly, in particular in countries like the Dominican Republic, is how – and if – authoritarian discourses and practices have been impregnated with references to democracy, and what the effects of such experiences are for the vitality of authoritarianism, or for the success of democratic consolidation.« (Rosario Espinal 1987: 15)

4

Western political thought provides no conceptual tools for apprehending some of the particular meanings that political terms have taken on in the Dominican Republic, largely in response to various forms of incursion of European and US imperial forces and thought patterns. What the Dominican case offers in more theoretical terms to the Caribbean region as a whole is a call to more carefully consider the various forms of rejection of – but also of appeasement with – notions of modernity put forth by the European colonial powers but also later by the US in the region, and how these have continuously had an impact in the region since 1492. The process of understanding and thinking about Caribbean postcolonial political cultures faces the challenge of how modern Western political concepts continually both bear down on and yet fail to fully capture Caribbean political realities shaped by the double-edged sword of Western imperialism and ideals. I thus fully concur with David Scott’s assertion that “the central demand after postcoloniality” is “a new theory of politics” (Scott 1999: 18), and in this essay I have pointed to some of the dynamics that such a new theory would have to account for in a more satisfactory fashion than any of the currently available conceptual tools.

4 “Lo que falta por estudia más detenidamente, en especial en países como República Dominicana, es cómo – si acaso – los discursos y prácticas autoritarias han estado impregnadas de referencias a la democracia, y cuáles son los efectos de tales experiencias para la vitalidad del autoritarismo, o para el éxito en la consolidación democrática” (free translation by the author; also quoted in Horn 2014: 23).

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References

Balaguer, Joaquín (1952): El Principio de la Alternabilidad en la Historia Dominicana, Ciudad Trujillo: Impresora Dominicana. Buck-Morss, Susan (2009): Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Candelario, Ginetta (2007): Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beautyshops, Durham: Duke University Press. Espinal, Rosario (1987): Autoritarismo y democracia en la política dominicana, San José, Costa Rica: CAPEL. Fischer, Sibylle (2004): Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Durham: Duke University Press. Hartlyn, Jonathan (1998): The Struggle for Democratic Politics in the Dominican Republic, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Horn, Maja (2014): “Dictates of Dominican Democracy: Conceptualizing Caribbean Political Modernity.” Small Axe 44, pp. 18-35. Mignolo, Walter (2011): The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Durham: Duke University Press. Nesbitt, Nick (2008): Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and Radical Enlightenment, Virginia: University of Virginia Press. San Miguel, Pedro (2005). The Imagined Island: History, Identity, and Utopia in Hispaniola. Trans. Jane Ramírez, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Scott, David (1999): Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scott, David (2004): Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Durham: Duke University Press. Torres-Saillant, Silvio (2000): “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity.” Callaloo 23/3, pp. 1086-1111. Torres-Saillant, Silvio (2006): An Intellectual History of the Caribbean, New York: Palgrave. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (1995): “An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event.” Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press, 70-107. Trujillo, Rafael L. (1946): Discursos, mensajes y proclamas. Santo Domingo: Editorial El Diario.

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Trujillo, Rafael L. (1960): Trujillo Speaks. A Series of Four Articles Expressly Written for and Published by the Miami Herald on April 3-6, 1960, Ciudad Trujillo.

Migration Flows and the Politics of Exclusion in the French Antilles K RISTEN S. C HILDERS

Migration has had a profound effect on the Caribbean – most dramatically, of course, in the tragic slave trade from Africa to the sugar plantations of European colonies in the Americas. One cannot raise the subject of migration in the Caribbean context without simultaneously conjuring painful associations with former journeys, either forced or voluntary, across the Atlantic in centuries past. Slavery was first abolished in the French Antilles during the revolutionary turmoil of the 1790s, and a revolution in Haiti gave birth to the first Black Republic of the New World. Although Napoleon Bonaparte reestablished slavery, it was definitively abolished during the revolution of 1848 in Martinique and Guadeloupe, which ushered in a new relationship between the “vieilles colonies” and metropolitan France. Following the trials of the Second World War, Martinique and Guadeloupe, along with Guyane and Réunion, voted in 1946 to become regular departments of France, ostensibly equal to any other metropolitan department such as the Ile-de-France. The history of the French Antilles has rarely been a triumphant march on the road to equality, but rather a clash of expectations and competing demands meeting at the intersection of the postwar world. Studying migration has therefore been an inherently complex and problematic matter, either in attempts to come to terms with the past or in blueprints for change in the future. In the wake of departmentalization, migration appeared to metropolitan French officials as a solution to a problem: the problem was over-population and under-development in the new Départements d’outre-mer (DOMs), and the solution was to facilitate the migration of carefully-selected Antilleans to a nation experiencing labor shortages in the postwar economic boom of the “Thirty Glorious Years.”

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For Antilleans, migration to the long-idealized metropole often confronted them with blatant racism they had not experienced in the Caribbean and prompted new nationalist movements calling into question the “assimilation law” that made them full-fledged members of the French family. In the last half of the 20th century, Antillean migration was not only complicated but also very much concerned with the issue of contested boundaries – national, racial, and cultural – and about who belonged on either side of these lines. For the European French, migration offered a straightforward way to redress the imbalance of people behind French borders; whereas Antilleans were needed in low-paying jobs in France, metropolitan functionaries could make themselves useful in the new DOMs by taking on leadership positions in the Antilles. The forced assimilation of Antillean migrants in France, often disguised as cultural republicanism that ignored race, prompted pushback from Antilleans who set out to create their own national boundaries beyond the limits of the Hexagon. If Martinicans and Guadeloupeans would not be recognized as full citizens in France, then they would draw their own lines of Antillean national sovereignty within which they could be assured of real liberty and equality. The French state’s involvement in migration from the Caribbean to the metropole therefore became the lightning rod for much of the dissatisfaction with and rejection of departmentalization in the 1970s. The history of Antillean migration shares much in common with that of other regions of the world undergoing decolonization in the decades after World War II, but it also provides unique insight into the fate of the nationstate in the 21st century. Historians and sociologists have studied the waves of migrants coming from formerly colonized areas to European metropoles within the framework of theories on colonialism or liberal capitalism. Such models have often seen the migrants themselves as hapless victims of impersonal global forces over which they have no control. And yet the history of Antillean migration offers new understanding of migrants’ journeys as part of complex, circular movements built on rational individual choices that create distinctly new identities and affiliations rather than affirm national boundaries or sociological theories. The stories of Antillean migration illustrate that if the late 20th century nation-state was no guarantee of equality for all citizens, neither was recasting the nation within new physical or cultural borders that themselves defined new aliens and undesirables. Antilleans who have straddled cultural, racial, and physical barriers in the last half-century have in fact presaged the unprecedented forces of globalization, drifting margins, and multiple identities of the post-Cold War world in all its complexity.

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Just as the islanders tacked against the prevailing winds of independence in the Caribbean, for Martinicans and Guadeloupeans migration to the “Hexagon” defied the usual immigrant experience in key ways. Most important was the fact that Antilleans who emigrated to France were, in fact, French citizens; unlike other immigrants who faced legal obstacles to settling in France, Antilleans were, on paper at least, the same as any other French citizen relocating for a chance at a better life. While islanders certainly did experience racism, discrimination, and police harassment in France, they were in a legally superior position to those immigrants from North and Sub-Saharan Africa who worried about deportation on a daily basis. However North African immigrants could sometimes “pass” for white in daily interactions in the metro or in stores, unlike Antilleans in France. Most Antillean migrants also saw themselves as fundamentally different from black African migrants in culture, history, and identity, though white metropolitan French usually ignored such distinctions (cf. Ndiaye 2008: 47). Another key difference in this experience of migration was the intense involvement of the state in selecting migrants, organizing their journeys, and facilitating their integration into French society. This was the government’s response to the disparity in opportunities between European France and the islands, and officials constantly affirmed that immigration policy was to be understood as a means to promote “social advancement” (promotion sociale) for these new citizens. Immigrants to France following the Second World War were overwhelmingly young, single men who came to France without their families to work in low-paying jobs in the construction industry. North Africans made up the largest group of these immigrants who helped build up a nation facing an acute housing shortage in the postwar years. Immigration from the Antilles was a different experience: rather than being the affair of young men without families, there were large numbers of female migrants who made the transatlantic journey, and this number increased over time. According to Yves Charbit, in 1968 men made up 52.9 per cent of migrants from the Départements d’outre mer; by 1982, men made up only 48.8 per cent of the migrant population (Charbit 1987: 61). In a study of Guadeloupean migration to France in the 1960s, JeanClaude Baptistide remarked: “what is striking is the relatively high number of unmarried women with children who decide to migrate” (Baptistide). Female emigration was actively encouraged by the French government as a means of dealing with the demographic crisis in Martinique and Guadeloupe; young women emigrating to France would not only lower birth rates in the Antilles but would also presumably absorb more “modern” family

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values and disseminate them in the Caribbean if and when they returned. The notion that metropolitan reproductive choices would be absorbed by Antillean immigrants proved to be largely true; the encouragement of emigration for young women, however, contradicted the ideological premium placed on “legitimate” marriage, stable unions and “intact” families enunciated by French officials in the Antilles for the past decades. Emigration schemes from the new overseas departments had powerful unintended consequences that ultimately undermined the French insistence on family as the cornerstone of social and economic development in the Antilles. Considering the high birth rate and low number of jobs available in Martinique and Guadeloupe, emigration to France appeared to many metropolitan French legislators as the only solution to a potentially volatile state of affairs in the new departments. Initially studies were undertaken by the Ministre d’Outre Mer that gauged the viability of encouraging emigration from overpopulated Martinique and Guadeloupe to Guyane, a former colony that became a DOM at the same time and lacked people and resources but certainly did not lack a reputation as the dumping ground for France’s undesirables. Not surprisingly, Antilleans themselves did not view emigration to Guyane as a solution to their islands’ development problems, and plans to sponsor such a transfer of population were scrapped. French government officials came to the conclusion that emigration to the metropole, to France itself, was the only solution to many of the population problems inherent in the Caribbean. In 1963, the Bureau pour le développement des migrations intéressant les départements d’outre mer, or BUMIDOM, was established in Paris to organize emigration from the overseas departments. With satellite offices in the new departments of the Caribbean as well as in the Indian Ocean department of Réunion, the goal of BUMIDOM was to recruit and select the best candidates for immigration to the metropole and to assist them with housing, employment, and acculturation once they arrived in Europe. While the publicly-enunciated goal of BUMIDOM was social advancement for workers from the new departments, internal government documents reveal that migration policy was, unsurpringly, much more a reflection of metropolitan concerns than the aspirations of young people from the Antilles. In a confidential memo of 1967, the Minister of Social Affairs emphasized that the two overriding concerns of any French immigration policy were the French economy’s need for foreign workers and the restoration of state control over immigration “in order to avoid the massive influx on our territory of unassimilable elements.” While the memo focused especially on illegal immigrants from Algeria and Africa in the wake of

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decolonization, the Minister also expressed concern about immigrants from the DOMs. The statutes of BUMIDOM, after all, “conceived of immigration from the DOMs solely in terms of “mopping up” (épongement) of demographic excesses in the overseas departments. But this immigration presents problems of integration into metropolitan society […].” 1 The document went on to warn that such a costly immigration program could not in any case be sustained beyond four or five years. BUMIDOM was actually “a gamble,” since it presumed that after only a few years economic development would provide more work opportunities in the DOMs themselves, that migration to the metropole would always be feasible, and that access to education and birth control would have quelled the demographic crisis on the islands. Despite the pessimistic outlook on BUMIDOM’s goals, the Ministry of Social Affairs could conceive of very few alternatives, since it was hardly possible or advisable to offer young people in the DOMs absolutely no hope and to express no confidence in their future. The financial costs of the program were particularly acute in the 60s and 70s as those who chose to migrate with the help of BUMIDOM were from different socio-economic backgrounds than those who migrated earlier in the century. Traveling to France had traditionally been the prerogative of young men from well-to-do families who could afford to send them to study at French universities for several years. For Antilleans who traveled to France in the 1950s, the immigrant experience approximated that of other intellectual and artistic elites who had enjoyed social and cultural success and seemed to integrate seamlessly into French life. These migrants sent glowing reports back home about the wonders of life in the metropole, contributing in no small way to the idealization of life in France among much of the population. In part this enthusiasm was bolstered by the reality that social security benefits and other economic assistance was substantially more generous in the metropole. More than an actual place, France itself was an ideal; a symbol of hope and deliverance from oppression that cast filial relations between the metropole and its former colonies in more egalitarian terms. By the 1960s, however, emigrants became more socially and economically diverse, and the journey no longer guaranteed social advancement but often shunted Antilleans into low-paying, low-status jobs that fell far short of the idealized new lives they had hoped to take up in Europe (cf. Pourette 1

Ministère des Affaires Sociales, Direction de la Population et des Migrations, “Propositions concernant la politique française de l’immigration.” In: Centre des archives contemporaines, Fontainebleau (hereafter CAC), 20080699, Art. 8.

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2006: 35-36). Those who availed themselves of BUMIDOM’s help tended to be poorer, with less education, and not surprisingly had fewer positive experiences in France. As Father Pierre Lacroix remarked about former migrants in his congregation in Guadeloupe, “for one group the Motherland meant advancement, freedom, success, humanity. And for the other, migration was a trap.” 2 These bad experiences, as well as the fact that the French government actively encouraged migration, contributed to Antilleans’ increasingly negative view of BUMIDOM, particularly among political groups who advocated autonomy or independence in the Antilles. Critics accused the agency of draining the departments of their young people, sending them to work in menial jobs in France in a kind of reverse slave trade. Louisa Dowling-Carter, a former staff member for BUMIDOM, said that criticism of the agency was so intense that they were prohibited from public advertising “and almost even from existing.” She avoided telling anyone she worked for BUMIDOM because “it wasn’t well-regarded.” 3 Local authorities barred BUMIDOM from advertising its services and recruiting publicly in the DOMs. This, French officials believed, was responsible for the paucity of accurate information about the program which let hostile attacks from its critics dominate public discourse. M. Chopin, the regional director for BUMIDOM in Fort de France, believed that such false claims about his agency had led to a leveling-off of sponsored migrations between 1964 and 1965. Director Chopin indicated that his office had been reduced to “word of mouth” publicity that couldn’t counter the strident critiques of certain activist political groups. 4 Officials stressed that improving the public image of BUMIDOM was essential if the government was to counter sensationalistic charges of organizing a modern slave-trade or promoting genocide with such policies. 5 In addition to numerous reports, opinion polls and public relations studies, BUMIDOM officials took concrete legal action to counter negative images of the agency in the public eye. In 1973, the weekly journal Politico-Hebdo published an article entitled “Les négriers du BUMIDOM” that the agency could not let go unchallenged. The article accused BUMIDOM 2 Père Pierre Lacroix, interviewed in the film L’Avenir est ailleurs, directed by Antoine Leonard-Maestrati, Doriane Films and Cinéma Public Films, 2007.

3 Louisa Dowling-Carter, L’Avenir est ailleurs. 4 BUMIDOM, “Rapport No. 1; Compte-Rendu d’Activités au 15 novembre 1966,” p. 7, CAC 20080699, Art. 1.

5 “L’Image de marque du BUMIDOM et CASODOM-Commentaire,” CAC 19840442, Art. 5.

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of making false promises to young people in the DOMs who joined up in hope of professional advancement but became simply a source of cheap labor for metropolitan industries. Particularly telling, according to PoliticoHebdo, was the fact that BUMIDOM paid for a young migrant’s journey to France but never a paid for a trip back home for young people from the DOMs who had had enough and wanted to go back to the Antilles. The BUMIDOM administration stressed that a return passage had never been promised to any migrant it assisted, and sought to pursue the journal in court for its defamatory language. Prefect Vie, the Chair of BUMIDOM’s administration, noted that »Without contesting anyone’s liberty to criticize [BUMIDOM], it seems to me totally unacceptable that a member of the press should call civil servants “true slavetraders” … when their only concern is to efficiently assist French citizens from overseas who voluntarily chose to set themselves up in the metropole.«

6

The French government was sensitive to criticism of the organization, fearing that such denunciations would turn more Antilleans against departmentalization and in favor of outright independence from France. Despite the negative publicity surrounding BUMIDOM, the number of state-sponsored migrations continued to accelerate over the years and there were always Antilleans without means who wanted to start a new life in the metropole (cf. Vie 1977). 7 By the end of 1975, BUMIDOM had officially helped over 105,470 migrants from all the new DOMs (including Réunion) and undertook an opinion poll among about 40,000 of these to gauge their attitudes and experiences. Although up to a quarter of the migrants complained about either the French climate or the scarcity of housing, as many as 85% of them said they were “satisfied” by their reception in France. A large majority indicated that they had very good social relations with colleagues (91 per cent) and the administration (75 per cent) although 45 per cent indicated that they had experienced difficulties since their arrival. Around 66 per cent of the migrants were satisfied with their overall experience with migration to the metropole, certainly not an exuberant commen-

6 Procès-Verbal d’une consultation écrite du Conseil d’Administration en date du 8 mars 1973,” BUMIDOM, CAC 20080699, Art. 2.

7 CAC 850665, Art. 29.

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dation but nonetheless convincing enough to keep fellow Antilleans making the journey. 8 It may have been true, as BUMIDOM agents suggested, that greater employment opportunities existed in France than in the Antilles; nevertheless these opportunities were seldom high-status positions offering Antilleans greater prestige than they could find in the new departments. All too frequently immigrants were shuttled into low-paying service jobs in household help, sanitation, or the postal service (cf. Condon/Ogden 1991: 451). Migrants themselves fought against this dynamic, whenever possible seeking work in public service in the state sector, which was thought to proffer better status, tenure, and pay and was perhaps a less racially discriminatory environment. For women migrants, this move toward jobs that were perceived as less demeaning was particularly marked. Most of the young Antillean women BUMIDOM attempted to place were directed toward domestic employment; they were sent to training centers established in various parts of France where they were encouraged to enter this “noble profession” by assurances of good working conditions in a “family environment” (ibid: 453). Part of their training entailed learning metropolitan standards of cooking, health and hygiene for a proper French family. Although French themselves, they were not presumed to know how to fit into and serve a family in the metropole, and had to be instructed in such values and practices. For officials of the BUMIDOM, this was a suitable answer to the question of how to assimilate citizens of the Antilles into the larger French family: as apprentices to metropolitan families, they could learn the appropriate norms and standards of family life in supervised domestic service. For Antillean women who migrated to the metropole, life as a maid or housekeeper could be extremely difficult. Many were forced to work long hours with little time off and even less privacy. Because they lived with their employers, their room and board was frequently deducted from their already-meager salary and they lacked the community connections that sustained many Antillean immigrants in Paris. Julétane, a Martinican woman who migrated with BUMIDOM in 1964, worked in arduous circumstances for two families in Paris after she first arrived. Despite the fact that she experienced racism and illness in France, she persevered and eventually found a new job as a university janitor cleaning labs and class8

“Une étude du BUMIDOM sur la situation des migrants antillaises et réunionais établis en métropole,” Marchés Tropicaux et Méditérranéens,” 2 avril 1976, CAC 850665, Art. 29.

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rooms. “With that, my life really changed […] It happened by accident, in the metro. I met a girl, Marie-Josée, from Guadeloupe […] she told me about her work. She was a civil servant. That was really something at the time!” 9 Julétane had left for France with the intention of becoming a nurse but was steered into domestic service by BUMIDOM. Nevertheless, this gave her a springboard to find other work in the Parisian educational corps that she found much more rewarding. Like Julétane, young women migrants from the Antilles often had different ideas than those presented at BUMIDOM’s training centers. Employment records show that these female immigrants left household work relatively quickly and tried to find other employment, often as nurses’ aides in hospitals (cf. ibid). Furthermore, young women from the Antilles frequently had their own families to think of, and were rather less interested in learning the ways of another metropolitan family. Antillean immigrants commonly solicited BUMIDOM for assistance in family reunification, seeking to bring young children left behind in the Caribbean to join them in France. For them, the rhetoric of a greater French family and France as a “mère patrie” meant assistance with socio-professional aspirations and accession to a higher level of universal French culture, not menial work for any French family in particular. As much as French government officials and administrators at BUMIDOM wanted immigrants from the DOMS to pass through the agency’s “psycho-technical” evaluations and follow its instructions upon arrival, the reality was that many immigrants bypassed the organization altogether and relocated on their own. Max Moulins, the Director of BUMIDOM in 1965, wrote to the Prefect of Martinique and the Departmental Head of BUMIDOM in Fort-de-France to explain the unfortunate situation of three young women from an “honorable” family in Guadeloupe who migrated “spontaneously” to Paris. Without the agency’s help they fell prey to a tempting offer of lodging and sent several months’ deposit to an unscrupulous person who forced them out weeks after their arrival. Finding themselves without work, money, or a roof over their heads, they requested help from BUMIDOM and were sent to one of the centers for young immigrant women in Crouy-sur-Ourcq. Moulins warned the Prefect that this was

9 “Les Voyages du BUMIDOM: Julétane.” In Gisèle Pineau/Marie Abraham (1998), Femmes des Antilles: Traces et Voix. Cent cinquante ans après l’abolition de l’esclavage, Paris: Éditions Stock, p. 114.

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an all too common experience for migrants from the Antilles who were lured with false promises into cataclysmic disappointments. 10 Historian Felix Germain notes that Antillean women migrants often became pawns in the political campaigns of French government officials and Antillean nationalists in Paris. French administrators viewed them as “Jezebels” responsible for the population boom in the Caribbean while proindependence male students from Martinique and Guadeloupe played up their sexual exploitation at the hands of French neo-imperialists. Prostitution among Antillean female migrants was not as rampant as these nationalist groups suggested, yet it proved useful as a sensational means of debating national sovereignty (cf. Germain 2010: 492). In the early 1960s, nationalist groups such as the Organisation de la jeunesse anti-colonialiste de Martinique (OJAM), the Groupe d’organisation nationale des Guadeloupéens (GONG), and the Front Antillo-Guyanais all sought to mobilize Antilleans against the current political status of the DOMs and viewed migration as detrimental to Antilleans, particularly women (cf. ibid: 491). Neither French officials nor Antillean nationalists were concerned primarily with women’s experiences but rather saw them as part of larger political goals. Many women who migrated interpreted the journey in gendered terms that had nothing to do with either “social promotion” or neo-colonialist exploitation but rather a chance to live a life that was less dependent on men. Julétane from Martinique noted: »To come back to BUMIDOM, believe me people criticized it in the beginning, especially the pro-independence people who spoke ill of France. But you should know that BUMIDOM saved many women who would have turned out badly if they had stayed at home, sitting in their mother’s hut, waiting for what? To find a man and get pregnant. That’s the reason I left. That’s what drove me to do it. I couldn’t see anything good about staying in Martinique. I certainly didn’t want to end up like that… to find myself with a fat belly waiting around on a man… I can tell you that BUMIDOM changed my life. I don’t know what would have become of me if I didn’t have the courage to make the journey.«

11

10 Max Moulins, Président, BUMIDOM ; à Monsieur le Préfet de la Martinique, Fort de France, Paris, le 10 Decembre 1965. Archives départementales de la Martinique, 16627 75/16 No. 51. 11 “Julétane,” Femmes des Antilles, p. 112.

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Mme. M., a Martinican interviewed for a newspaper article on Antillean women in France, echoed similar sentiments about power relations between men and women in the Antilles. Young women often got pregnant and were faced with a dilemma: “you need money to raise a child, so the man says if you want money you’ll have to keep sleeping with me […] if she does, she’ll have more children and more of the same blackmail […] until he decides otherwise.” Mme. M. chose to emphasize the resourcefulness and courageousness of Antillean migrants rather than focus on their exploitation in France. 12 Perhaps the most vexing problem for Antillean immigrants was not the motives of BUMIDOM but the almost insurmountable obstacles they faced finding housing in France. Antillean migrants almost always sent postcards home of the Eiffel Tower against a brilliant blue sky, feeding the myth of a Parisian El Dorado. But as one Antillean journalist wrote: “we don’t live in the Eiffel Tower. More likely it’s an HLM [low-cost housing] in Sarcelles. And HLMs don’t often appear on postcards” (Clerc 1980: 16). Time and again Antilleans report being turned away when prospective landlords realized they were black. Valentin and Faustina Clérence described the difficulties they had finding anything more than a furnished hotel room when they arrived in the early 1960s. As soon as they showed up to look at an empty apartment, they were told it was already rented. Faustina reported that “as soon as I set foot in France it was another story. I noticed the difference from the moment I arrived. I had come from a different country, I felt like a foreigner in France.” 13 Internal BUMIDOM documents reveal that the agency was itself very concerned about the housing problem. Officials disliked having to lodge migrants in foyers or temporary hotels but were often constrained by the severe shortage of permanent dwellings available in Paris in the postwar years and by their prohibitive cost. Instead of getting better, the situation only worsened over the course of the 1970s so that just when BUMIDOM was assisting the greatest number of migrants, it had the smallest number of apartments available for those arriving from the Antilles. 14 This problem was especially acute for those migrants hoping to benefit from the family reunification program, for having spouses and children join them in France was unlikely to be possible in the dormitories and hotels where many were 12 “Une Enquête sur les femmes Antillaises in France,” Témoignages, 1 Septembre 1980, CAC 850665.

13 Faustina Clérence, L’Avenir est ailleurs. 14 BUMIDOM. Problèmes de la migration, p. 48. CAC 19840442, Art. 7.

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housed. Increasingly Antilleans were funneled into low-cost housing in soulless new developments on the outskirts of Paris whenever it became available. The acute housing problem migrants faced was not simply due to an increasingly tight market but also to the negative attitudes of property owners who were free to indulge their prejudices about renting to immigrants and people of color. They cited complaints from other neighbors about noise and late-night parties or low standards of hygiene as justifications for their refusal to help a state agency in its endeavors to house those arriving from the DOMs. BUMIDOM attempted to tackle the problem by initiating a series of housing inspections meant to weed out the renters who were causing problems and thus salvage the reputation of other respectable citizens. Along with other social service organizations, officials stressed the need to educate and advise new immigrants on how to behave in a metropolitan environment and to keep up their apartments in an appropriately clean state. In one report from 1974, BUMIDOM inspectors found that over 80 per cent of those lodged with their help were maintaining their apartments well; only seven per cent were found to be living in “dirty” or “damaged” locales. 15 This minority could hardly be blamed for the extreme difficulties all migrants faced in finding housing, as clearly other discriminatory attitudes were at work. Endemic racism was a problem that Antillean migrants faced whether they came to France with BUMIDOM or not. It was a rude awakening to discover that the France they encountered was nothing like the France of their dreams, and for many Antilleans, this was the first time they were confronted with fellow citizens who told them to “go back home.” Although BUMIDOM became a symbol of French neo-colonialism and racism for Antillean nationalists in the metropole, in many ways it was the attitudes of the French themselves, and not any one governmental program, that contributed to the growing disillusionment with departmentalization. Parisian newspapers recounted the frustrations of Antillean job-seekers who were frequently told by prospective employers that of course they themselves weren’t racist, but their patrons were and therefore they wouldn’t be hired. 16 In a study of Antillean university students in Paris in 1968 and 1969, researchers found that almost 70 per cent of those interviewed believed that racism and color prejudice was a serious problem in France.

15 BUMIDOM, “Note,” Octobre 1974, p. 7. CAC 20080699, Art. 2. 16 “France-Soir” dossier de la segregation en France, CAC 19840442.

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Even though most Antilleans agreed that “the racial problem” was very important in the Antilles, only 18 per cent of them felt that they had been negatively affected by it in Martinique or Guadeloupe. 17 As part of an effort to tackle the problem, the Movement against Racism and for Friendship among Peoples (MRAP) campaigned for 13 years before a law was finally passed in 1972 outlawing racial insults, defamation and incitement to racial discrimination or hate as well as racial discrimination. This law enabled courts to pursue landlords who refused to rent apartments to people of color; even if they claimed to be operating under instructions from the property owner, the manager could be held accountable as an accomplice in racially discriminatory behavior. Similarly, job notices requesting “Europeans only” would become illegal, as would the refusal of certain café owners to serve people from the Antilles, Guyane or Réunion in their establishments. 18 Given the omnipresence of such sentiments in the “race-blind” Republic, it was no coincidence that migration became of increasing concern to critics of departmentalization and fed mounting nationalist sentiment among Martinicans and Guadeloupeans both in the Antilles and in France. The constant reminders that they were second-class citizens led activists to question their affiliation with France and to denounce, in Aimé Césaire’s words, the “genocide by substitution” that took vital young people out of the Antilles and imported white functionaries to take up jobs on the islands instead. Words such as “self-determination,” “autonomy,” and “independence” appeared frequently in political events in the Antilles such as the Convention of Morne-Rouge in 1971. While pro-departmentalization parties advocated for concrete improvements in migration policies, antidepartmentalization parties questioned the very idea of migration due to the impoverishment of Antillean society and the ghettoization of Antilleans in the metropole. In France itself, university students and laborers also took up increasingly nationalist positions as they denounced the myth of the “mèrepatrie” and the chilly welcome they received from their white compatriots (cf. Constant 1992: 92-93). In Guadeloupe, similar discontent with departmentalization crystallized and led to a new chapter in the history of migration in the Antilles, one that is seldom associated with the journey across the Atlantic. In the late 1960s 17 “Étudiants originaires des départements et territoires d’outre-mer,” CAC 19840446, Art. 2.

18 George Paul-Langevin, “La loi française contre le racisme,” Fiche Pratique, CAC 20080699, Art. 2.

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and early 1970s, plantation owners began to import Haitian workers for the cane harvest, making them unwitting strike-breakers and therefore targets of deep resentment and violence from Guadeloupean unions. The migratory currents within the Caribbean had brought Haitians to other islands before; in the 19th century migrants had often been wealthy political refugees leaving Haiti for Jamaica or the French Antilles (cf. Smith 2006). In the 1960s, many more impoverished and vulnerable Haitians were fleeing the violence of Duvalier’s dictatorial regime and migrated to seek economic opportunities elsewhere. In the context of growing labor unrest in the Antilles, the Haitians appeared to Guadeloupean workers as opportunists who were undermining their quest for collective rights. Instead of seeing Haitian economic migrants as analogous to Antilleans making their way to France, many Guadeloupeans resented their presence and shunned any sense of kinship with Haitians in the Antilles. Haitians often live as precarious, marginal citizens in the French departments, especially in Guadeloupe where INSEE estimated that around 25,000 largely undocumented Haitians were living in 1999 (cf. Brodwin 2003: 386). Police regularly hunt for Haitians at construction sites and open-air markets, and Haitians without the proper papers constantly fear imprisonment, deportation, or worse at the hands of local authorities. Their association with low-status, low-pay work mark them as undesirables in Antillean culture, and the popular insult “I’m not your Haitian” expresses the scorn linked to their position in the Guadeloupean hierarchy. Being Haitian is associated with servility and elicits contempt rather than empathy with another immigrant community also struggling with the legacy of French imperialism (Hurbon 1983: 1999). Although Antillean separatist groups were radicalized by the treatment of Antillean immigrants in France during the 1960s and 1970s, the nationalism that sprung up with these encounters was not always directed at representatives of the colonial order. Attacks against a government that they believed served only the interests of the metropole or Békés that continued to dominate the economic and social life of the DOMs would have been logical extensions of the idea that departmentalization had been a failure. But attacks on Haitian immigrants demonstrate, according to L. Hurbon, that “once again we can see that racism has very little to do with race” (ibid: 1990). According to anthropologist Paul Brodwin (2003), the relationship between Haitian immigrants and Guadeloupeans has been highly charged and contradictory:

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»As Guadeloupeans embrace French identity and opportunities, Haitians are devalued according to the dominant axis of difference. However, as some people regard assimilation into France as a species of culture loss, Guadeloupeans envy Haitians as bearers of more potent Afro-Caribbean authenticity… Haitian immigrants elicit envy and resentment because they embody what Guadeloupeans feel they have lost in the process of assimilation. They are an unwanted mirror because they reflect back not the Frenchified Guadeloupean culture of today, but the richer, more Antillean-based culture of the past.« (Jackson/Brodwin/Martinez 2006: 12-13; Brodwin 2011)

Even if Antilleans might seek out the assistance of a more powerful Haitian vaudou practitioner for a particularly intractable problem, Haitians in general continue to experience discrimination, insecurity, and violence in a country that most often views their “authenticity” as an uncomfortable echo of a more primitive past. In 1981, Ernest Moutoussamy, a Communist deputy from Guadeloupe, spoke out in the National Assembly against the “wild and uncontrolled immigration” of Haitians into his land, encouraged by unscrupulous capitalist bosses in search of maximum profits. The result, he said, was “an uneasy cohabitation between indigenous people and these allogeneic, anonymous and rootless people” (Hurbon 1983:1992). Whether they were aboriginal or nomadic, authentic or rootless, Haitians are all too frequently marked as interlopers rather than compatriots in a shared struggle against poverty and stubborn colonial injustice. Victims of discrimination after their own immigrant journeys to France, Antilleans sometimes had a difficult time accepting those who came seeking opportunities in their islands, whether it was Lebanese or Syrians in the late 19th century or Haitians in the late twentieth. Ultimately the large-scale government sponsorship of Antillean immigration was stopped in the early 1980s. Less than a year after taking office, the new Socialist government officially ceased to encourage immigration from the DOMs and BUMIDOM was replaced by the Agence Nationale pour l’insertion et la promotion des Travailleurs d’outre-mer (ANT) in February 1982 (cf. Giraud 1982: 435). BUMIDOM had elicited a great deal of controversy and was charged with exporting the youngest and brightest Antilleans to low-pay and low-status employment in Europe. Equally important, France’s need for unskilled labor had been satiated by a burgeoning immigrant workforce that was no longer needed when the economy slumped and the expansion of the “trente glorieuses” came to an end. BUMIDOM’s record was a mixed one; although there were migrants helped by its offices both in the metropole and in the Antilles, a large number of migrants chose to avoid the intrusive questionnaires of the

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“psycho-technicians” and the agency’s employment placements in the service industry. By the 1980s, new realities had emerged about the greater French family of metropole and DOMs and the welcome formerly colonized citizens in the Antilles would receive in Europe. Although departmentalization had “legitimized” the union between France and the Antilles, the children of this marriage continued to be regarded as second-class citizens in the mother country. If French administrators imagined state-sponsored immigration as a solution to problems of incipient nationalism and social unrest in the DOMs, then it cannot be considered an unqualified success. In many ways, BUMIDOM and the stories of hardship and racism experienced by recent migrants to the metropole did more than even insensitive government officials to sour Antilleans on departmentalization and to prompt activists to reconsider their family ties with France. Whether it was in Césaire’s public denunciation of government policy or the private misery of young Antillean women caught in domestic service, negative impressions of BUMIDOM’s policies seemed to provoke more problems than solutions among politically-active Antilleans on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet BUMIDOM was not, in the end, simply genocide by substitution. In the late 1960s, up to 5000 Antilleans a year left the islands for France, and between 1967 and 1974, INSEE estimates that Guadeloupe and Martinique lost 39,000 and 40,000 people to immigration, or almost twelve per cent of their resident population (cf. Domenach/Picouet 1992: 59). Alongside these imposing numbers, however, another equally impressive figure is the number of French citizens of Antillean origin living in France itself: 337,000 in 1990, of whom 246,300 live in the environs of Paris, or Ile-deFrance. This is especially significant when one compares it to the population of Martinique (359,579) or Guadeloupe (387,034) in 1990; Paris truly is, in Alain Anselin’s (1990) words, the “Third Island of the Antilles.” From BUMIDOM’s closure in 1962, immigration policy was no longer a matter of migrant labor but of labor in childbirth, as young women who had come to the metropole founded families whose children were not born in the Antilles. This “immigration de peuplement,” as Dolorès Pourette (2006: 21) calls it, has given rise to a whole new universe of Antillean population and culture in France, whose participants call both France and the Caribbean home. This Third Island has also been marked powerfully by the migration experiences of Antillean women. Although their difficult circumstances did get caught up in the discourses of various nationalist groups and despite the setbacks they encountered, women continued to seek out opportunities in

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France that were unavailable in the Antilles. Pourette estimates that in 1990 73 per cent of Antillean women in France worked outside the home, compared to 46 per cent of metropolitan women and 39 per cent of other foreign women. Antillean women were also more likely to be the head of a single-parent family and to suffer more from unemployment than their male counterparts, but for many of these women the metropole offered a better way of life than what awaited them in the Antilles (ibid: 24-25). The stories of Antillean migrants therefore need not be understood exclusively from the perspective of impersonal theories on the excesses of liberal capitalism or decolonization. As Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan point out (2003), new migration scholars have gone beyond the behavioralism and structuralism of older theories to show how migrants “apprehend, negotiate, and transform the social structures that impinge on their lives” (Gidwani/Sivaramakrishnan 2003: 198). The authors express disquiet, however, with the fact that with their “attempts to destabilize the master narratives of modernity, both postcolonial and postdevelopment scholarship have tended to portray ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ as monolithic, depoliticizing processes, everywhere the same and always tainted beyond redemption by their progressivist European provenance” (ibid: 202). On the contrary, the Antillean experience reaffirms that migrants themselves could use aspects of ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ to fashion new lives and identities that rest uneasily within the interpretive frameworks at hand or run counter to the expectations of those who would wish to liberate them from colonialism. Migration across the Atlantic, despite its painful associations and complicated legacy, could indeed be liberating and redeeming in addition to confronting Antilleans with uncomfortable truths about their own national family ties. Such clashes could result in the revalorization of a lost Antillean past and search for cultural authenticity – or the pushback against assimilation could result in a new set of exclusions against threatening foreigners landing on their own island shores. Rather than genocide by substitution, however, migration flows across the Atlantic in the late 20th century created new identities and new boundaries of belonging for those who chose to embark on the journey.

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References

Anselin, Alain (1990): L’Émigration antillaise en France. La Troisième Ile, Paris: Karthala. Baptistide, Jean Claude: “La Migration Guadeloupéene vers la France (ou: Contribution à l’étude d’un movement de population organisé).” In: Mémoire de Géographie Tropicale et Humaine, Université de Rouen, Archives Départementales de la Guadeloupe (ADG), unclassified. Brodwin, Paul (2003): “Marginality and Subjectivity in the Haitian Diaspora.” In: Anthropological Quarterly 76/3, pp. 383-410. Charbit, Yves (1987): “Ménages et familles des originaires des Départements d’outre-mer.” In: Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 3/3 fourth trimester, pp. 49-67. Clerc, Isabelle (1980): “Les Antillais de Paris.” In: Le Matin Magazine, November 22. Condon, Stephanie A./Ogden, Philip E. (1991): “Afro-Caribbean migrants in France: employment, state policy and the migration process.” In: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 16/4, pp. 440-457. Domenach, Hervé/Picouet, Michel (1992): La Dimension migratoire des Antilles, Paris: Economica. Germain, Felix (2010): “Jezebels and Victims: Antillean Women in Postwar France, 1945-1974.” In: French Historical Studies, 33/3 summer, pp. 475-495. Gidwani, Vinay/Sivaramakrishnan, K. (2003): “Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion.” In: Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93/1 March, pp. 186-213. Hurbon, L. (1983): “Racisme et sous-produit du racism.”In: Les temps modernes 39, pp. 441-442. Jackson, Regine O./Brodwin, Paul Brodwin/Martinez, Samuel (2006): “Identity and Marginality among Diasporic Haitians.” In: Conference on “Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories: South Asia and the U.S.,” Emory University, October. Ndiaye, Pap (2008): La Condition noire. Essai sur une minorité française, Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Leonard-Maestrati, Antoine (director) (2007): L’Avenir est ailleurs, Paris: Doriane Films and Cinéma Public Films. Pineau, Gisèle/Abraham, Marie (1998): Femmes des Antilles: Traces et Voix. Cent cinquante ans après l’abolition de l’esclavage, Paris: Éditions Stock.

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Pourette, Dolorès (2006): Des Guadeloupéens en Ile-de-France. Identité, sexualité, santé, Paris: Éditions Karthala. Smith, Matthew J. (2006): “Emperors, Exiles and Intrigue: The Case of Nineteenth Century Heads of State in Jamaica.” In: Annette Insanally/Mark Clifford/Sean Sheriff (eds.): Regional Footprints: The Travels and Travails of Early Caribbean Migrants, Mona, Jamaica: Latin American-Caribbean Centre, UWI. Vie, Jean-Émile (1997): “Les Migrants des DOM.” In: Le Monde, October 19.

Staging the Caribbean: Dialogues on Diasporic Antillean Music and Dance in Paris during the Jazz Age 1 I NGRID K UMMELS

The first global diffusion of Caribbean rhythms and dance moves took place during the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s, the so-called Jazz Age. 2 For the first time, African-American music and Afro-Caribbean rhythms achieved broad positive acclaim in their countries of origin, often as a result of burgeoning popularity in the metropolises of the Caribbean and beyond, and transcended their local “black” working class origins. New Orleans jazz and ragtime from the United States, Cuban son and the conga, and biguine from Martinique became popular both in the respective countries and on the international stage. The boom of African-American dance music from the 1920s had different causes and manifestations in the respective metropolises. New York produced the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, which redefined what was still designated at the time as Negro music. Paris became a center for numerous genres of Afro-

1

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This article is partly based on my contribution to the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie from 2011, “Race on Stage: Inszenierungen von Differenz in Musik und Tanz in Paris, Havanna und New York zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen.” In this revised version, I incorporate some ideas which were discussed in an exchange with John Cowley, with whom I am currently working on a chapter entitled “Caribbean Diasporic Culture and Politics in the Jazz Age.” I am indebted to John Cowley for sharing with me in-depth research on Caribbean music styles in Paris during the interwar years. As a reference for his work see Cowley (1999). The term Jazz Age is to certain extent misleading, since it does not connote the variety of musical waves from the Caribbean that left their mark during the interwar years along the coasts and in the metropolises of the Black Atlantic (cf. Hill 2013: 66).

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(Latin)American music, mostly due to an appreciation there for so-called art nègre in the context of artistic primitivism. And, Havana saw a flourishing of Afro-Cuban dances and music in the wake of Prohibition in the United States (1920-1933). The Caribbean city welcomed 100,000 American tourists annually who sought to freely indulge the vice of alcohol consumption and were attracted by Havana’s local popular culture. This article explores processes that contributed to the globalization of Caribbean culture. It contends that music and dance genres were crucial vehicles through which actors created new ways of thinking about themselves as communities. The Jazz Age saw a rise in anti-imperialist and nationalist consciousness, fuelled by international political movements. Based on commonalities which they perceived in transnational spaces such as Paris actors began highlighting wider regional identities – such as a Latin American, Afro-Latin or Caribbean identity – and often combined them with “race,” as in the case of black nationalisms and black latinité (Putnam 2013: 6; Goebel 2014: 105ff, 161). During this period, locally and in the metropolises, Caribbean people from different social classes not only voiced political ideas criticizing imperialism and racism in an explicit manner in political spheres, but also discussed issues of the Antilleans’ diasporization and the Caribbean culture’s globalization in venues which revolved around imported and hybridizing music and dance genres. This chapter examines some of the processes which contributed to the global popularization of music and dance genres from the Caribbean and to simultaneously establishing them as a locus of communality for a Caribbean diaspora living in Paris. Paul Gilroy (1987) has stressed the critical importance of popular culture for connections that crisscross the Atlantic and constitute global modernity. In his view, music and performance play a key role in the oppositional practices created and consumed by supranational countercultures. With the intent of operationalizing Gilroy’s approach, music and dance performances and activities related to them in the following will be understood as sites. 3 Popular-culture sites can be considered bustling interfaces where cultural and social processes overlap and the category “race” is negotiated in its interaction with sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and social standing (Rosaldo 1993; Kummels 2009; Wade 2009). 3

With the term “site,” I draw on Renato Rosaldo (1993: 17, 20, 194, 229). He has discarded notions of culture as an ensemble of fixed and self-contained social actions. Instead, he suggests understanding culture as a “busy intersection” where a number of distinct social processes intersect and attributions of meaning to social phenomena are interconnected.

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According to Gilroy (1987: 37), music and performance are important sites for the “transfiguration” of social relations within the context of a “racial” hierarchy, since a “racial community of interpretation and resistance” interacts with its former oppressors. Methodologically, I trace the routes of these diasporic cultural expressions in a way that takes into account how particular actors initiated dialogues and actively encouraged local processes of appropriation at the places they connect, such as their country of origin and their host country, as in this case France. The dialogues under scrutiny are broadly defined. Dialogue here serves as a metaphor for the economic, political, literary, and musical dimensions of interaction (see Matory in this volume). According to James Lorand Matory, contemporary interlocutors shape dialogue by creating multiple sets of relationships over time, a process that is essential for the formation of diasporic consciousness. During the first global diffusion of music from the Caribbean, the principal actors who initiated and participated in dialogues included writers, intellectuals, impresarios and patrons, as well as performers – men and women alike. In this period, the press played an important role in announcing and interpreting novel cultural attractions and thus became a vehicle for counterpolitics of diverse origin. In this regard, daily newspapers and magazines of political and cultural movements such as Carteles in Cuba, the Belgium newspaper Le Soir, the short-lived Franco-Antillean newspaper La Dépêche africaine, and the Panafrican journal La Revue du Monde Noir are noteworthy examples. In some cases, collaborations between writers, on the one hand, and musicians, on the other, were decisive in promoting new musical genres and interpreting them as part of contemporary anti-imperialistic and anti-racist political thought. The “(e)mbodied performance and irresistible sound” (Putnam 2013: 153) of Caribbean music and dance genres contributed decisively to these developments. Circulating between metropolises in the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and Africa, they became crucial elements of stage productions in night clubs, cabarets, music halls, dancings and boîtes. Thus, night clubs and cabarets will also be examined here as sites, along with the artists and performances themselves. Before the introduction of television, they were important sites for the production of popular imaginaries, where expression was given to social concerns, fears, dreams, and desires. The circulation of descriptions of cabaret performances in reviews and illustrations in newspapers, on radio, and in cinema meant that they were able to reach an audience far beyond the world of cabaret itself (Vogel 2009). Beyond this, however, Caribbean music and dance genres were also popu-

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larized as a subject of academic debate and avant-garde artistic interest. The sites under analysis therefore include debates about these artistic forms at the Parisian Club de Faubourg and movie screenings at the city’s Studio des Ursulines. Finally, this contribution examines how “race” was renegotiated through Caribbean music and dance in Paris, a city that developed a historically distinctive form of race relations, though at a time when conceptions and stereotypes about blackness were increasingly globalizing. Race was both a fundamental concept for the nation-state’s approach to control mobility via exclusion, which in practice was put in effect by everyday understandings of national citizenship. In France, these views were culturally as well as racially inflected, despite the race-neutral terms in which citizenship, immigration and work conditions were couched in official declarations (Goebel 2014: 79). In Europe, race relations reflected the contrasting colonial strategies of the former powers Spain, England, and France in the Caribbean and domestically. Migrants who strove to counteract these practices of exclusion construed genres of music and dance as expressions of national, regional, or international communities and used terminology such as Caribbeanness and blackness. From the 1920s on, myriad versions of these new forms of consciousness circulating as popular culture upended the existing barriers in race relations. In the realm of the entertainment business, Paris, with its craze for the so-called art nègre and negrophilia, motivated Caribbean artists to work and even settle there. This location offered opportunities for recreating race relations, especially when African Americans from the Americas in general were eroticized and “black culture” was conceived for the first time as an integral part of universal modernity. This shift in perception took place in the context of the transnational circulation of Africanisms or “primitivisms” – discourses that assessed “blacks” 4 and certain aspects of their culture “positively” (though 4

Due to their constructed nature, I designate the dimension of “race” and categories like “black” at this point with quotation marks. Later on in the text, they will be omitted. The racial categorization nègre, negro and Negro used at that time will be subsumed under the umbrella term “black” as they are all derived from the Latin word “niger, nigra, nigrum” (meaning radiant or sunburned). “Black” referring to the skin color and the origin from the African continent, is a central “racial” category that has remained remarkably constant over long periods of time and in many countries. Wade (2009: 5) points out the close correlation between the hierarchy “racial” categories defined on the basis of color/phenotype and the continent (black/Africa, white/Europe, yellow/Asia) and to the fact that both of these systems of categorization were developed by Europeans during the first wave of globalization.

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in an ambivalent way) and as nationally significant. 5 Cabarets, dancings, dance halls, and boîtes were prominent sites for the renegotiation of race. Who participated and dominated such negotiations? How did the press and the audience in general assess the alternative race versions that were performed? And to what extent did such performances promote identification with a Caribbean diaspora? These issues will be explored by taking a chronological approach. Beginning with the influential transnational “Revue Nègre” in Paris in 1925, I focus on key sites for dialogues that were initiated and carried out by writers, intellectuals, impresarios, patrons, musicians, and dancers. In analyzing the different local contexts, I rely on both secondary sources, especially biographies and the chronicles of music critics, and eyewitness accounts. Although they are mentioned only briefly, my interviews with Cuban musicians from the band Anacaona, which captivated audiences with Afro-Cuban son music during a tour in 1938 at the hot spots of the international music scene in Havana, New York, and Paris were critical for better understanding the period’s cultural dynamism. 6 Antillean Paris: Practicing and writing about Caribbean rhythms and dance moves

From the 1920s, African-American musicians and artists from the United States and the Caribbean were increasingly drawn to Paris, where many eventually migrated. Several developments played a role in this. With the influence of New York’s Harlem Renaissance 7 and the importance that was ascribed to literature and the arts as strategies for overcoming racism, 5

6

7

Although use of the word “primitive” as a category of analysis poses a number of problems, including a sweeping, ahistorical transfer of its European origin to (Latin-)American contexts, I will use it to illuminate the circulation of stage representations of the “black” figure in transnational spaces between the Caribbean and Europe. A broad definition of “primitivism” makes it possible to trace such circulations. According to David Luis-Brown (2008: 6), primitivist discourses create “an opposition between so-called primitive peoples and those deemed civilized or modern, usually making the case that either one or the other is a superior form of life.” In 2000, I recorded, along with Manfred Schäfer, a detailed biography of Alicia Castro (1920-2014), a founding member of Anacaona (Castro/Kummels/Schäfer 2002). Over the years, I also interviewed former members of the band like Graciela Pérez (1916-2010), a singer of Anacaona from 1934-1944. In the context of the Harlem Renaissance, black philosophers and writers such as Alain Locke (1999) had demanded a new collective consciousness for African-Americans (or American Negroes according to the language of the period) as a social group with common interests and a common culture.

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Harlem-style popular music and dance from the night-club scene exploded internationally (Shack 2001: xvii). In Paris, and the Montmartre district in particular, ragtime, jazz music, minstrelsy, and vaudeville performances 8 enjoyed great popularity. Beginning in the 1920s, the number of musicians and artists traveling from the US and the Caribbean to Paris grew steadily (Jefferson 2000: 1). Impresarios, night club owners, and musicians coming from Harlem and cities of the Caribbean such as Havana, Port-au-Prince, and Fort-de-France discovered favorable working conditions in the Paris entertainment industry. Most African-Americans suffered from racial segregation in the music sector of their cities of origin. Discriminatory practices, for instance, prevented black musicians in Havana from publically performing in white bands and excluded black patrons in New York from entering white-owned nightclubs. 9 In contrast, there was a general appreciation of African-derived culture in Parisian night life that led to an exotization of black people from the United States and the Caribbean, or to negrophilia. Though racial attitudes were more permissive, as W.E.B. Du Bois and others noted with astonishment, discrimination was by no means completely absent, as will be discussed in the following. 10 The Paris of the 1920s thus developed into a center of transnational Afro(Latin)-American and Antillean music and dance, which was shaped partly by the diverse immigrants who felt attracted to Paris and adventured traveling to this city, partly by the artists who were already based there. Against this backdrop, it is worth taking a closer look at the incentives and obstacles that migrants from the Caribbean faced during this era, at a time when countries devised new systems of mobility control at their political borders (Putnam 2013: 11). The differential access to France according to migratory or citizenship status granted officially on the basis of the country of origin influenced the possibilities of forming a Caribbean diaspora in Paris. Artists and intellectuals from the English-, French- and Spanishspeaking Caribbean – including performers, writers, and avant-garde painters – headed for France after the First World War because of the new opportunity structure it offered. People from Martinique and Guadeloupe had, in fact, already resided there in larger numbers since the 1820s and the 8

Minstrelsy integrated theater skits that were performed by white actors in blackface. On the genre of vaudeville theatre, a fast-paced, eclectic variety show consisting of numerous unrelated individual acts, see Kenrick (1996-2004). 9 As to Havana’s racial categories and complexity during this period, see Moore (1997: 13-15). 10 For a discussion of instances of racism in the French capital during the interwar years, see Stovall (1998) and Goebel (2014: 81ff.).

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islands’ annexation as possessions of France. They constituted an important nucleus of French citizens from the Antilles and had a more diverse composition, with a greater share of liberal professionals and women, and a wider distribution of ages (Goebel 2014: 40). In contrast, in a first phase, Latin Americans and people from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean residing in France as “foreigners” mostly came from the urban white upper strata of their home countries. By the mid-1920s, this group reached a total population of over 15,000. 11 Slowly, the affordability of trans-oceanic ship fares and the fall of the French franc after the First World War opened the city to migrants with diverse social backgrounds. By 1931, immigrants represented a large portion of Parisian population, as more than ten percent of the 6.7 million inhabitants were foreigners (Goebel 2014: 33). This presence and the concentration of these heterogeneous groups in specific Parisian quarters such as Montmartre and Montparnasse (Quartier Latin) laid the foundation for regular interaction. A community was formed through two related means: On the one hand, music and dance were an important avenue for earning a living. Migrants, therefore, sometimes found work as professional musicians for the first time in Paris (Boittin 2010: 37). At the same time, rhythms and dance moves were central elements for socializing and building a Caribbean community, as the names of nightclubs and cabarets such as Cabane Cubaine demonstrate. 12 The novelty and impact of “La Revue Nègre”

To trace the fascination with African-American culture and its resignification by the Parisian immigrant landscape, it is worth taking a closer look at the most famous revue of the period of the Tumulte Noir, “La Revue Nègre,” which premiered in October 1925. Its racial and gendered constructions were perceived as a turning point, though they proved controversial. The revue was the result of an innovative collaboration between cultural mediators from different national, ethnic, and social backgrounds. Caroline Dudley, a white American heiress, mounted the show and organized the 11 Due to this concentration of Latin Americans in Paris, among them many of intellectuals, artists, and politicians, Jens Streckert (2013) has termed the French metropolis as “the capital of Latin America.” 12 The Cabane Cubaine emanated from the Palermo and the Cabane Bambou on Rue Fontaine. According to Jens Streckert (2013:67), the Cabane Cubaine was the central place of dissemination for Afro-Cuban jazz in Europe during the 1930s.

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collaboration (Jefferson 2000; Shack 2001: 35, 54). As the daughter of a liberal doctor from Chicago, she had grown up with black vaudeville from early childhood and was inspired by the idea of exporting American black cultural forms to Paris. When Dudley was presented with the opportunity to launch a revue at the renowned Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, she assembled an extraordinary team: Along with local big names from the revue scene such as Jean-Jacques, the choreographer of the Casino de Paris, she hired a string of African-American artists, including Louis Douglas, and Senegalese 13 Joe Alex, both Paris-based dancers, Josephine Baker, whom she had discovered in New York’s Plantation Club, and 25 jazz musicians, most of whom had already played in Paris and Berlin. The revue strove to become the first to represent black culture as an expression of world culture. Toward this end, Dudley’s team consciously integrated into the lineup diverse cultural manifestations ascribed to the nègres 14, ranging from the Dixieland music of the American South to a dance performance called the “Danse des Sauvages,” purportedly from Africa. The revue was comprised of four acts dedicated to the following themes: “Mississippi Steam Boat Race,” “New York Skyskraper,” “Louisiana Camp Meeting,” and “Charleston Cabaret.” In each act, a trait commonly attributed to the âme nègre – idleness, melancholy, religious fervor, and sexual ecstasy – was presented in a stereotypical way. In the fourth act, the revue’s climax, the narrative hearkened back to the African roots of black culture. Josephine Baker and the dancer Joe Alex, both only slightly veiled (Baker wore only a feather mini skirt and feathers on her wrists and ankles), danced the overtly sexualized “Danse des Sauvages” (Blake 2003: 94f.). After its initial run, the press and the intellectuals of Paris attributed a significance to the revue that went far beyond the realm of mere entertainment. The majority of the critics celebrated “La Revue Nègre” as an artistic dramatization of the modern age that combined exoticism and primitivism and perfectly expressed the spirit of the times. The erotic “Danse des Sauvages” figured prominently in this reappraisal. On the one hand, the 13 According to a newspaper report of 1930 Joe Alex was from Senegal, but this information is not wholly reliable. 14 Nègre (which corresponds approximately to the English category of Negro) developed its own meaning and implications as a racial category in France. Boittin (2010: 89) emphasizes that its derogatory meaning was transformed in the 1920s, when the term “was repossessed by black workers who wanted their race to bespeak political engagement.” It therefore began to convey more a commitment to politics than solely represent a racial category.

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dance consisted of acrobatic bodily movements that highlighted Joe Alex’s strength and Josephine Baker’s agility, such as when she imitated a chariot wheel. On the other hand, the dancers both incorporated Charleston elements into their performance, adding shimmies, for instance, to express ecstasy. 15 One writer acknowledged that the “Danse des Sauvages” recalled the earlier archaism and modernism of the Ballets Russes, though it now took the dance performance to even more exotic realms (Blake 2003: 96). 16 Nevertheless, the press conveyed the general impression that the “Danse des Sauvages” depicted a particularly “authentic African” experience that was characterized by frenetic movements, the nakedness of the dancers, and Baker’s “ebony body.” From the perspective of the enthusiastic critics, the performance depicted primordial emotions that were unique to modern man and effectively unleashed by the dance. Gustave Fréjaville commented that the “Danse des Sauvages” was “of extraordinary audacity” and that Joe Alex “expresses with an intensity that is almost unbearable, tragically shameful, the obscure force of desire” (Blake 2003: 96). On the other hand, conservative critics largely dismissed the revue and bemoaned that it signaled the decline of classic European traditions. One of the few more nuanced and profound critiques of “Bakermania” came from Martinican writer Jane Nardal, who published her essay “Exotic Puppets” (“Pantins exotiques”) in the Paris newspaper La Dépêche africaine in 1928. The Antilleans running this paper had mostly written sympathetically about Josephine Baker. Some fiercely defended her against rightwing journalists who denigrated her artistry (Boittin 2010: 28-29). In contrast, Jane Nardal from the perspective of a black woman studying and living in Paris reflected on the fallacies of Baker’s success as part of an

15 Janet Flanner (1973: xx-xxi), correspondent of The New Yorker and eyewitness, described the scene many years later as follows: “She [Josephine Baker] made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs; she was being carried upside down and doing the splits on the shoulder of a black giant [Joe Alex]. Midstage he paused, and with his long fingers holding her basket-wise around the waist, swung her in a slow cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood [...]. She was an unforgettable female ebony statue. A scream of salutation spread through the theater. Whatever happened next was unimportant. The two specific elements had been established and were unforgettable – her magnificent dark body, a new model that to the French proved for the first time that black was beautiful, and the acute response of the white masculine public in the capital of hedonism of all Europe-Paris.” 16 The ballet company founded in 1909 by Sergei Djagilev specialized in groundbreaking modern productions. They included fantastical narratives, abstract geometric dance figures, as well as exotic and erotic costumes.

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imperial cultural consumption (Hill 2013: 71). Antillean intellectuals 17, Nardal claimed, had already offered more truthful portraits of “the colored man” that transcended exoticism and primitivism, only to then experience a backlash: “[…] Josephine came, Josephine Baker you understand, and bored a hole through the painted backdrop associated with Bernardin. 18 Here is that a woman of color leaps on-stage with her shellacked hair and sparkling smile. She is certainly still dressed in feathers and banana leaves, but she brings to Parisians the latest Broadway products (Charleston, jazz, etc.). The transition between past and present, the soldering between virgin forest and modernism, is what American blacks have accomplished and rendered tangible. And the blasé artists and snobs find in them what they seek […]” (Jane Nardal 1928, in Sharpley-Whiting 2002: 109). Jane Nardal thus highlighted the dynamics of the very modern primitivist fantasies which not only fueled the success of black artists, but also imposed new racial stereotypes in the context of Caribbean music and dance. In an essay she wrote in 1928 on Internationalisme noir, Nardal coined the neologism of “Afro-Latin” to refer to the existing exchange between blacks from Africa and the Americas and Latin Americans in Paris and as a concept to help foster black latinité. It is here, that she suddenly casually thanks the (white) “snobs” for launching Negro art which together with the Caribbean arts of music and dance conquering European music halls unite blacks with regard to remembrance of a common origin in Africa. Among the diversity of black people she characterizes the Afro-Latins as a group capable of loving their Latin country and Africa at the same time. Nardal therefore aspired to a cross-way between the shared Latin cultural sphere and racial consciousness (Jane Nardal, in Sharpley-Whiting 2002: 105-107; SharpleyWhiting 2000: 12-16). With regard to her performance in the “Danse des Sauvages,” Josephine Baker herself likely only played a limited role in the reconceptualization of race. 19 In her earlier vaudeville career, she mostly personified comical blackface characters. In this form of theater, white actors usually imitated blacks on stage by blackening their faces and mimicking certain facial expressions. Depictions in blackface consisted in stereotyping blacks, but besides also revealed an ambivalent attitude toward blacks and not an 17 She refers among others to Marius-Ary Leblond, a writer from Reunion Island. 18 This is a reference to 19th century writer Jacques-Henri Bernardin de SaintPierre, who exoticized the West Indies in his novels. 19 In her biography, Josephine Baker claimed to have spontaneously invented the dance in a kind of trance state; see her description in Jules-Rosette (2007: 47f.).

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exclusively discriminatory one, since whites’ fascination for the racial other became evident in the great pleasure they took in impersonating them on stage. Blackface was characteristic of societies with a rigid social hierarchy based on phenotypic attributions like the USA, Cuba, and South Africa (Jules-Rosette 2007: 56f.). It was both an integral part of the repertoire of minstrelsy performances and vaudeville theater in the United States and Havana’s Teatro Vernáculo. 20 African-American entertainers and performers such as Josephine Baker also appeared later in blackface. This form of white imitation of blacks was in demand among white audiences and because it was profitable some blacks adopted this style of performance. Dialogues of musicians and writers: Reinventing beguine and son

The dialogues that reconceptualized race, as in the case of “Danse des Sauvages,” simultaneously influenced Caribbean artists, who increasingly traveled to Paris and began popularizing music and dance genres from their countries of origin. From 1924, French Antillean performers and Frenchspeaking Africans promoted and helped popularize the biguine, a hybrid music and dance style that originated from Martinique. It combines layered West African rhythms with European melodies and harmony, and the complex instrumentation gives it a distinct Dixieland flavor. The development of this music in Paris was partly due to the legal status of Antilleans from Martinique and Guadeloupe as French citizens. Clubs in Montparnasse and on the Left Bank playing biguine gradually became a focal point for migrants from the Caribbean, local surrealist artists, intellectuals, as well as Harlem Renaissance writers, artists, and performers with their appreciation for African-influenced cultural fusions. A bit later during this period, Cuban artists also began to make an impact on the Parisian night club scene. A single musical composition, El Manisero (or The Peanut Vendor), 21 sparked Cuban son music’s global popularity from 1930. Cuban musicians looking for good work venues overseas already began exporting their own versions of black Afro-Cuban music and dance to Paris in 1928: the danzón, son, conga and rumba. 20 The Teatro Vernáculo has been a popular form of comedy theater in Cuba since the 1860s. Its plays are largely based on stereotyped ethnic characters such as the Galician, the Chinese, the mulatto, and the black. 21 Based on a market vendor’s street cry (or pregón), the song was written by the prolific Cuban composer Moisés Simons.

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Previously, Cuban artists had engaged in a lively exchange with the US scene and, much like Josephine Baker, had also been influenced by the same trends, from minstrelsy to vaudeville (Pulido Llano 2010: 50). In 1928, some Cuban musicians found work in the Parisian nightclubs of Montmartre and Montparnasse, yet still formed parts of jazz bands or orchestras that played tango, ragtime and the Charleston and only occasionally risked including a piece of Cuban danzón. 22 The Cuban composer of “El Manisero,” Moisés Simons, began touring New York in 1928 and Madrid and Paris in 1930. The tours and recordings of the Havanan son septet Septeto Nacional also contributed to Cuban music and dance’s incursions into Europe. Indeed, the Septeto Nacional was invited to the Exposición Iberoamericana in Sevilla in 1929, where they won an award for their music. 23 Dialogues between these migrating music and dance styles took place at Parisian nightclubs and cabarets such as La Jungla and Le Palerme. A great deal of cultural hybridity resulted from the intermingling of and collaboration between musicians from diverse countries with different migration statuses teaming up together to satisfy the increasing demand for Caribbean rhythms and dance moves. As a formula for success, they would emulate each other’s styles according to the genre currently en vogue. One example of this is the house orchestra of La Coupole de Montparnasse, a large brasserie that opened its doors in December 1927 and offered dance music from 1929 on. In the summer of 1929, the orchestra, which played a mixed repertoire, 24 consisted of seven musicians originating from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Barbados, and Cuba under the direction of Haitian clarinetist and saxophonist Bertin Depestre Salnave. It was replaced in May 1934 by Rico’s Creole Band, led by the Cuban saxophonist and flutist Filiberto Rico. Here, musicians from diverse Antillean provenance teamed up and played a “repertoire [which] deliciously mixed different rhythms from the

22 As Cuban writer and intellectual Alejo Carpentier (2012: 423) attests in 1928, Cubans formed part of jazz orchestras such as the one at La Jungla and they chiefly played jazz and ragtime pieces to accompany the Charleston “con un ritmo infernal.” Only occasionally did they risk playing a danzón. See also Ruel (2000: 43). 23 See http://www.encaribe.org/es/article/septeto-nacional. 24 See Meunier (2005). John Cowley has informed me that the Creole band nominally led by Salnave performed in La Coupole until December 1933. The band appears to have had several leaders, including the Martinican drummer Florius Notte (under whose name they recorded for Ultraphone in February 1931) and Cuban multi-instrumentalist Filiberto Rico.

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Caribbean islands” (Navarrete 2003). Rico’s Creole Band recorded several rumbas and biguines for the record company Gramophone in 1934. Don Barreto’s orchestra, which performed at the Melody’s Bar starting in 1935, was led by a Cuban violinist, who first concentrated on playing biguines (until 1930) and then gradually introduced Cuban rhythms. Despite these developments, writers and musicians from the Caribbean did not wholeheartedly celebrate musical cultural métissage. They were also concerned to some extent with conserving the authenticity of their cultural styles in Paris, while, at the same time, they reconceptualized their national identities. Cubanismo, for instance, was reinterpreted with regard to cosmopolitanism and Caribbean cultures’ globalization. The Cuban intellectual Alejo Carpentier was one of the actors involved in this process: His magazine articles from the late 1920s and early 1930s document how the triumph of Cuban music and dance in Paris rested upon multiple dialogues, including the one between him, French surrealist Robert Desnos, and Cuban musicians working in Paris. They were decisive for the diffusion of and the attribution of new meanings to son and further Cuban genres like danzón, conga, and rumba, which record companies such as RCA Victor, Columbia, Parlophone, and Gramophone marketed under the common catchword of “rhumba.” As a result of his contacts to French intellectual circles and his activities in the press and radio of both his country of origin Cuba and of France, Alejo Carpentier became a central promoter of Cuban dance and music upon his arrival to Paris. 25 In close cooperation with Carpentier, Robert Desnos organized evening soirées at his atelier in Rue Blomet to promote Cuban musical genres. He also published an article entitled “L’admirable musique cubaine” in the daily newspaper Le Soir. 26 As a foreign correspondent of the Cuban magazines Social and Carteles, Carpentier wrote two celebratory articles on Cuban music, “La música cubana en Paris” (September 1928) and “Nuevas Ofensivas del Cubanismo” (December 1929). But he did not limit himself to writing. Together with Desnos, he organized lectures on Cuban music and dance, which took place at Parisian venues such as the avant-garde cinema Studio 25 Carpentier’s stay in Paris was due to the fact that he was accused in July 1927 at the “Proceso comunista” during the Machado government of an international conspiracy against the governments of Latin America (Chaple 2009: 9). Following the invitation of Robert Desnos, the French surrealist and writer (who had participated in 7th Congress of Latin American Journalists in Havana; see Ruel 2000: 40-42), Carpentier accompanied Desnos as a stowaway in his cabin on a ship to Paris, instead of heading as planned to Mexico (Chaple 2009: 21). 26 See Ruel (2000: 42); Carpentier (2012: 429).

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des Ursulines, and the Wagram Hall of the Club de Faubourg, where members of this club such as politicians, painters, actors, and physicians organized expositions on issues of current interest. Alejo Carpentier (2012: 424) also created a soundtrack for surrealist films by Desnos and Man Ray, in which son and danzón music were played on three gramophones to produce a seamless soundscape. It was first performed before an audience of fifty persons, among them surrealist André Breton. Carpentier considered performances such as those by Cuban singer Rita Montaner to be turning points in Cuban music and dance’s transformation into cosmopolitan and globalized genres. 27 It is therefore worth examining the case of Montaner more closely. An actress, singer and pianist, she was already a star in Cuba by the time she traveled to Paris in 1928. It was not until 1927, after a career as an operetta singer, that she had finally began to give priority to Afro-Cuban cultural productions. Montaner made the first commercial recording of “El Manisero,” which was recorded by Columbia Records from the United States during their field trip to Cuba in November 1927. She performed blackface (called negrito in Cuba) in the play “Niña Rita” and even took on the role of the male black coachman. 28 In Paris, she had engagements at prestigious music halls such as the Palace. She delighted audiences there with son cubano songs like “¡Ay! Mamá Inés” and “Lupisamba o yuca y ñame” (Fajardo Estrada 1998: 74). These numbers came from the repertoires of white Cuban composers like Eliseo Grenet, Sindo Garay, and Moisés Simons (Sublette 2004: 386). Songs like Garay’s “Lupisamba o yuca y ñame” usually had a black male first-person narrator speaking in Bozal, the Creole language created by African slaves who had recently been shipped to Cuba (who were likewise called bozales) and which combined Spanish and African languages. 29 Bozal had been integrated into stage performances in Cuba since 1830 and was used in blackface 27 However, it was not until January 1930 that examples of Cuban rhythms were put on record in Paris by the Cuban Castellanos brothers (this information was shared by John Cowley). 28 The black coachman (negro calesero) is a stock figure of the Cuban Teatro Vernáculo. His comic effect is produced by his vain attitude, for he is convinced that he is very handsome (Moore 1997: 47). It was unusual for a female performer like Rita Montaner to embody this male figure. 29 Sindo Garay explains that this song was the only afro he composed in his whole career on occasion of his engagement as part of Rita Montaner’s line-up (de León 2009: 169). Contemporary whites discriminated against the Bozal language, alleging that it was as a corrupted Spanish. Nevertheless, African-American variants of Spanish called Bozal were created by the multi-ethnic and -linguistic slave groups for use as a lingua franca.

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performances to portray blacks as simple-minded, superstitious, and comical people. Rita Montaner, however, reinterpreted black personae in a more dignified way, as in the case of the black male in the song “Lupisamba o yuca y ñame.” She not only performed the song at the Palace, but also communicated to the Parisians her own particular version of Afro-Cubanness. The song describes a black man who is head over heels in love with a white woman and offers her tubers as a gift to express his feelings, something especially audacious for the time given his lower social status (Fajardo Estrada 1997: 74). When performing this kind of Afro-Cuban music, Rita Montaner became a new kind of cultural mediator who mixed comedy, skillful acting, and local cultural expressions (Moore 1997: 174-175). As part of her upbringing, she had acquired the ability to perform in multiple cultural registers. She grew up in the Eastern Havana district of Guanabacoa in a well-to-do middle-class family, the daughter of a white father and a mulatto mother. She was classified as a light-skinned mulata. Guanabacoa is known for its strong Afro-Cuban religious traditions and Montaner was herself a devotee of Santería (Estrada Fajardo 1998: 395). As Carpentier (2012: 431) remarked on her performance in Paris in 1928: “Rita Montaner has created her own style: she shouts at us with an authentic voice, with a prodigious sense of rhythm; she sings suburban songs written by a Simons or a Grenet that have the flavor of a solar courtyard […].” 30 In Cuba, solar refers to a formerly spacious upper-class house in which – mostly black – lower-class families each occupied a single room. Montaner transformed this very typical Cuban space through her performance into a universal one. Here, Carpentier also alludes to the fact that Montaner no longer solely performed in the operetta style, as was common for singers of her social class at that time. Shifting between diverse vocal ranges, Rita Montaner would accordingly change between the different characters she personified in a song. A hoarse voice was part of her broad vocal range that allowed her, for example, to transform into an old black man. 31 Over the years, Rita Montaner perfected her fluid shifting between the roles of racial and gender categories that she performed on stage. Her audiences adored this ability and she was nicknamed “Rita, la única.” Such impersonations and role changes also play an important role in the trance dances of Afro-Cuban religions. Cuban audience members from the lower 30 Translation by the author. 31 Gilberto Valdés, Afro-Cuban song composer, describes this vocal technique of Rita Montaner (Giro 2009: 243). See also Moore (1997: 174f.).

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class, most of whom were devotees of these religions, therefore had a special appreciation for Montaner. Carpentier in turn asserts in his discussion that this new hybrid style is criollo or native to Cuba. In Paris, he thus reassessed cubanismo, which in Cuba had been exclusively associated with Spanish culture, as having an Afro-Cuban character. This new cosmopolitan understanding of Cuban culture, which now integrated Africanisms, was part of a broader movement of reinventing Afro-Caribbean culture and transforming it into an anti-imperial space, where persons ascribed to different races could intermingle. Carpentier saw Afro-Cuban culture in this phase as “an antidote to Wall Street,” the symbol of whiteness and capitalism (Carpentier 1933, in: Kutzinski 1993: 141). Dialogues in the cabaret and the spatialization of bodies

The example of Rita Montaner and Alejo Carpentier’s interpretation of her performance show how the understanding of black culture in Paris was expanded and repositioned in the 1920s, while the dissemination of local cultural expressions such as Cuban son fueled the wave of globalization of Caribbean music and rhythms. I now turn to the night clubs, cabarets, music halls, dancings, and boîtes themselves as sites for the negotiation of race as well as for the production of popular imaginaries, where expression was given to social concerns, fears, dreams, and desires – and to new subjectivities. As Alejo Carpentier discovered, Cuban conga, son, and rumba music, and dance dominated at the beginning of the 1930s in the boîtes of Montmartre, including the Melody’s Bar, the Cabaña Bambú, the Cabane Cubaine, and the famous Chez Florence. These clubs and cabarets became crucial for social positioning and racial ascriptions. But why was this so? When viewed from the perspective of interconnected metropolises such as New York, Paris, and Havana in the 1920s, it is easier to discern how these recreational venues became key locations where the concept of a modern lifestyle was developed in close relationship to concepts of race and sexuality (Vogel 2009; Kummels 2011: 242f.; Jacotot 2013). Decried by opponents as dens of vice, cabarets were celebrated by supportive patrons and artists as sites of cultural creativity that not only allowed for permissiveness, but also the overcoming of racial, social, and sexual restrictions (Vogel 2009: 3). The transformative potential of the cabaret was based on its unique characteristics. Since performances were not limited to the stage, it was a place where the traditional boundaries between the artists and the audience became blurred. The simultaneous enjoyment of food and drink during a performance also made for a uniquely intimate setting

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(Vogel 2009: 60f.). These innovative spatial and performative practices of the cabaret were developed in transnational circuits. Parisian prototypes, like the Chat Noir, founded in 1881, were emulated in New York from 1911. In the wake of the Paris Tumulte Noir, New York cabarets such as the Cotton Club were, in turn, re-exported to Paris. Havana’s cabaret culture, for its part, influenced and was also influenced by the metropolises to the north (Lam 2007: 142f.). The cabarets in Paris were not uniform. Instead, they were oriented towards different audience segments and had varying degrees of exclusivity. This is illustrated by the distinction between “high-class” soirée dansantes like Les Ambassadeurs on the Champs-Élysées, with its tea time and supper club revue, and Montmartre’s expensive, though more inclusive, boîte Chez Florence. After the show ended around midnight in Les Ambassadeurs, white customers fascinated by African-American cultural forms increasingly migrated over to the dancing at Chez Florence, managed by famous African-American entertainer Florence Embry Jones. The club was racially mixed and put on shows that privileged Caribbean rhythms (Castro/Kummels/Schäfer 2002: 171ff.). As I will discuss later, the Caribbean dances adopted in France became an important site for representing the couple, desire, and race in a new form (Boittin 2010; Jacotot 2013). Patrons and musicians like the Cuban son septet Anacaona were important actors, for they contributed to the dialogue between the music scenes of Les Ambassadeurs and Chez Florence and thus connected these sites. Anacaona, an all-woman ensemble, established itself in Havana beginning in 1932, despite being confronted with the Havana entertainment industry’s discrimination against female instrumentalists (Kummels 2006: 267). The band’s international success began following its recording of several son pieces for RCA Victor in Havana in 1937, which were distributed in the US, Europe, and Africa. After performing as the opening act at the Havana-Madrid on New York’s Broadway, the Cuban all-women band teamed up with Alberto Socarrás, a Cuban soloist on the transverse flute. Socarrás had made a name for himself in New York as the leader of his own rumba orchestra and pioneered Latin Jazz. Havana-born Alicia Castro (1920-2014), a doublebass player, traveled to Paris with five of her sisters and black singer Graciela Pérez as members of the band Anacaona. They performed as one of most highly coveted acts at the noble Les Ambassadeurs on the ChampsElysées in April and May 1938. At the Les Ambassadeurs, the female band formed part of an internationally oriented revue that combined what were now perceived as exotic variations of world culture like son, tango, waltz, and jazz. Show girls in sequined bathing suits from the International Casino

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of New York danced to their rhythms in a “tropical” revue. The show’s climax was a “typical Cuban” conga, in which all of the patrons were encouraged to join in (Castro/Kummels/Schäfer 2002: 172). The Cuban composer Eliseo Grenet helped create this greatly simplified, Europeanized form of the original carnival dance from Cuba. Here, the dancers lined up and executed their steps in unison, first left, then right, with rhythmic accent being put on the fourth beat. Anacaona additionally appeared every night after midnight in a program with Django Reinhardt’s Quintette du Hot Club de France at Chez Florence. This boîte was managed by Florence Embry Jones, who explicitly sought to introduce a more egalitarian ethos into the city’s night life (Vázquez 2013: 110f.). The demand for authentic local cultures was met by the club’s joint program of female Cuban musicians and tsigane artists. One new development here was that female instrumentalists were now being appreciated for their mastery of authentic cultural forms such as Afro-Cuban son music. Numerous women actors, from host Embry Jones to Anacaona’s instrumentalists and son singer Graciela Pérez, deserve credit for having decisively created an important transnational space of exchange (Vázquez 2013: 115). Compared to other venues, audiences at the Chez Florence were more mixed in terms of race and class. This was due to both the boîte’s history as a more permissive place and the demand for the authentic Caribbean cultural forms that were presented there. The boîte not only attracted American intellectuals and French surrealists. It was also one of the places where the workers of the Parisian nightlife could party after their shifts to the early hours of the morning (Blake 1999: 113). At the Chez Florence, these workers of the leisure industry mingled with persons at the top of the social echelon such as Marlene Dietrich and the Duke of Windsor (Castro/Kummels/Schäfer 2002: 174). They also contributed in a dialogical manner through music and dance to the creation of local cultural expressions from the Caribbean that could not be found at Les Ambassadeurs. Anacaona’s instrumentalists made a political statement, not only by playing son, both a local Cuban genre and a formerly male-dominated site, but also by adopting the name of Anacaona. The name referred to a Taino political leader, composer, and noblewoman from the island of Hispaniola (Haiti/Dominican Republic), who was executed for alleged conspiracy by the Spaniards around 1500. The band contributed to turning her into a symbol of Caribbean resistance (Vázquez 2013: 101). Boîte audiences were less interested in the conga dance than the erotic couple dances and the accompanying music that Caribbean bands, among them Anacaona, would play there. Patrons transformed these dances into a

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new discourse about the couple, desire, and race, which was evaluated from different perspectives. Because of such transformations, Caribbean dances were generally under a great deal of scrutiny. Already in the 1920s, the eroticization of dance, white women performing “black” dances, and racially mixed dance partners were subjects of public discussion. The Nardal sisters, for example, wrote several articles on biguine dance. In one piece, they defended it in its original Martinican form against the “obscene” Parisian version as a respectable dance which “express[es] a languorous grace and an extreme liveliness [that] mimics the eternal pursuit of woman by man” (Andrée Nardal, in: Sharpley-Whiting 2002: 54). In the meantime, scholars like Alejo Carpentier as well as writers of a feminist newspaper represented white women (e.g. the legendary French actress and singer Mistinguett) dancing to Caribbean rhythms as objects of ridicule (Carpentier 2012: 438ff.; Boittin 2010: 60). Despite such debates, however, new forms of mixed race couplehood were overtly performed in night clubs, cabarets, music halls, dancings, and boîtes and thus widely celebrated. George Brassaï’s later famous images of the racial diversity of dancers and audiences at the Cabane Cubaine also attest to this. These different perspectives demonstrate that dance and the spatialization of bodies in nightclubs constituted new and powerful forms of dialogue. Concluding remarks

Conceptualizing a range of different sites such as high-class nightclubs and boîtes geared toward diverse audiences and sites of academic and artistic debate as dialogues holds great promise as a research approach. It allows for discerning the interconnections between seemingly divergent and mixed social settings, where actors intermingled on the basis of different cultural expressions and media such as music and dance, academic and public debate, as well as print journalism. While these media served to express ideas in fundamentally diverse ways (some being embodied and others not), they were simultaneously connected to each another because of their reciprocal references. Examples of this include newspaper articles commenting on Caribbean rhythms and dance moves and academic lectures at the Club du Faubourg and the Studio des Ursulines, which even included music and dance expositions for didactic purposes. Night clubs, cabarets, music halls, dancings, and boîtes have not yet received their due in the research as crucial transnational spaces probably because of the relatively small number of actors and their casual mention in writing, photography, and oral history. However, these venues in particular were hotbeds for imported and

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hybridizing music and dance genres as well as a diversity of patron interactions. They are therefore sites that provide important cues and reveal dialogues about, among other things, the Antilleans’ diasporization and Caribbean culture’s globalization. These venues display diverse formulations of diasporic Caribbeanness, ranging from gendered symbols of Caribbeanness such as the Taino noblewoman Anacaona, reconceptualizations of the national character of music and dance to more encompassing horizons of identity such as black latinité. In this period, nationalisms with regard to music and dance were reformulated: Son and biguine were both defended as national cultural forms and at the same time these national cultural forms were cosmopolitanized, since they were now also considered as constituting world culture. Alejo Carpentier, for example, attributed to Cuban singer Rita Montaner the ability to displace Havana’s solar courtyard to Paris and interprets this kind of Afro-Cuban culture as an “antidote to Wall Street.” The cultural politics with which he and other Parisian actors reconfigured Antillean cultures and Paris as an anti-imperialist space provided an outlook that extended far beyond the imperial attitudes of the Jazz Age.

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Blake, Jody (2003): Le Tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-age Paris, 1900-1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Boittin, Jennifer Anne (2010): Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Carpentier, Alejo (2012): La música en Cuba. Temas de la lira y del bongó. La Habana: Ediciones Museo de la Música. Castro, Alicia /Kummels, Ingrid/Schäfer, Manfred (2007): Queens of Havana. Te Amazing Adventures of Anacaona, Cuba’s Legendary AllGirl Dance Band. New York: Grove Press. Cowley, John (1999): Carnival, Canboulay and Calypso: Traditions in the Making. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellington, Duke (1980): Music Is My Mistress. New York: Da Capo. Fajardo Estrada, Ramón (1998): Rita Montaner. Testimonio de una época. Havanna: Editorial Casa de Las Américas. Fernández, Raúl (2002): Latin Jazz. The Perfect Combination. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Flanner, Janet (1973): Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939. London: Angus and Robertson. Gilroy, Paul (1993): The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Giro, Radamés (2009): Diccionario enciclopédico de la música en Cuba. vol. IV, Havanna: Editorial Letras Cubanas. Goebel, Michael (2014): Anti-Imperial Metropolis. The Politics of Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans in Interwar Paris. FU Berlin: Habilitationsschrift zur Erlangung der Venia legendi des Fachbereichs Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Jacotot, Sophie (2013): Danser à Paris dans l'entre-deux-guerres - Lieux, pratiques et imaginaires des danses de société des Amériques (19191939). Paris: Nouveau Monde. Jefferson, Margo (2000): When Black America Triumphed in France. In: New York Times Theater Review, 10.03.2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/03/theater/critic-s-notebook-whenblack-america-triumphed-france-exhibition-revives.html?pagewanted =all&src=pm. Accessed on 12.27.10. Jules-Rosette, Bennetta (2007): Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Hill, Edwin C. (2013): Black Soundscapes White Stages. The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Kenrick, John 1996-2004: A History of the Musical Vaudeville. http://www.musicals101.com/vaude1.htm. Accessed on 12.27.10. Kummels, Ingrid (2006): Ein Leben entlang der Achse Havanna – New York – Paris: Concepción Castro Zaldarriaga (1907-1976) und ihre Frauenband Anacaona. In: B. Hausberger (ed.), Globale Lebensläufe. Vienna: Mandelbaum, pp. 257-282. Kummels, Ingrid (2009): Popmusik und das Sakrale: Kubanische Religiosität aus der Perspektive der Forschung zu Populärkultur. In: L. Rossbach de Olmos/H. Drotbohm (eds.), Kontrapunkte: Theoretische Transitionen und empirischer Transfer in der Afroamerikaforschung. Marburg: Curupira, pp. 75-95. Kutzinski, Vera M. (1993): Sugar’s Secret. Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Lam, Rafael (2007): Esta es la música cubana. La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Casas de Cultura. León, Carmela de (2009): Sindo Garay. Memorias de un trovador. La Habana: Ediciones Museo de la Música. Locke, Alain (1999): The New Negro. Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. (1925). New York: Touchstone. Luis- Brown, David (2008): Waves of Decolonization. Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. Durham: Duke University Press. Meunier, Jean Pierre (2005): La biguine á Paris. Migration et mutation d’une musique metise de la Caraïbe. http://www.lameca.org/dossiers/biguine_paris/biguine04.htm Moore, Robin D. (1997): Nationalizing Blackness. Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Naverrete, William (2003): Cuba: La musique en exile. L’Harmattan. Pulido Llano, Gabriela (2010): Mulatas y negros cubanos en la escena mexicana 1920-1950. Mexiko-Stadt: INAH. Putnam, Lara (2013): Radical Moves. Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Rosaldo, Renato (1993): Culture and Truth. The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press.

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Shack, William (2001): Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars. Berkeley/CA: University of California Press. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean (2000): Femme négritude. Jane Nardal, La Dépêche africaine and the Francophone New Negros. In: Souls. Black Feminist Research. Fall. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean (2002): Negritude Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sublette, Ned (2004): Cuba and its Music. From the First Drums to the Mambo. Chicago: Review Press. Stovall, Tyler (1998): The Color Line behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France during the Great War. In: The American Historical Review 103 (3): 737–769. Streckert, Jens (2013): Die Hauptstadt Lateinamerikas. Eine Geschichte der Lateinamerikaner in Paris in der dritten Republik (1870-1940). Köln: Böhlau Verlag. Vázquez, Alexandra T. (2013): Listening in Detail. Performances of Cuban Music. Durham: Duke University Press. Villalón, Célida P. n.d.: The Ballet Russe - Ballet Russe de Montecarlo. http://www.danzaballet.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&si d=1432. Accessed on 12.27.10. Vogel, Shane (2009): The Scene of Harlem Cabaret. Race, Sexuality, Performance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Wade, Peter (2000): Music, Race & Nation. Música Tropical in Colombia. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Wade, Peter (2009): Race and Sex in Latin America. London: Pluto Press.

Rasta in Revolution: The Rastafari Movement in Socialist Cuba K ATRIN H ANSING

Since its inception in the 1930s, the Jamaican Rastafari movement has gained a widespread local and international following. 1 It is now recognized not only as one of the leading Afro-Caribbean religions but also as one of the most popular cultural trends in the world (Murrel 1998). Today Rastafari communities and dreadlocked inspired youth can be found throughout the Caribbean, in parts of Central America and Brazil, North America and Europe, and in much of Africa, as well as among the Maoris in New Zealand, some Native American groups in the US, and many Japanese youth. Unlike many other transnational religions and global social movements that have predominantly been spread in a consciously organized fashion and through the physical participation and movement of people, this has not been the case with Rastafari. Instead the movement has been diffused in very unguided and haphazard ways through the medium of culture, particularly reggae music, mediated via technology and consumer capitalism. Sounds and images rather than people have spread Rastafari’s message; and 1

Although caution should be exercised when generalizing about Rastafari, a few broad observations can be made about how the movement developed in the Jamaican context. The movement emerged in Jamaica in 1930, the year Ras Tafari was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. Rastas regard Haile Selassie as God (Jah), and it is after him that the movement is named. The Rastafarian ideology is characterized by three main themes: the philosophical tradition of Ethiopianism; a Biblical fundamentalism that comprises both the Old and New Testament; and an appeal to such universal values as love, truth, justice, etc. In Jamaica, its orientation is also profoundly Afrocentric, and the collective repatriation of Black people to Africa is a major aim. For a more detailed discussion of the emergence of the movement, see Barrett (1977); Campbell (1985); Chevannes (1995); Yawney (1978).

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cassettes, CD’s, T-shirts, and posters, rather than proselytization campaigns, as well as organized rallies, conferences, and public relations stunts, have acted as the movement’s international couriers. Despite Rastafari’s globalization, one cannot speak of a monolithic, homogeneous, or bounded movement. Instead, Rastafari is continuously being appropriated and reinterpreted by different peoples in different ways, which has resulted in the ongoing emergence of new localized expressions of the movement. Past scholarly writings on the movement have tended to describe Rastafari as a religion of the oppressed, a protest movement of the poor, a millenarian movement and messianic cult, as well as a culture of resistance and body culture. Although there is no doubt that all of these perspectives have been relevant at one time or another, or indeed at any one time, they have all tended to pigeonhole Rastafari into specific, fixed, and exclusive categories and definitions. Given Rastafari’s global community, I believe that we can no longer presume any one interpretative perspective but rather need to develop multifaceted frameworks to reflect this changing situation. It is thus that my work approaches Rastafari as a transnational social movement. In so doing, it acknowledges both Rasta’s inherent spatial and spiritual diasporic nature, in that the movement’s inception was inspired by events in Ethiopia and its adherents continuously look towards the African continent for inspiration and spiritual guidance, as well as its ongoing transnational attributes in the form of the complex macro and micro dynamics involved in its continued global diffusion and local adoptions and recontextualizations, which have generated many new manifestations of the movement. Viewing Rastafari from this perspective, i.e., as a transnational social movement, implies giving up rigid notions, definitions, and interpretations of the movement and instead recognizing the legitimacy of its continuously evolving hybrid expressions. This article examines the dynamics involved in the transnational journey of the movement’s ideas, images, and music as well as the multiple mechanisms involved in its indigenization with specific reference to Rastafari’s emergence and development in Cuba. Decades after its birth and subsequent tour du monde, Rastafari has also appeared on the neighboring doorsteps of its former island homeland of Jamaica. After traversing geopolitical, linguistic, and ideological boundaries, the movement has now emerged in Cuba. This article examines how Rastafari has entered the island, why and by whom it has been espoused, and how it manifests itself locally. In particular, it looks at the ways in which Cubans have adopted Rastafari and how they have made sense of, adapted, redefined, and even reinvented it according to their own particular context and circumstances.

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Although there are a multitude of ways in which people identify themselves with and express Rasta, the culture in Cuba is predominantly an AfroCuban youth movement. The reasons, significance, and potential implications of this have a lot to do with the specific social context in which the movement finds itself. Fifty-plus years after the triumph of the Revolution, Cuba is currently in a period of economic crisis and intense social transformation. New and old socio-economic inequalities and racial prejudices are resurfacing and are having a particularly strong effect on the AfroCuban population. Special emphasis is thus placed on examining how the Rastafari movement’s presence has influenced and contributed to the formation and expression of new cultural identities and discourses with regard to what it means to be young, Black, and Cuban. Rasta’s Roots / Routes in Cuba

Rastafari is a relatively young phenomenon in Cuba. It first entered the island in the late 1970s and has continued to do so via a number of different agencies. Most Cubans who identify with the movement first learned about its existence by listening to reggae music. Reggae, which to this day occupies almost no airtime on Cuban radio stations, first arrived on the island via sailors and foreign students. Thereafter, the secret listening to and recording of Jamaican and Floridian radio stations was the main way of obtaining the new beat. As tape recorders were hard to come by until the mid-1980s, these first recordings were made by a small group of dedicated fans and played at weekly reggae parties organized in private homes in mostly marginalized urban neighborhoods. It was in this manner that the beat began to circulate, new fans were created, and a new alternative underground music circuit was established. In order to appreciate the difficult conditions under which reggae entered and was diffused in Cuba, one must keep the country’s cultural isolation in mind, which was particularly intense during the late 1970s and 1980s. In terms of music, this has meant that Cuban music has dominated Cuban airwaves since the Revolution, while foreign music has been played less and has been difficult to obtain through formal channels. 2 In addition,

2

The cultural isolation was/is in large part due to the US embargo but has also been partly self-imposed through the government’s strong nationalist and antiimperialist cultural policy. Foreign music on the whole is played less on the radio, partly because it is too difficult and expensive to procure but also because

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listening to music with English lyrics was officially disapproved of during the 1970s and 1980s because of the language’s association with the North American enemy. These and other factors made it difficult for many Cubans to acquire foreign music, which, like many things new and forbidden, subsequently caught on like wildfire. Inspired by images of Bob Marley and other reggae artists, some reggae fans started growing dreadlocks because, as they explained, they “liked the look.” However, because police harassment against men with long hair was especially strong in those decades, the number of people with dreadlocks remained small. Until recently, few Cubans understood or spoke English. However, as most reggae lyrics are in English, most early reggae fans’ understanding of the songs’ content and meanings was limited. Many of these early aficionados, now Rastas, commented that this language barrier did not matter, as the rhythm of reggae itself carries the message. Despite their attraction to reggae, most remained unaware that there was a movement and way of life connected to it. This changed with the increasing numbers of AngloCaribbean, especially Jamaican, students who started coming to Cuba to study in the 1980s. 3 While most were not Rastas, they did bring reggae music and some basic knowledge of Rastafari with them, as well as information about their own islands’ histories and cultures, which they shared with their Cuban peers. Although these exchanges allowed for only rudimentary information about Rastafari knowledge to circulate, they did introduce the early Cuban reggae fans to some of the movement’s main principles and ideas as well as to some of its symbols, such as dreadlocks and the tricolor. The continued haphazard and fragmented fashion in which information about Rastafari has entered Cuba, coupled with the intense discrimination and police harassment towards people with dreadlocks, made it difficult for the movement to grow and organize itself throughout the 1980s. Since the mid-1990s, however, this situation has taken a sharp turn and the movement has literally started to boom. A number of reasons account for this

3

by law, 80 per cent of all music played on radio programs has to be Cuban. All mass media in Cuba are under the direct control of the Communist Party. Since the late 1960s, Cuba has offered university and vocational training scholarships to students from developing and socialist countries. Thousands of students from all over the world have come to Cuba in this manner. In 1972 diplomatic relations between Cuba and Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago were re-established, and agreements were made for these islands to send some of their students to Cuba. Students from some of the smaller islands arrived somewhat later.

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change. Cuba’s sudden economic opening and the growth of tourism have made the entrance, access, and circulation of foreign information, ideas, and styles easier and vaster. While the state continues to hold a firm grip on official cultural production and maintains its anti-imperialist ideological stance towards what it views as North American cultural hegemony, it is having a harder time controlling the inflow of cultural trends from abroad as well as people’s attraction to them. Young Cubans in particular are adopting a wide variety of foreign styles and being bolder in their forms of self-expression. This has led increasing numbers of young people to grow dreadlocks and to openly identify themselves with the movement. Another important reason for this growth has been the presence of a group of religious Rastafari from the English-speaking Caribbean who studied in Havana in the mid to late 1990s. Viewing the movement in Cuba as weak and fragmented, the Anglo-Caribbean Rastas made it their mission to educate and unite the Cuban Rastas. Apart from organizing weekly congregational meetings at which the Bible was read and Rasta doctrine discussed, they translated Rasta literature, Haile Selassie’s speeches, and reggae lyrics. In addition, they were influential in motivating Cubans to start their own reggae bands and drumming groups. Although their influence was especially strong in the formation of a particularly religious group of Cuban Rastas in Havana who are now on their own intra-island proselytization mission, the circulation of their translations has had a broader influence in terms of growing and strengthening the movement as a whole. A further catalyst in the development of Rastafari has come from a number of Cuban Rastas who have left the island. Having become stronger in their faith and/or knowledge about Rastafari abroad, some of them have made a conscious effort to aid other Rastas in Cuba by sending them translated Rasta literature, videos, and paraphernalia in the form of T-shirts, tam hats, scarves, and posters. It is via these diverse transnational routes and networks that the movement has entered Cuba and in the process undergone dynamic changes. Given its multiple roots and the many local obstacles Rastafari has encountered, who, how, and why have people identified with the movement in Cuba? Rastafari a lo Cubano

Rastafari in Cuba can generally be characterized as a predominantly male Afro-Cuban youth movement. Most adherents are from socio-economically poor and often marginalized urban neighborhoods and work as artisans, musicians, or in the informal sector. Due to the haphazard and heterogene-

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ous ways in which Rastafari was introduced and has spread, coupled with the particular socio-political context in which it finds itself, Cubans have not been exposed to the movement’s religious, philosophical, and sociocultural knowledge and practices in an ongoing and structured way but rather in a random and unguided manner. Moreover, the lack of a centralized structure, an authoritative voice, and access to information as well as the language barrier has meant that Cubans have been able to freely choose elements from the movement that most appeal to them as well as to individually reinterpret and change certain elements in order to fit their own personal needs and circumstances. As such, different Rastafari components—whether religious, social, philosophical, or cultural—have been selectively as well as randomly copied, altered, and fused with elements from other cultural systems. As a result, a multitude of different understandings and manifestations of the culture have developed. One can thus for instance find individuals like Ernesto, a Rasta from Havana who, in addition to having a strong faith in Haile Selassie, is also a devotee of San Lázaro, one of the most popular saints and orishas of the Afro-Cuban syncretic religion, Santería. December 17 is the patron saint day of San Lázaro, on which many Catholic and Afro-Cuban religious practitioners undertake a pilgrimage to the national shrine of San Lázaro at El Rincón on the outskirts of Havana. They come here to demonstrate their devotion to San Lázaro and to ask for his protection against disease and other misfortunes. A few years ago, on the eve of December 17th, I went to El Rincón to document this religious festival. It was around 8pm when I reached Santiago de las Vegas, the last and nearest bus stop to El Rincón. Despite a major lack of public transport, Santiago de las Vegas, which lies about five miles away from El Rincón, was packed with people, many of whom had come from distant parts of the island. Many carried candles and flowers as offerings to San Lázaro, while a number of people dressed in rags could be seen crawling on their knees or dragging themselves along their backsides towards the shrine. These individuals had made a promesa (promise) to the saint and were now paying penance by way of physical hardship. In the midst of all of this activity, I spotted Ernesto, who I had met a few months earlier. Not knowing that he was a devotee of San Lázaro, I expressed my surprise at seeing him. We walked the remaining four miles to the shrine together, during which he told me his reasons for coming to El Rincón. As a child Ernesto was involved in a bad car accident that almost killed him. His multiple leg and hip injuries kept him hospitalized for months, and it was uncertain whether he would ever be able to walk again. In her des-

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peration Ernesto’s mother, who had always been a strong believer and devotee of San Lázaro, decided to make a promesa to the saint in order to help her son. In this she promised San Lázaro that if he saved her son and allowed him to walk again she would make sure that Ernesto visited his shrine every year for the rest of his life. Ernesto did live and walk again, and he has been making the annual pilgrimage to El Rincón ever since, in order to fulfill his promise. Like his mother, Ernesto strongly believes that he has San Lázaro to thank for being alive and well. Feeling a strong bond to and affection for this saint, Ernesto refers to him as his protector (protector) and guía espiritual (spiritual guide). However, Ernesto’s devotion to San Lázaro does not interfere with his identification with Rastafari and his belief in Haile Selassie. On the contrary, Ernesto believes in both Haile Selassie and San Lázaro. As he put it: “I am Cuban and these are the beliefs that I grew up with. San Lázaro is my protector, but I also believe in Haile Selassie. They both give me support and guidance, and fill me with the strength I need.” Despite his identification with both belief systems, Ernesto has not blended these different systems of knowledge together, nor has he chosen to solely adopt one or the other. Instead, he has allowed both to coexist, using elements from each system depending on the particular situation and context he finds himself in. In so doing, Ernesto not only manifests a high degree of multiple cultural competence but also what some scholars have referred to as a toolkit-like attitude towards culture (Swidler 1986). Like Ernesto, most Cuban Rastas have adopted and adapted elements from Rastafari and either incorporated them alongside other beliefs and practices or mixed and merged them with elements—religious, philosophical, and cultural—from other cultural systems. What Rasta elements are adopted and how they are reworked and reinterpreted greatly depends on who does the adopting. People’s personal situations differ tremendously, as do the manners in which they were introduced to Rastafari and their reasons for identifying with it. As a result, a wide variety of Rasta identities and expressions has emerged, which can perhaps best be described as a continuum ranging from orthodox religious Rastas to people who identify with Rastafari as a body culture or style. 4

4 In my work I have identified four main “types” of Rastas: (1) religious; (2) philosophical; (3) fashion; and (4) jinetero. For a more detailed overview, see Hansing (2006).

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Rastafari in a Different Kind of Babylon: Shared Aesthetics – Shared Vision

Despite the heterogeneity of reasons for people’s identification with the movement and the manifold manifestations of it, certain commonalities between all Rastas in Cuba can be discerned. These include a shared aesthetic and vision. The long matted hair worn by Rastas, called dreadlocks or locks, is perhaps the best-known symbol of Rastafari. To many, dreadlocks are a symbol of defiance against Babylon, while to others they represent a way of manifesting individual choice and being different from the norm. To others still, they are simply the natural way of being according to biblical scripture. In a country like Cuba, where looking differently from the norm is usually associated with thinking differently, both of which are looked upon unfavorably by the state, wearing one’s hair in locks is a bold and daring undertaking. While the harsh persecution of the 1970s and 1980s is over, young men still face constant social and police harassment. Their looks are associated with delinquency, crime, and drugs, making Rastas one of the main targets of the police. Social prejudices are also strong. Most Rastas have experienced some form of discrimination against their choice of hairstyle from their own family members as well as from society more generally. Verbal and even physical abuse, such as being spat at or being called condescending names by complete strangers, are not uncommon. Due to this common experience of discrimination, strong ties of solidarity between people with dreadlocks—whatever their reasons for wearing them—have developed. Such discriminatory experiences have led many to view Cuba’s dominant codes of beauty as Eurocentric, as well as made them more conscious of the deepseated prejudices against Blacks. Among them there is a shared sense of daring to be different as well as a sense of pride that comes with having understood and, according to them, escaped the Eurocentric mental slavery, which they believe they were (and most Cubans still are) conditioned by. Rastas share an aesthetic, but in so doing they share much more, namely a certain outlook, attitude, and vision. Rastas in Cuba, whether male or female, state-employed or working in the informal sector, from Havana or Santiago de Cuba, all share a common understanding of what their Babylon in Cuba is. In most societies where Rastafari is present, this often-used term is normally equated with oppression and injustice, and is most often associated with capitalism, racism, and the police. In theory, Rastafari and socialist principles and doctrine sound

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surprisingly similar. So, what is Babylon in a society that officially stands for social justice and equality? What is Babylon in Cuba? Although the Cuban Revolution has tried hard to eliminate all forms of social and economic injustice, the past fifty years have not brought about a complete social transformation. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the so-called Special Period in Cuba, economic inequalities and racial discrimination have resurfaced and increased, making social justice and equality a far cry from reality. Nonetheless, it is precisely these words and ideas that continue to make up much of the official rhetoric. Walls, buses, posters, as well as TV and radio advertisements are all covered with slogans such as “igualdad, lealtad, justicia”;“luchamos juntos, venceremos juntos”; “patria o muerte”(“equality, loyalty, justice”; “struggle together, triumph together”; “fatherland or death”). Television and radio programs, which are controlled by the Cuban Communist Party (CCP), also tend to highlight the gains of the Revolution while blaming the US embargo and other US policies towards Cuba for the island’s social and economic difficulties. Sensitive social issues are seldom discussed publicly, and when this does happen the debate is often managed in such a way that the Revolution and government are not talked about in a critical or negative manner. In the eyes of most Rastas, these words and the system that pronounces them are hypocritical. Combined, they produce a myth that covers up the increasing economic inequalities, the reality of racism and repression, and the lack of freedom of expression. Rastas are learning that, although they have been brought up to believe in equality on all levels, some Cubans are more Cuban than others these days. In their view, Cuba is neither the multiracial democracy nor the egalitarian society it claims to be, and it is the power of this myth that Rastas call Babylon. By embracing Rastafari’s antihegemonic, anti-racist, egalitarian as well as overall humanistic message, they are identifying with a philosophy they view as truer and more just than the one they see, hear, and live in. The second vision Cuban Rastas share is their connection with Rastafari’s anti-racist and pan-African message, as well as their positive identification with Blackness. Because these themes are of major significance in understanding Rastafari’s emergence and development as well as its particular manifestations in the Cuban context, we will explore them in greater detail.

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Race and Racism in Cuba

Race and racism have been an integral part of Cuban society since the early days of the Spanish conquest. During both the colonial and republican periods, race established people’s legal and social rights and played a defining role in how people were judged and treated. While 20th century pre-revolutionary Cuba did not evolve into a US South or a South Africa, it was considered to be among the most racist of the Hispanic Caribbean territories. At the same time, its racial situation was comparable to Brazil’s in that the color spectrum ran from black through varying shades of brown to white. The so-called blanqueamiento (whitening) factor continued to give those of mixed race greater social mobility than Blacks within the larger society, and shaped socio-psychological aspirations (de la Fuente 1995, 1999; Helg 1995; Martinez-Allier 1974; Robaina 1990; Scott 1985). After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the race question was almost entirely subsumed under a broadly redemptive nationalist and subsequently socialist umbrella. In line with their Marxist views of history and society, Cuban authorities approached the issue of race from a structural perspective. As such, it was believed that once the causes of racial inequality (private property and class exploitation) were eliminated, racism and racial discrimination would automatically disappear (de la Fuente 1995). Class privileges based on private property were eliminated in Cuba in the early 1960s. In addition, the Revolution moved rapidly to dismantle institutional racism and other forms of socio-legal inequality. However, it did not specifically target the society’s deeply ingrained culture of racism. Instead, the ideological rationale and rhetoric of unity and equality introduced an official silence on all race-related matters – a silence that transformed the race issue, among others, into a taboo topic that has to this day made speaking about the problem of race a problem in and of itself (de la Fuente 1997; Moore 1988). Cloaked under the myth of racial equality and national unity, race and racism have not been consciously and directly confronted or tackled in a country in which education and conciencia (consciousness) have always been considered primary objectives. Instead, by effectively excluding the issue from public discourse, centuries-old racial stereotypes and prejudices have been left unchallenged. Socioculturally speaking, what this has done is turn the issue into a complex and often hard-to-pinpoint social phenomenon in which racial prejudices persist but are not acknowledged.

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Although official statistics are unreliable, it is safe to assert that approximately 60 per cent of Cubans have a significant degree of African ancestry (McGarrity 1993). Although some Afro-Cuban cultural elements have been acknowledged as valid expressions of national Cuban culture (this has increased since the introduction of tourism), much greater emphasis has been placed on science and on Cuba’s Spanish roots. However, beyond religion, folklore, dance, and music, there has been little serious study and teaching of African history and culture and its presence in Cuba’s own heritage. This, coupled with the island’s cultural isolation, which has made obtaining news about Africa difficult for ordinary people, has led to a state of relative ignorance about the African continent and its diaspora. In addition, there is a tendency in Cuban society to idealize the European to the detriment of the African phenotype. Fair skin, blond hair, and blue eyes are considered the ideal when it comes to standards of beauty. This is not only reflected in people’s obsession with skin color categorization 5 but also in attitudes towards curly hair as pelo malo (bad hair) versus straight hair as pelo bueno (good hair). Notions of adelantar la raza (advance the Black race by marrying a lighter-skinned person) are also still prevalent. Black images in the media are rare, and when they do exist they usually portray stereotypical Black characters such as slaves, musicians, and sportsmen. Until the late 1980s, the government appeared to have the necessary moral force to impose a sort of conformity, which made people aware that overt forms of discrimination were anti-social; and by equating anti-social behavior with anti-government behavior, the state made deviance punishable by law. However, with the weakening of the economic structure of the Revolution, the Cuban government appears increasingly less able to insist on general conformity among the population in the way that it once did. In the current period of socio-economic hardship and insecurity, racial discrimination is becoming more apparent and is threatening to restore the status quo of pre-revolutionary days.

5 When describing each other, Cubans rely on physical characteristics. Common terms include but are not limited to:negro(a) or prieto(a), i.e., dark-skinned black; blanco(a) or rubio(a), literally white or blond/fair; mulato(a), i.e., mulatto (person of mixed African–European ancestry); moreno(a), i.e., someone with olive complexion; jabao(a), i.e., light-skinned mulatto; indio(a), i.e., mulatto with fine features; chino(a), i.e., Chinese-looking (McGarrity 1993: 201). These adjectives are situated within an unstated subtextual racial hierarchy, with rubio and blanco being at the top and prieto at the bottom.

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While the origins of the crisis may not be inherently racial, some of the reforms introduced by the government have hit Blacks especially hard and given the crisis a strong racialized dimension. To start with, the legalization of the dollar and the later introduction of the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC) have exacerbated tensions between those who do and those who do not have legal access to hard currency. Cubans receive hard currency legally from two main sources: family remittances from abroad and links to the Cuban hard currency / the CUC economy, comprising mainly of: tourism, foreign joint ventures, and small private businesses. Because the exile community is overwhelmingly White, Blacks do not receive a proportional share of the remittances (Mesa-Lago 1994). Their opportunities therefore are reduced to the competitive tourist sector, where they do not have the same opportunities as Whites to obtain jobs. Although it is generally difficult for anyone - Whites included - to obtain work in the tourist industry, some factors, such as the concept that de la Fuente describes as “buena presencia”(good presence) (1998), so valued in the tourist industry, work specifically against Blacks. In such an environment, racial prejudices play an active role in preventing Blacks from gaining access to highly desirable jobs. Moreover, due to Afro-Cubans’ relative concentration in areas with rundown and overcrowded housing, the opening of paladares (family-operated restaurants) and bed-and-breakfasts, two of the most lucrative ways of earning hard currency legally, is not a viable option for most Black families. Because of these barriers, most Afro-Cubans have been forced to participate in the informal and frequently illegal economy, ranging from prostitution to trafficking in the black market, in order to gain access to hard currency. As a result, many of these activities, especially prostitution and crime, have once again become racialized (Fernández 1999). Rastafari as a Response to Racial Discrimination

Rasta offers an alternative view of race, Blackness, Africa, and cubanidad (Cubanness), one that is pro-African and anti-racist. Interlocking with the island’s growing racism, it is the attraction to these ideas that are the main reason for the movement’s growing popularity among young Black Cubans. Most Rastas are young Afro-Cuban men who have grown up with racial discrimination as part of their daily existence. Like most AfroCubans, they are becoming increasingly aware of the myth of racial equality in their country, to which frustration, anger, and confusion are among the most common responses. In addition, questions relating to what it means to

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be Black in Cuba are starting to be voiced and are prompting many, especially among the youth, to explore what this may mean to them. Because of the lack of an open public discourse on race-related matters and an official blueprint of what it means to be Cuban (which is defined only in revolutionary and socialist terms), most people do not have the vocabulary with which to articulate their frustrations. Rastafari’s ability to convey its message, particularly its positive identification with Blackness and Africa through various symbolic forms other than speech - namely, aesthetically, musically, spiritually, bodily, and verbally - has allowed many to identify with the culture as well as to use it as a means to examine, discover, and express what Blackness may mean to them. In other words, these processes of exploration, identity construction, and expression occur at various levels and through different agencies. We thus find, for example, that through wearing dreadlocks, the tricolor and Afrocentric clothing, the body is used not only to defy and question dominant aesthetic norms and standards of beauty but also to re-evaluate and challenge old stereotypes about Blackness. Also, reggae concerts and parties are increasingly evolving into new Black cultural spaces where Rastafari fashion, news, and knowledge are shared, shown off, and exchanged, and where reggae itself is used as an important vehicle through which individual ideas about Blackness are articulated and other sensitive social issues are addressed. It is in these spaces that a growing sense of shared Black identity is not only being discovered but also created. Furthermore, many committed Rastas are themselves acting as awareness raisers, by teaching people about African and Afro-Cuban history and culture as well as by speaking up about the race problem. They are mainly using the arts and culture to send their message. Through concerts, poetry readings, exhibitions, and several homages to Bob Marley in the past few years as well as fighting to have reggae music played on local radio stations, these Rastas are on a mission of their own. Conclusion

Since its humble beginning over eighty years ago in Jamaica, Rastafari has been transformed into a global movement, expressing itself differently depending on the local context it finds itself in. In Cuba, Rastas are also no longer an uncommon sight, and there is no doubt that the movement is growing. There, Rastafari has been adopted and adapted into a culture through which individuals are exploring and re-evaluating their identity on many levels, especially with regard to race. In light of Cuba’s historically

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complex race relations and still existing problems of racial discrimination and depreciation of Africa, Rasta is contributing enormously to raising awareness about these issues and in so doing is offering a counter-narrative to the official discourse on race, equality, and what it means to be Cuban.

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References

Barrett, Leonard (1977): The Rastafarians, Boston: Beacon Press. Campbell, Horace (1985): Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney, London: Hansib Publishing. Chevannes, Barry (1995): Rastafari, Roots and Ideology, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. de la Fuente, Alejandro (1995): “Race and Inequality in Cuba, 1899-1981.” In: Journal of Contemporary History 30, pp. 31-68. de la Fuente, Alejandro (1997): “Are Blacks ‘Getting out of Control’? Racial Attitudes, Revolution, and Political Transition in Cuba.” In: M.A. Centeno and M. Font (ed.), Towards a New Cuba? Legacies of a Revolution, London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, pp. 53-71. de la Fuente, Alejandro (1998): “Recreating Racism: Race and Discrimination in Cuba’s ‘Special Period.’” In: Georgetown University Caribbean Project. Cuba Briefing Paper Series 18. de la Fuente, Alejandro (1999): “Myths of Racial Democracy: Cuba 19001912.” In: Latin American Research Review 34/3, pp. 39-73. Fernández, Nadine (1999): “Back to the Future? Women, Race and Tourism in Cuba.” In: K. Kempadoo (ed.), Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex in the Caribbean, Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 81-90. Hansing, Katrin (2006): Rasta, Race and Revolution: The Emergence and Development of the Rastafari Movement in Socialist Cuba, Berlin: Lit. Helg, Aline (1995): Our Rightful Share, The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1902, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Martinez-Allier, Verena (1974): Marriage, Class and Colour in 19th Century Cuba, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGarrity, Gayle (1993): “Race, Culture and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba.” In: S. Halebsky (ed.), Cuba in Transition, Boulder: University of Colorado Press, pp. 193-205. Mesa-Lago, Camelo (1994): Breve Historia Economía de la Cuba Socialista, Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Moore, Carlos (1988): Castro, the Blacks and Africa, Los Angeles: UCLA Press. Murrel, Nathaniel Samuel (1998): Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Robaina, Tomas (1990): El Negro en Cuba 1902-1958, Havana: Edition de Ciencias Sociales.

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Scott, Rebecca (1985): Slave Emancipation in Cuba, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith, Lois/Padula, Alfredo (1995): Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swidler, Ann (1986): “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” In: American Sociological Review 51, pp. 273-286. Yawney, Carole (1978): Lions of Babylon: The Rastafarians of Jamaica as a Visionary Movement. Unpublished PhD thesis, Montreal.

A Transatlantic Restoration of Religion: On the Re-construction of Yoruba and Lúkúmí in Cuban Santería C LAUDIA R AUHUT

Yoruba is an important source of socio-cultural and religious belonging in the Atlantic World. Due to the transatlantic slave trade, millions of Africans identified as Yoruba came to the Americas, especially to the Caribbean, the USA, and Brazil. Their lasting cultural impact has been shown in nearly all sectors of everyday life – in Afro-American religions like Cuban Santería, Haitian Vodou, or Brazilian Candomblé, in music, language, material and popular culture, food, and so on. But Yoruba, as part of broader African heritage, is not just a historically constitutive element of Afro-LatinAmerican societies; it has also influenced certain people, practices, and locations in nearly all countires of the Atlantic World by means of cyclical processes of migration and globalization. The ongoing construction and appropriation of Yoruba identity by highly diverse sets of actors, as exemplified by their practices and materially tangible in their localities in the Americas, Europe and Africa, has been a central concern for anthropological research since the early 20th century. The assumptions of classical literature on African, and especially Yoruba, cultures and their transformation in the Americas between survivals (Herskovits 1941) and creolization (Mintz/Price 1976) has been reworked since the 1990s by groundbreaking Atlantic approaches. Authors like John Peel ( 1989), Stephan Palmié ( 2002; 2005), and J. Lorand Matory ( 1999a; 1999b) have stressed the transnational ethno-genesis and construction of Yoruba as a historical and ongoing process of an “Afro-Atlantic live dialogue” (Matory 1999a). Focusing on the long-term interweaving of connections among mobile actors, practices, and ideas circulating between Europe, West

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Africa, and the Americas especially since the second half of 19th century, they all have convincingly shown that Yoruba religions are the result of active and continuous work on the past, and memory, influenced by missionaries, colonial powers, commercial, scientific, and religious agencies in different localities and temporalities around the Atlantic. A key observation is that identification with Yoruba is mainly achieved by religious agency – people “become” and consider themselves Yoruba as a result of being initiated into the Yoruba or into one of the Afro-American religions. In Cuba, historically one of the most prominent locations for Yoruba practices (labeled as Lucumí) in the Americas, identification via religion has been analyzed as a constitutive element in the emergence of first religious groups of Lucumí at the end of 20th century (Brandon 1997 [1993]; Brown 2003; Palmié 1991). In this article, I examine contemporary processes of identification with Yoruba and Lucumí in Cuban Santería. By focusing on the worshipers themselves, I aim to demonstrate how they re-construct their religious belonging and the historical, spatial and temporal references they draw upon. As an example, I highlight a particular contemporary project of transatlantic ritual innovation headed by a religious leader in Cuba and finally analyze how the categories Yoruba and Lucumí in Cuba are appropriated. The backdrop of this study is the ongoing religious globalization of Santería through migration which has gone hand-in-hand with the gradual official recognition and popularity of Afro-Cuban religions since the 1990s. In my PhD thesis, I analyzed the increasing relevance of transatlantic networks, whereby conflicts surrounding religious tradition and related references between Cuba and Africa have been important struggles for accessing power in the growing field of Yoruba religion and practice (Rauhut 2012). 1 While other contributions in this volume offer an impression of the recent global spread of Yoruba-based religions in the USA, Latin America, and Germany, my article deals with the impact of religious globalization in Cuba itself and the historical and contemporary meaning of traditions of Yoruba and Lucumí and how they are positioned by Cuban religious leaders within a global spectrum of Afro-Atlantic religions.

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Based on long-term empirical research in Havana/Cuba between the years 2004 and 2007, I analyzed several major conflicts concerning the globalization of Santería and its renegotiation in Cuba (Rauhut 2012).

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The Emergence of Santería Cuba

Santería is based on West African, mainly Yoruba traditions, which were brought to Cuba by enslaved Africans captured from the regions of the today south-western Nigeria and south of Benin during the transatlantic slave trade. Still not known by the term of Yoruba, in Cuba they have been labeled as Lucumí (analogous to Nagó in Brazil). Both terms were originally used by colonizing slaveholders to categorize supposed ethnic origins and classify the “value” of the enslaved Africans in the colonies (Law 1997: 205). Cuban historian López-Valdéz has shown how Lucumí became a generic concept in 19th century Cuba, which not only the Yorubaspeaking people have adopted, but also other ethnic groups like Bariba, Igbo, Asante, Haussa (López-Valdés 1998 [1990]: 339). Palmié and Zeuske understand Lucumí as a mode of cultural and ethnic integration concerning the assimilation of linguistically and culturally similar groups – a process that mainly took part within the urban colonial institutions called Cabildos de Nación (Palmié 1991: 76; Zeuske 2002: 118). A central factor in “becoming Lucumí” was at that time, and still is, religion. People thus choose and achieve their belonging to Lucumí by initiation into one of the different religious groups of Lucumí (Brandon 1997). The first such group was initially founded by enslaved Africans as well as freed Blacks in the Lucumí Cabildos, probably in the second half of 19th century. At the turn of century, after the official abolishment of slavery in 1886, a standardized religion called Regla de Ocha (the rule of the Orichas, the Yoruba gods) emerged through the agency of several charismatic religious leaders of the Lucumi Cabildos and Sociedades (Brown 2003). Regla de Ocha (consisting in the devotion to different Orichas, Cubanized gods of Yoruba people) was popularly known as Santería from the 1930s and practiced by male Santeros and female Santeras. The other branch, Regla de Ifa, centered on the interpretation of the oracle of Ifa by exclusively male Babalaos, who were considered as the highest ritual hierarchy within a religious family. Today, there are hundreds of independent, autonomous, and decentralized religious families, whose members are affiliated by ritual kinship and mutual social ties, loyalty, and support. As godfathers/mentors (padrinos/as), the Santeros, Santeras, and Babalaos transmit their spiritual practices and knowledge to their godchildren (ahijados/as) and initiate them as sons and daughters of the Orichas. The relationships within a religious family can thus be characterized in terms of kinship and reciprocity: While worshipers constantly devote different forms of worship to the Orichas, including sacrificial offerings and spirit posses-

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sion, the Orichas, in turn, protect them through their spiritual powers and shield them from harm and misfortune in their private and professional lives (Perera Pintado 2000; Menéndez 1995b). While Santería, like other Afro-Cuban religions, was stigmatized from many years as “African sorcery” or a “primitive, backward and criminal cult,” it is today the most popular religion in Cuba and has become a powerful symbol of the Cuban national identity. 2 At present, numerous practitioners prefer to (re-)use the terms Lucumi or Yoruba, instead of Santería, to refer to the religion. These shifts in terminology are part of broader tendencies to re-Africanize Afro-American traditions, which is closely linked to an increasing global connectedness and migration of these religions (Frigerio 2004). Global Networks of Re-Africanization

Re-Africanization refers to the wider appropriation of “African-style” rituals and cosmologies in the Americas for strengthening religious authenticity and legitimation. Those tendencies have been most prominently (and were also first) exemplified by Orisha voodoo practice in the USA, which is usually understood as a selective synthesis of elements from Cuban Santería, Haitian Vodou, and US-American styles of Nigerian Yoruba religion (Brandon 1997 [1993]; Palmié 1995). The followers of this reAfricanized practice, many of whom were affiliated with the movement of Black nationalism in the US, have been inspired by the establishment of Cuban Santería in the US since the 1940s as a result of different Cuban migration waves. In Santería’s strong African Yoruba-based practices, they have found connecting links to support their political and cultural interest in Africa and concern with identity affirmation. Since its foundation in the 1970s, the religious agenda of the Yoruba movement and Oyotunji 3 village in North Carolina has prominently been analyzed as Yoruba revisionism (Brandon 1997 [1993]), Yoruba reversionism (Brown 2003) or Yoruba revivalism (Clarke 2004, 2007). This means that creolized syncretistic Afro-American religions like Santería were revised in such a manner that their supposed Christian and Hispanic influences were claimed to be substituted by assumed “purer” and “more authentic” African versions. In their struggle with identity, the “Yoruba of the New World” (Capone 2005), 2 3

Ayorinde 2004; Argyriadis and Capone (2004); Perera Pintado (2007). In the Yoruba language: “Oyo rises again,” referring to the old kingdom of Oyo in today’s Nigeria.

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especially the followers from the US, have traveled to West Africa in order to learn about and import current African-Yoruba rituals and to collaborate with spiritual mentors from Nigeria. Their assumption of a superior authority of a “true African religion” has been a source of conflict with other practitioners, mostly Latin Americans in the US who defend the conventional Cuban Santería style (Palmié 1995). While the activists from USAmerican Yoruba movement once strongly influenced other AfroAmerican religions in their own “re-Africanization” process, which is well documented in the cases of Brazilian Candomblé (Capone 1999) or the Orisha religion in Trinidad and Tobago (Henry 2003), the search for African Yoruba origins has since become a quite diverse religious agency of different local actors and groups throughout the Americas. Oyotunji is just one of many existing institutions, actors, and “networks of Yoruba-Orisa invention,” connected by transatlantic interacting geopolitical zones (Clarke 2007: 729), where “centers of canonization” (Matory 2001: 198) emerge. Palmié emphasizes the impact of Nigerian Yoruba practitioners and scholars like Wande Ambimbola, who have been engaged in teaching the (West African) Yoruba language and religion since the 1970s in Brazil, in the Caribbean, and also in Cuba and have thereby contributed to a “cultural work of Yoruba globalization” (Palmié 2005). Re-Africanization has further been researched in the so-called “secondary religious diaspora” – a term Frigerio uses to refer to countries like Argentine, Venezuela, Mexico or Uruguay, where Cuban Santería, Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candomblé or US-American Orisha voodoo have taken root due to approximately 40 years of condensed migration and religious globalization (Frigerio 2004). Approaching Yorubización in Cuba

In Cuba the issue of re-Africanization has been conceived first as Yorubización, a tendency that Cuban scholar Lázara Menéndez observed in the 1990s at an international congress of the Asociación Cultural Yoruba de Cuba. 4 According to Menéndez, several Cuban Babalaos advocated for a stronger ritual and linguistic orientation toward Nigerian Yoruba practices and religious authorities. In her article, deliberately entitled “The Santería 4

The Cultural Association of Yoruba Cuba was founded in 1991 in Havana with governmental support. Their leading members, like the controversial president Antonio Castaneda, claim to represent all the Santería practitioners in Cuba and even those living outside Cuba (Argyriadis/Capone 2004; Gobin 2007; Rauhut 2012).

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that I know…,” she criticizes those Cubans as a small elite manipulated by discourses “from the outside” who “discredit (the) established Cuban Santería of the majority” (Menéndez 1995a). Her view that Yorubización threatens to divide religious unity in Cuba and provoke an identity crisis (ibid: 42) has been shared by other scholars. Ayorinde believes that as a result of Yorubización Santería would lose its recognition and autonomy within the global spectrum of Yoruba practices in Nigeria and the African diaspora, where “[…] attempts to return to a ‘nebulous orthodoxy’ are futile and […] such a return would imply an immobilization of living cultural practices” (Ayorinde 2004: 184). To my mind, such assertions are misleading, insofar as they overlook the perspectives of the religious practitioners themselves. Should not the search for African roots, independent of any theoretical reflections of “essentialism” etc., be considered a “living cultural practice”? As my observations will show in the following, it is necessary to account for the fact that practitioners themselves indeed appropriate “African knowledge” and “African ritual practices” within their transatlantic networks in a very creative and obviously essentialist way – a relevant agency that we have to take into account. When Menéndez asserts that Africa does not have any impact as a source of identification apart from being the (past) origin of Santería and that “Lucumí is not used in Cuba, either as term or as practice” (Menéndez 2002), she is clearly ignoring a relevant religious current of recent years. This radical position negating any affirmation of Africa may have changed in the last years. Recent publications at least differentiate more between certain institutions, actors, and strategies involved in the reAfricanization or Yorubización of different periods. Stephan Palmié has offered interesting insights into early 20th century “African lucumí religious morality,” when Lucumí leaders mobilized alliances with scholars and politicians in order to gain more public recognition for African based religions (Palmié 2002: 259). Argyriadis/Capone as well as Konen have focused on current re-Africanization in Cuba, taking the example of Ile Tuntun and its leader Frank (Cabrera) Obeché (Argyriadis and Capone 2004; Konen 2013). As one of the first Cuban Babalaos to establish religious ties with Nigerian Yoruba practitioners (including the abovementioned Wande and later his son Taiwo Abimbola) beginning in the late 1980s, he attempts to conduct ceremonies in an “African style” of Yoruba religion. I have also noted in my research that people often refer to Frank Ogbeché and other Babalaos of the so-called Linea Africana and so I finally contacted Víctor Betancourt Omolófaro, who was referred to me as one of

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the most prominent representatives engaged in the re-Africanization of Santería. Claiming a Crisis of Cuban Santería.

Víctor Betancourt founded his own religious group, Casa Templo Ifá Iranlówo (which means “the salvation is in Ifá” in Yoruba), in Havana in the 1990s. In this programmatic undertaking, he “reformed” established rituals in order to “restore” popular Santería. Some of the ritual innovations (to be described later) have caused intense debates between different religious groups, both inside and outside of Cuba, around different aspirations to define “legitimate” tradition. Already in the late 1980s, Betancourt established an informal school of Ifa, where Cuban Babalaos discretely came together in private houses and exchanged and systematized their sources of oral history and knowledge in order to improve and refine Ifa divination and liturgy in the Yoruba and Lucumí language (interview with Betancourt; Havana/January 2007). During that time, when the majority of Cubans still did not have many opportunities to establish relations to people outside Cuba, Betancourt already had some transnational contacts to practitioners in Mexico and USA, who helped him to access written sources on the Yoruba religion from Nigeria. He furthermore enjoys a high reputation as the second leader of the Comisión Organizadora de la Letra del Año due to his knowledge, especially of liturgy. 5 According to Betancourt, Santería at present is experiencing an ethical crisis and decline due to its on-going commercialization and the fast and uncontrolled spread of initiations in Cuba, a tendency that “banalizes and splits religious knowledge” (interview with Betancourt; Havana/January 2007). The discourse on negative changes in the religion is quite common among Cuban practitioners, who point to the problems of globalization and the increasing participation of foreigners. 6 However, for Betancourt the

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The Commission on Ifa´s prediction for the year is, in contrast to the Cultural Association of Yoruba, considered to be a more legitimate state-independent association of Santería practitioners. It was founded by Lázaro Cuesta in 1986. Emma Gobin (2008) has analyzed the impact of the “initiation of foreigners” in its normative discourses; cf. also chapter seven in Rauhut (2012). I would interpret the normative borders around the anxiety of having foreign members in one’s own religious group – and thereby accessing (or not accessing) better resources of transnational practice – as an integral part of increasing global ex-

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crisis of Cuban tradition already began with the system of slavery, which forced a radical rupture with the “original” Yoruba culture. Many rituals, according to him, did not even reach Cuba or could not be developed under the dominant colonial catholic society, resulting in their disappearance over the years. Furthermore, he asserts that several rituals have been transmitted “incorrectly” due to “failures” in the oral tradition that have prevented any teaching of knowledge. As a result, Cuban practice remains incomplete and deficient. Betancourt advocates for a stronger religious exchange with the followers of Yoruba living in Nigeria and other places around the Atlantic. He calls them “our brothers” (in terms of religious and genealogical kinship) and emphasizes new possibilities for Cubans to establish cross-border contacts. Indeed, following the internal and global changes in and around Cuba after 1990s, this represents quite a new option for mobility, ritual exchange, and knowledge transfer within increasing transnational networks of Yoruba practitioners. To overcome the proclaimed crisis, Betancourt makes an appeal for a restoration of religion through a larger project of ritual innovations. These innovations are, on the one hand, based on a revitalization of an older Cuban praxis. On the other hand, he also introduces, with the support of his contacts outside of Cuba, some ritual elements of present Nigerian practice which were previously unknown in Cuba. The Renewal of the Lúkúmí Religion

Betancourt, nevertheless, presents his own model of religion not as being African inspired, but much more as a restoration of an “original” Cuban practice which went lost partially at the beginning of 20th century but can be recuperated in present times. He calls this early Cuban practice Lúkúmí and considers it an authentic form which is much closer to the “original” heritage of the enslaved Yoruba (Lucumí) people than what later became known as Santería, “corrupted” by syncretistic changes due to catholicpatriarchal influences, from which he distances himself. He uses the term Lúkúmí instead of the very usual Cuban form Lucumí, and also presents other religious termini as the “correct Yoruba form.” He consequently rejects popular Afro-Catholic terminology like Santería, Santero, Santera and instead calls himself and his godchildren “followers of Lúkúmí.”

change. In a growing competitive spectrum of Yoruba practitioners, Cubans struggle to defend their ritual expertise.

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Betancourt argues that this early practice can be revitalized today, because there are still some “isolated ritual elements” conserved by elder families, especially in and around the region of Matanzas. In order to “bring them up to light,” Betancourt and his followers have been conducting their own field research in different provinces of Cuba since the late 1980s. Similar to the work of an anthropologist (he in fact considers himself to be a self-taught anthropologist), they collect and record primary sources such as ritual chants, Ifa verses, participant observations during ceremonies, and finally conduct interviews with elder worshipers. He emphasizes his own exclusive access to “authentic” and revered religious persons and the confidential knowledge he gained as an experienced and respected Babalao. According to Betancourt, these hidden sources of oral history and knowledge have simply been overlooked for a long time because of the “disinterest” and “ignorance” of the majority of practitioners and still have not been investigated by researchers (interview with Betancourt; Havana/January 2007). He started to collect, systematize, and reorganize those oral sources and, finally, published them in combination with other “sources of Yoruba” containing philosophical and cosmological fundaments. A first step in the rediscovery of hidden sources was the revitalization of the former initiation style Pata y Cabeza in the early 1990s (feet and head, also known as Pie y Cabeza), which is distinct from the leading Cuban initiation style. 7 Other Babalaos have also applied Pata y Cabeza and usually refer to it as an African style initiation, similar to the common style among the Yoruba in West Africa (cf. interview with Lázaro Pijuán; February/Havana 2007). Again, Betancourt refers to Pata y Cabeza as an early Cuban style (not an African one) practiced especially in Matanzas between 1860 and 1939, before the consolidation and unification of various Orichas into one initiation ceremony became the predominant style in Cuba. 8 While scholars have explained the frequent adoption of Pata y 7

8

“Pata y Cabeza” is a reduced form of initiation with only one major Oricha in the head (dueño de la cabeza, owner of the head) and Oricha Elleguá in the feet. Unlike in the predominant Santería style, adepts do not receive five or six additional Orichas. Víctor Betancourt: Casa Templo Ifá Ìranlówo. Para todos los Líderes Religiosos de Cuba y el Mundo; unpublished document, owned by the author. Many scholars agree about the existence of “Pata y Cabeza,” but differ with regard to its historical references in terms of the time, region, and content of this practice (Brown 2003; Ramos 2003). The initiation of “head and feet” is also wellknown and practiced by the Yoruba of Oyotunji in the USA, who acquire their

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Cabeza as a pragmatic response to the economic crisis of the “special period” in the 1990s, which forced people to reduce their initiation costs (one Oricha alone costs much less than five or six Orichas, cf. Fernández Robaina 2003; Ayorinde 2004: 176), religious practitioners legitimate it as a purer, and more authentic style. However, the ceremony of Pata y Cabeza is controversial among Cuban Santería followers, who mostly continue to adopt the conventional style. But obviously the most conflictive innovation has been the first initiation of women into Regla de Ifa as Ìyáonifá, introduced by Betancourt in 2004. Previously unknown in Cuba, this revitalized ceremony for women has caused a deep trans-local religious conflict dealing with competing models of tradition. This conflict especially brought to light the already existing struggles for power, legitimization, and leadership among the leading religious institutions in Cuba. 9 Transatlantic Restoration on Both Sides of the Atlantic

These innovations could not have been accomplished without support from affiliated practitioners living in Nigeria and other places, who aided Betancourt with sources, rituals, finances, and logistics. However, Betancourt never describes his innovations as African, but much more as a former Cuban practice of Lúkúmí that he has revitalized based on the above-described field research. He argues that it is not necessary to search in Africa for what already once existed as part of a Cuban practice. He suggests that this former tradition can be easily restored because there are still some isolated Yoruba elements that have been maintained by elder families, in some cases even better than in Nigeria itself: »[…] las formas de culto y de liturgia que conforma la variante cubana de esta práctica forman parte de un legado mucho más antiguo del que están divulgando los africanos actualmente. Por fortuna, se conservan en escasos ilé Òşà, todo el caudal legado de forma original. Hasta me atrevo a decir que poseemos valores

9

knowledge exclusively through exchanges with Yoruba priests from Nigeria (Brown 2003: 281). Emma Gobin (2007) has convincingly shown the chronological dynamics and ambitions of this institutional conflict. I myself have focused on the women`s legitimization discourses referring to Cuban and African sources and on how the ceremony contested gender roles in religion, as it is supposed to attribute more ritual competences to women (Rauhut 2012).

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tradicionales que los actuales yorubas no conservan.« (Awo Òrúnmìlà/ Betancourt Omolófaoró/Selier Crespo 2004) 10

Betancourt underlines the presumed authenticity, pureness, and even superiority of a strong Cuban oral tradition. He presents the latter as older and therefore “closer” to the “original” African Yoruba practice (in the form as it reached Cuba) compared to contemporary Yoruba religion in Nigeria. He further argues that the predominance of Christianity and Islam in Nigeria since the 19th century and internal wars have deeply affected the Yoruba religion and caused the disappearance of Orichas, liturgy, and rituals. As a result, the Nigerian tradition today remains deficient and incomplete; he further sees the present Cuban tradition as also being in a state of constant decline. In order to overcome the crisis of religion, he suggests selectively searching in Cuba and Africa for ritual elements that can restore the respective missing parts in both religions: »No se trata de hacer una copia de Africa. Aparte, la misma [religión] que está aquí está allá. La misma. (…) Mis bisabuelos que llegaron aquí son los hermanos, los primos de los mismos bisabuelos que están allá. Lo que nos enseñaron aquí, lo que dejaron aquí como legado es lo mismo que dejaron como legado allá. Eso es lo que hay que buscar (…). Para ver lo que aquí se perdió está allá. Y que ellos [los Nigerianos] ven también lo que han perdido está aquí. Entre ambos hacemos el trabajo ese y restauramos.« (interview with Betancourt/January 2007 in Havana) 11

The idea of a once shared and unique Yoruba religion that slavery disrupted is quite pervasive among other practitioners as well. Most, however, would emphasize Cuban Santería’s specific history and transformation and would reject substituting established Cuban tradition by introducing new elements 10 “[…] the forms of cult and liturgy that the Cuban variant of this practice contain are part of a legacy much older than what Africans actually divulge. Fortunately, they have been preserved, the entire legacy it its original form, in a few ilé Òşà [religious houses]. I would even argue that we have traditional values that the present Yoruba has not preserved.” (free translation by the author) 11 “It’s not about making a copy of Africa. Above all, the same [religion] that is here is also over there. The same (...) My great-grandfathers who arrived here were brothers and cousins of the same great-grandfathers who were over there. What they have taught us here, what they have brought us as a legacy, is the same legacy they have over there. That is what we have to look for (...). To see that what has been lost here is there. And they [the Nigerians] also realize that what they have lost is here. Between both of us, we make that work and restore.” (free translation by the author)

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from outside of Cuba (cf. interview with Lázaro Cuesta; Havana/ February 2007). In contrast, Betancourt highlights the possibility and, indeed, necessity of restoring the religion’s disrupted and widely dispersed local variants and of unifying the “here” (Cuba) and the “over there” (Nigeria) in a transatlantic religion which, he argues, would be stronger and more effective. He enacts this active religious work by creating new possibilities, of mutual exchange between practitioners dispersed in different locations around the Atlantic world regarding specific rituals, mythology, liturgy, and oral and written sources. He thus considers the rituals found in Nigeria to be as fragmented and incomplete as those in Cuba – which is why the ritual repertoires of the respective sides depend on and need to complement each other in a mutual process of “restoration…on both sides of the Atlantic” (interview with Betancourt; Havana/January 2007). The restored rituals can then be reintroduced in Cuba, as well as in Nigeria. This vision certainly seems innovative compared to other well-documented practices of “reAfricanization” in other Yoruba-based religions in the US, Brazil or Trinidad and Tobago, which often refer to a timeless and boundless Africa in a unidirectional and essentialist way (exemplified most prominently in the case of Oyotunji movement in the US, cf. Palmié 1995; Capone 2005). Betancourt, on the other hand, enacts a different strategy: Instead of only importing African rituals with the support of Yoruba practitioners in Africa, he considers himself and his followers to be Cuban experts who are themselves able to export ritual knowledge into the world. Behind this affirmative stance is the self-conscious assertion of Cuban notions of religion shared by a large number of Cuban practitioners, especially those who defend the autonomy of Santería (interview with Ernesto Valdés; Havana/February 2007). Of course, most of them would respect Nigerian authorities and the African origins of Cuban Santería, but only inasmuch as they represent the roots of the religion, not as relevant points of reference for the present. By contrast, Betancourt examines contemporary African rituals as legitimate sources, which – because of their selective integration – allows him to achieve a more complete version of a religion, but one that still envisions a very Cuban notion of tradition. On the Current Lúkúmización in Cuba

While the central discursive reference for Víctor Betancourt’s own model of “restored religion” still remains the “original” Lúkúmí practice in Cuba itself, he has only been able to re-construct it by means of selective recourse to present rituals, sources, and knowledge from Nigeria and other

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localities of Yoruba practice. Within transatlantic networks of reAfricanization, he enacts a specific form of approaching African authenticity, which, to my mind, is better suited to the term Lúkúmización than the above-mentioned term Yorubización. Lúkúmización, in my view, is a religious program generated within global practices and discourses on Yoruba religion that is strategically referred to as a unique and “renewed” Cuban tradition. By constructing his own specific model of Lúkúmí, Betancourt confronts established models of Yoruba Atlantic tradition in three different ways: First, he rejects a too predominantly influence of Nigerian scholars and Yoruba leaders like Wande Abimbola, who considers himself a “spokesperson” for the Yoruba worldwide 12 and closely collaborates, for instance, with above mentioned Frank Ogbeché, another Cuban Babalao of the Línea Africana. Even if Betancourt has some commonalities with these leaders, including the desire to unify different local variants of Yoruba practice, he categorically refuses the realization of this goal by means of the unilateral spiritual guidance of Nigerians. He insists on mutual exchange between Cubans, Nigerians, and other experts on a level playing ground. Second, Betancourt distances himself from US-centered Yoruba practice of the Oyotunji movement. He confirms that he knows their claims, but considers them too extreme, radical, and misleading – especially when they deliberate suspending the Cuban tradition in favor of a Nigerian version. Third, with regard to the positioning of Betancourt’s model within variants of the Cuban tradition itself, he constantly distances himself from popularized and “corrupted” versions of Afro-catholic Santería as propagated, according to him, by the Cultural Association of Yoruba who claims an “illegitimate” representation of Yoruba practitioners in Cuba (interview with Betancourt; Havana/January 2007). Towards these ends, Betancourt’s model of the Lúkúmí tradition claims to be “new” and “original,” while Betancourt constantly mobilizes “innovation” as a strategic discourse. It is, however, not a historic continuity of a supposed former original Lucumí practice, but rather a retrospective projection based on present access to new practices and (often written) sources.

12 http://www.afrocubaweb.com/abimbola.html. Accessed on April 1, 2010.

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Accessing Transatlantic Networks – Confronting Imbalances

The extent to which Cubans are able to introduce new or restored old ceremonies depends highly on their access to resources of transatlantic practice which encounter quite unequal pre-conditions. Betancourt gained a privileged position due to his longstanding connections to practitioners, scholars, artists and journalists from Nigeria, the US, Latin America, and Europe going back to 1980. Many were initiated as members of Betancourt’s group and invited him to travel for religious purposes or academic events to countries like Mexico, Argentine, and the US. Those networks have provided him with rituals, books, and Internet sources on different local variations of Yoruba. In turn, he first selectively incorporates them into his religious model, and second compares, researches, systematizes, and publishes a very specialized knowledge. Betancourt therefore can be considered a leading proponent of new processes for the religion’s intellectualization (cf. also Gobin 2008). Betancourt is a well-known and respected Babalao and enjoys a great deal of support and admiration from affiliated and non-affiliated worshipers, scholars, journalists and sympathizers in Cuba and abroad. However, most Cubans do not pay much attention, or even know about, his model of the Lúkúmí tradition. He is, however, a good example of a newly emerging and powerful transatlantic religious “elite.” Even if they are never able to control the so-called religious “base” and undermine the autonomy of the very heterogeneous and decentralized religious families, they nonetheless possess a certain power of representation. This obviously influences the larger process of redefining Santería, Yoruba and Lúkúmí in a transnational context, as well as its leadership both inside and outside of Cuba (Rauhut 2012). Within Cuba, Betancourt has been accused by other religious leaders and scholars for “confronting and attacking Cuban tradition and for being too concerned with Africa” (interview with Ernesto Valdés; Havana/February 2007; interview with Maria Faguaga; Havana/February 2005). Betancourt, however, sees his confrontation with established Cuban tradition as central to his reform project and considers it necessary from a religious point of view (interview with Betancourt; Havana/January 2007).

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Conclusion

By way of concluding, I interpret Betancourt’s recourse to the Lúkúmí tradition as a particular appropriation of an African past and present incorporated in a Cuban tradition of Lúkúmí that is supposed to restore the historical “pureness” of religion in terms of “originality.” This pureness is not a given, but rather has to be produced ex post through a process of remembering and re-inventing that, moreover, needs to backed by an assertion of a supposedly broken tradition. What Betancourt presents as the original Lúkúmí religion in Cuba is not a direct continuity of the existing tradition of the beginning of the 20th century, but rather a retrospective projection based on contemporary practices, sources, and knowledge. In short, “originality” is always constructed in hindsight from the present perspective as original. However, through the very selective and fragmentary use of oral and written sources from different historical periods and localities, Betancourt successfully shows how tradition can be reworked by individual agency in terms of “re-making history” or “re-writing” history” – a history of Afrocuban religions, which according to Betancourt and many others, has been too long misrepresented by colonial narratives and hegemonic powers like the church, academics and state officials. While a lot of anthropological work has been done on the construction and invention of traditions, Stewart and Shaw (1994) have convincingly demonstrated that theoretical concepts often risk obscuring the perspective of religious actors. For believers, traditions are not invented but frequently performed as phenomenological realities which they appropriate, obviously in an essentialist way. Through their strategic recourse to the past, they stabilize and legitimate their practices in the present. Consequently, it is not our task as anthropologists to empirically show whether ethno-historical categories like Yoruba or Lúkúmí really exist or are constructed or if ritual innovations are “authentically” African or “originally” Cuban. We simply have to take account of the fact that Cuban religious leaders assert they are African, Yoruba or Lúkúmí in order to strengthen their religious authority and to narrate their own versions of African past and present. A central part of their agency is building up strategic bridges to Africa – a quite new possibility they have been denied for a long period, be it through slavery, colonialism or political ideologies. The way Cuban worshipers of Santería refer to Africa is, of course, as complex and heterogeneous as Cuban religious practice itself. Betancourt’s agency is just one example of how Africa, Yoruba, and Lúkúmí are selectively appropriated as sources of identification in order to underline an

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exclusive Cuban notion of tradition. In a global field of Yoruba religions, Betancourt reinforces and defends a Cuban ritual expertise that is still symbolically and territorially located in Cuba. His model of Lúkúmí practice further offers a more differentiated perspective on a development that religious leaders and scholars have propagated quite generally as “Yoruba world religion” or “Yoruba worldview” (Frigerio 2004; Olupona/Rey 2008; Abimbola/Miller 1997), see also the contribution of Félix Ayoh`Omidire in this volume. My case study, however, contributes to a more concrete understanding of how Yoruba world religion can be constructed: Betancourt envisions a restored transatlantic religion in terms of a unified world religion, but which also accesses Cuban, more than Nigerian, practices as sources of legitimation. In this sense, he discursively declares Cuba, and not Africa, to be the center of a religious authenticity, indeed of an appropriated African authenticity. This example further shows that there is no single Yoruba worldview, Yoruba World religion, or Yoruba religious culture (as for instance assumed by Olupona/Rey 2008). Yoruba means very different things in different localities and temporalities as well as individual and collective processes of identification within the Atlantic World. By means of a stronger micro-perspective emphasizing religious agency, we can reach a truly empirically grounded and much more differentiated understanding of what it means precisely to be Yoruba or Lucumí or a part of what recently has called “the Yoruba Atlantic” (cf. the contribution of Stephan Palmié and Félix Ayoh’Omidire in this volume). As this paper has demonstrated, the re-construction of Yoruba and Lúkúmí in Cuba is part of a self-asserted re-presentation of untold versions of Afrocuban religions by the perspective of worshipers strategically placed within a highly interconnected transatlantic field of Yoruba religions and practitioners in the Atlantic world.

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Petrodollar, Bolivarianism, and the Re-Yorubanization of Santería in Chávez’s Socialist Venezuela F ÉLIX A YOH ’O MIDIRE

»Este es un país petrolero, nunca debemos olvidar eso, un país donde hay mucho dinero circulante en la calle, un país donde la población maneja mucho efectivo, y un país de posibilidades. Por eso es que vemos personas que, aunque tienen una casa que vale 40.000 Bolívares, se hacen un santo que vale lo mismo que vale esa casa, porque tienen la necesidad de ser como el padrino […].« Enver “Olayemi” Arbelaez (The Oluwo of Egbé Oturupon-Isokun, Venezuela) 1

1

“This is a petrol-rich country, we must never forget that. It is a country where there is a lot of money circulating on the streets, a country in which the population handles a lot of cash, a country of possibilities. This explains why there are people here who, even though they live in a house that is worth 40,000 Bolívares, don’t mind paying the same amount for an (Ifá/Orisa) initiation ceremony, because they want to be like their oluwo (spiritual guide) at all cost [...].” (free translation by the author). Interview with Enver Olayemi Arbelaez and Ricardo Acevedo, in Caracas, Venezuela on April 19, 2012.

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The coming to power of Commandant Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (19542013) and his so-called “Bolivarian Socialist Revolution for the 21st century” as the 52nd President of Venezuela in 1999 marks a turning point in the history and reality of that country. Venezuela occupies a unique position as a frontier country between Latin America and the Caribbean, sharing a lot of political, economic, socio-cultural, and historical ties with countries of the Andean region of South America as well as ideological, ecological, political, economic, and socio-cultural realities with her Caribbean neighbors, especially Cuba. As the major oil-producing country in the region, Venezuela has considerable economic and political weight in the affairs of Central, Meso-, and South American countries, a fact that often creates frictions between the country and the United States of America, often seen and portrayed as the bullying power within the regional OEA – Organization of American States. The present paper seeks, on the one hand, to analyze the relationship between Venezuela’s prevailing economic condition under President Hugo Chavez and the (re-)emergence and/or (re-) invigoration of the interest of middle-class Venezuelan youth in the practice of the Yoruba cultural ethos, specifically, the new waves of initiation into Ifá/Orisa practice. On the other hand, the paper intends to contribute to the on-going debate on the re-Yorubanization of Afro-Latin-American religions, most especially Santería Lucumí, otherwise known as La Regla de Ocha (Way of the Orichas). Backed by the purchasing power of what Chavez sympathizers fondly refer to as the bonanza petrolera, President Chavez’s government was able to bring about a number of obvious socio-economic changes in Venezuela. The most visible were the government-sponsored social programs known as Misiones Bolivarianas. Totaling twenty-one in all, the missions aim to improve the living standards of Venezuelans by addressing diverse areas of human development. At the economic level, Chávez’s brand of socialism has led to the creation of various programs that support job creation and provide other socio-economic benefits that help the populace to cope with the growing rate of inflation. According to the official statistics released by the Venezuelan News Agency AVN – Agencia Venezolana de Noticias – every Venezuelan family at the peak of the Chavez’s regime in 2012 earned at least a monthly income of two minimum wages, which stood then at 6000 Bolívares, roughly 1000 US Dollars. 2 2

For more on the rise in the standard of living of Venezuelans under the Chavez government, see: http://www.avn.info.ve/contenido/ingreso-m%C3%ADnimolegal-promedio-hogares-venezolanos-compensa-inflaci%C3%B3n. consulted on

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The prevailing economic conditions were also reflected in the pattern of the consumption of symbolic goods by the lower-to-middle working-class groups in Venezuela, as it became possible for more and more Venezuelans to subscribe to and seek out new and not-so-new socio-cultural, philosophical and religious experiences. A major hypothesis of the present paper is to contend that Chavez’s Bolivarian Socialism has favored the propagation of the Yoruba Ifá/Orisa tradition in Venezuela over the past one and a half decades, a process which, in turn, has boldly inserted Venezuela into the Re-Yorubanization process of the Regla de Ocha, the Afro-Cuban religious tradition that originated from the Lucumi 3 (Yoruba) of West Africa.

3

09-05-2012. It is also noteworthy that even today, after the death of President Chávez, the Misiones Bolivarianas are still supported by the government of President Nicolás Maduro. Cf. http://www.gobiernoenlinea.ve/home/misiones.dot (May 27, 2012). The Yoruba, an extensive and highly diversified ethnic group which originated from the ancient civilization of Ile-Ife in present-day Nigeria became prominent in the slave societies of the Americas from the end of the 17th century as a result of the mass enslavement of Yoruba-speaking peoples. Due to the different ports of deportation from the African continent, they became known in the LatinAmerican and Caribbean diasporas under diverse ethnonyms. In Brazil, they were known as the nagô, a name derived from the term anago. This was how the Dahomean neighbors to the west referred not only to Yoruba-speaking groups generally, but also to people who practiced the orisa religious tradition. In Cuba, the same group became known as the lucumí. This name was purportedly derived from a kingdom of Ulkamy, but it has since been determined that it likely came from an expression common among people of that culture that was used to refer to non-family members whom they held dear as olùkùmi, i.e. my bosom friend, my confidant. This term is still widely used in modern-day Nigeria in central and eastern Yoruba dialects like Ife and Ijesa. The etymology of lucumí is thus similar to another collective ethnic name of the Yoruba-speaking peoples, which persists today in Sierra-Leone. There, they are known as the Akú, a term derived from the greetings custom and philosophy of the kaaro-oo-jiire group, who still greet each other with formulas that invariably begin with “e kú” or “a kú” (cf. Ayoh’Omidire 2004, 2005 and 2009a).

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From the Cuban Lucumí tradition to the 4 Yoruba Ifá/Orisa in Venezuela

In the theoretical discussion of the spread of the Yoruba religious culture into the Americas, scholars have always worked with a theory of periodization. In essence, the diasporization of the Yoruba cultural and religious worldview can be divided into at least three phases: 1. The adoption and incorporation of various aspects of the Yoruba religious, philosophical, linguistic, and cultural traditions by non-Yoruba Africans within the larger process of interpenetration of cultural practices prior to the Atlantic experience. 5 2. The recuperation of the Yoruba identity and the implantation of the Yoruba worldview 6 within the slave oligarchies of the Americas from the late 18th to the early 20th century. 7

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5 6

Ifá is the Yoruba oracular practice par excellence. Although the two are interconnected, Ifá is different from the Orisa religious tradition in that the patron of Ifá is Orunmila Bara Agboniregun, who is not seen as a deity per se by the priests of Ifá because the object of worship in Ifá is the odù and not Orunmila himself, who is considered more as the patron of the oracular science. On the other hand, Orisa worship centers around the person of the specific Orisa, e.g. Ogun, Oya, Sango, Osun, Obatala, Esu, etc. who are appeased by their followers via specific liturgical practices in accordance to the given localities and contexts. For a proper understanding of this process, cf., among others, Samuel Johnson, S. Biobaku, A.B. Eltis, Robin Law,Yai, etc. By Yoruba identity or the Yoruba worldview, we refer to the totality of the cultural, material, and spiritual traits shared by all the kaaro-oo-jiire group, which makes it possible for the different sub-groups like Ife, Ijesa, Oyo, Ekiti, Akoko, Ondo, Owo, Onko, Egba, Egbado, Sabe, Ketu, Idaissa, Menigri, Ife-Ana, etc. to recognize one another as brothers and descendants of Oduduwa, emanating from the same ancestral stock at Ile-Ife. These features include kinship and kingship institutions and practices, language, inheritance customs, Ifá-Orisa religious traditions, ancestral worship of Egungun and Gelede, among many other traits. Contrary to what is held by some scholars who prefer to see the Yoruba identity as an invention of the 19th century, when all of the more than 30 subgroups of the kaaro-oo-jiire were collectively referred to as Yoruba, a name that was hitherto reserved exclusively for the Oyo sub-group of the descendants of Oduduwa, it is evident that – irrespective of the individual or collective ethnonym adopted – the traits uniting the groups have never been in doubt among the different sub-groups. The use of the collective name Yoruba by the missionaries and the adoption of same by contemporary Kaaro-oo-jiire communities in modern-day Nigeria must thus be regarded as a mere term of convenience, which neither diminishes the collective identity nor invalidates the individual identifications and identities of the sub-groups.

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3. The back-and-forth movements in the post-slavery era of free and/or economically indentured Yoruba cultural agents within the Atlantic space i.e. from Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad and Haiti via Barbados, Granada, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and other Caribbean locales, from where their descendants have today spilled into the United States and other parts of the Western Hemisphere to form what Falola/Childs (2004) term “economic diasporas” in the 21st century. The second phase in the scheme elaborated above appears to have been responsible for the greatest portion and the largest expansion of the Yoruba cultural presence in the Atlantic region. Scholars have subdivided this phase of the diasporization of Yoruba identity in the Americas into two additional phases. The first is what Alejandro Frigério (2004) calls “primary diasporas,” which includes countries like Brazil, Haiti/Santo Domingo, and Cuba, while countries like Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and the United States belong to the “secondary diaspora” groups. I have argued elsewhere (Ayoh’Omidire 2005; 2009a) that between Brazil and Cuba, the two countries in the Americas which received more than 70 per cent of the total population of enslaved Yoruba persons during the slavery era, a spontaneous redistribution of the Yoruba cultural and religious worldview developed. This was consistent with the general trend of the redistribution of enslaved persons into different countries of the Americas from the ports of Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro and Santos (SP) in Brazil, on the one hand, and the port of La Havana in Cuba, on the other (Ayoh’Omidire 2005; 2009a). While Brazil exported its brand of the KetuNagô religious worldview in the form of Candomblé, Batuque, Umbanda, and Xangô to countries like Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and other parts of the Cone Sur, Cuba exported its Lucumí tradition to the United States, as well as to other Hispanic American countries like Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela. In the case of Cuba and the exportation of the Lucumí-Yoruba worldview in the Atlantic region, Michaelle Ascencio speaks of two distinct periods in her book Las diosas del Caribe (2007: 35-36). She describes the first as la primera emigración de los dioses africanos (the first migration of the African deities) covering the period from 1601-1910, which was almost immediately followed by what she describes as the second migration of the deities. This same re-diasporization of Yoruba 7

Cf. the works of Herskovits, Roger Bastide, Edson Carneiro, Arthur Ramos, Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, Mercedes Cros-Sandoval, Miguel Barnet, and a host of others.

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religious praxis has also been described elsewhere both as a process of the relocation of the deities and the transnationalization of rituals, whereby Yoruba rituals and religious beliefs were transposed and transplanted through the agency of Cuban santeros and babalawos 8 to various countries of Spanish-speaking America. In the specific case of Venezuela, scholars have identified three phases or moments in the process of the implantation of Santería in the country. It is worth pointing out that, based on the available records of the distribution of enslaved Yoruba people in the Americas, Venezuela did not receive a significant number. This fact, coupled with the absence in Venezuela and Puerto Rico of the enabling institution known as cabildos de nación in the Hispanic Americas and as Irmandades and Confrarías in Brazil, 9 may partially explain why the Yoruba religious culture and worldview did not originally take root in these countries before the Cuban diasporization and the subsequent second migration of the Yoruba deities. Before this, the predominant Afro-Latin religious culture in Venezuela was the María Lionza and her tres potencias, a syncretic tradition that incorporates elements from the three principal racial influences in South America, similar in many aspects to the caboclo tradition of Brazil. Santería in Venezuela

The historiography of Cuban Santería in Venezuela has revealed that the arrival of the Yoruba deities to that country can be divided into three distinct moments. The first covers the period from the beginning of the 20th century to the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the second continues through the 1980s, while the third extends from the 1990s onward. It is interesting to note that, in the initial period, prior to the second dispersal of the Yoruba deities (which was a fallout of the Castrist Revolution in Cuba), Santería and Lucumí worldviews did not permeate Venezuela in their “religious dimensions,” but more in their artistic and aesthetic forms. 8

9

The terms santero and santera are popularly used in Cuba and the Afro-Cuban religious offshoots to refer to practitioners of Santería. Santería, i.e. the AfroCuban religious expression based mainly on African religious traditions such as the Yoruba Lucumí or Regla de Ocha, the Bantu Palo Mayombe or Palo Monte, and the Dahomean Rada. On the other hand, babalawo refers to the priests of Ifá who use different divinatory methods including opele (divination chain) and erindinlogun (known as diloggun in Cuba), i.e. the 16 cowries, to consult Ifá. See, for instance, the works of Miguel Barnet, Cros-Sandoval, Samuel Cruz, and, especially, Philip A. Howard.

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While the religious aspect was dismissed as sorcery, the areas of music, dance, and performance were seen as exotic in Venezuela. On the other hand, as scholars like Michaelle Ascencio have already discussed, the migration of Cubans dissatisfied with the Castrist Revolution of 1959 led to the second emigration of the Yoruba deities. They first took the deities to places like Miami and New York in the United States, where they interacted with other Latino immigrants like Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Haitians in what Capone (2005: 115) considers to have been un-equal conditions. As Ascencio (2007: 36) observes: “[...] debido a las altas cifras de emigración cubana en Miami [...] la Santería se ha expandido de un modo notorio con el reclutamiento de devotos de otras nacionalidades: venezolanos, portorriqueños, dominicanos, además de los cubanos [...].” A consequence of this encounter of various HispanoAmerican nations with the Cuban-Lucumí Santería in the United States was the eventual transfer of Santería to Venezuela in the late 1960s. In Venezuela, one of the pioneers of this process that can be aptly termed the 3rd diasporization of the Yoruba divinities from Cuba to the rest of Hispanic-America was Domingo Gómez. His Lucumí name was Changò Migua. Born in Cuba, Gómez grew up in New York, where he was initiated into the Sango cult by another Cuban santera named Mercedes Nobles. According to Venezuelan santero Esteban Pérez, Gómez’s was one of the first Orisa initiations to be held in New York in the early 1960s. 10 After having perfected his knowledge of Ocha 11 with members of the older generation of Cuban santeros in Puerto Rico at that time, Domingo later turned to Venezuela for his Ocha works. When another Venezuelan santero, Ramón Sáenz, was interviewed by Gonzálo Baez in the local magazine Los Oricha, he summarized Domingo’s arrival in Venezuela as follows: »Creo que llegó en el 74 o 75, empezó a venir porque él primero venía mucho como venían muchos santeros como Evelio Iglesias, Ambiro, Abelardo, Chiqui Valdez, santeros que venían e iban, y así comenzó Domingo Gómez, así estuvo, hasta que se

10 Cf. “Conversación con Esteban Pérez,” interview in Personajes by Gonzálo Baez (2006), In: Revista Los Orichas, Febrero 3/33, pp.14-18. 11 In Cuba, as in other Hispano-American communities, Orisa is pronounced as Ocha, originally received in Cuba as a phonetic contraction common among Òyó-Yorùbá speakers.

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quedó definitivamente en Caracas. Tenía un apartamento, ese apartamento tengo entendido que se lo dio un ahijado para que viviera ahí.« 12

Sáenz further points out in his interview that prior to this period (1974/75) not much was known about Santería in Venezuela. The few who were initiated into the religion had done so in Puerto Rico or Miami, while one or two had done their initiations in Cuba. Notwithstanding the apparent contradictions in the exact dates of Domingo Gómez’s trip to Venezuela, it is clear that Santería only came to the country as a result of the actions of itinerant Cuban santeros living and practicing in the United States and Puerto Rico in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Another important and relevant detail is that, during this initial period, the transplantation of Cuban Santería to Venezuela was made possible by the patronage of wealthy Venezuelans artists and intellectuals, who invited the itinerant santeros to practice and consult for them in Venezuela. With regard to the introduction of lucumí-Yoruba Ifá into Venezuela, the trajectory resembled that of Ocha, as Ifá was also brought into the country by the same Cuban migrant santeros. José Manuel Perreira – whose Ifá initiation name, or Odù, is Ocana Che – became the first Venezuelan to undergo the Ifá initiation in the country in 1986. 13 Five years after his Ocha initiation which was done by his own blood brother, Luís Eduardo Hernández (Ochún Laddé), in 1982, 14 José Manuel Pereira “Ocana Che” was initiated into Ifá priesthood by Adalberto Herrera “Otura Tiyú,” assisted as Ojugbona by Ivo Illinois Morales Díaz, “Otura Trupon” (ibid: 21). It is noteworthy that during the time of Pereira’s initiation in 1986 there was already an impressive array of Cuban babalawos practicing in Venezuela,

12 “I believe he (Domingo Gómez) arrived here in 1974 or 75. He started by coming for short visits, because at the start he was coming a lot like many of the other santeros such as Evelio Iglesias, Ambiro, Aberlardo, Chiqui Valdez, santeros who were coming and going. Domingo Gómez did the same until he decided to remain permanently in Caracas. He had an apartment. I understand that the apartment was given to him by one of the people whom he had initiated so that he could live here for good.” (free translation by the author) 13 Interview “José Manuel Pereira, Ocana Che – El primer venezolano que fue consagrado como Babalao en nuestro país.” (2006), In: Revista Los Orichas, Febrero 3/33, pp. 20-23. 14 Ochun Laddé himself was one of those initiated by pioneer santero Domingo Gómez “Chango Miguá” in Caracas.

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who probably came and went as itinerant priests, as in the case of the santero Domingo Gómez “Chango Miguá.” 15 Interestingly, José Manuel Pereira “Ocana Che” also indicates the number of Ifá initiations he himself conducted from the time he was consecrated in 1986 to 2006. In response to the question, “Cuántos Ifases has hecho hasta el momento?” he affirmed that he had so far initiated 27 persons into Ifá in Venezuela (ibid: 22). This is a fairly high figure, considering the relatively recent date of the introduction of the tradition into that country. However, as a Santería cubana website points out, after Santería eventually took roots in Venezuela as a religious tradition in the 1990s, is witnessed an unprecedented growth that was aptly described as a “boom”: »El boom y popularización de la Santería cubana en Venezuela comienza a partir de los años 90 y comienza a apreciarse una divulgación y visibilidad mucho más amplia de la Santería cubana en Venezuela no sólo en la capital y sus zonas urbanas sino también en otras ciudades del interior del país. Actualmente en Venezuela la Santería cubana y sus trabajos rituales de magia tienen una expansión sin precedentes.« 16

This boom in all likelihood was responsible for the real venezuelarization of Santería, having prepared the ground for the next phase of the manifestation of Yoruba Ifá/Orisa traditions in Venezuela whereby a faction of Venezuelan Orisa practitioners today seeks to subscribe to, and participate in the larger process of the re-Africanization of Ifá/Orisa practice in the Americas by connecting directly to the Yoruba-African Orisa homeland.

15 José Manuel Pereira “Ocana Che” provides an impressive list of the babalawos present at his own initiation, which reads as follows: “Adalberto Herrera (padrino), Ivo Illinois (Oyugbona), Alfonsito Herrera (Iroso Batrupon), Iván Romero (Iroso Fún), Jhony Pérez (Obe-Di), Roberto Lara (Ogunda Keté), Pepe Páez (Oberoso), Buena Ventura Páez (Osa Wori), Mildonio (Odi Omoluo), Ubaldo Porto (Olofista y Obba de la ceremonia), Osalofobeyo, Ubaldito Porto (Iwori Turá), and Lázaro (Alfonso) (Irete Kután).” 16 http://www.consultassanteria.com/santeria-cubana-en-venezuela-santeros-ybabalawos-en-venezuela.php (December 5, 2012).

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Egbe Orisa-Oko and Egbe Oturupon-Isokun: Re-Yorubanizing Ifá/Orisa Tradition in Venezuela

In recent years, two groups of Ifá/Orisa practitioners in Venezuela, who are direct descendants of the first and second generations of Cuban santeros and Ifaleros, 17 have turned towards Yorubaland in West Africa to strengthen and legitimize their religious practice. The first group, led by an astute former showbiz Venezuelan santero, José Hidalgo Edibere (Ifa Tokun Itaniyi), is registered under the official name of Egbé Òrìsà-Oko, while the second group, under the leadership of a Nigerian babalawo named Solagbade Popoola and coordinated by his Venezuelan disciples, a group of young Awos, is known as Egbé Otúrúpòn-Ìsokùn. Edibere’s group officially initiated the process of the re-Africanization of the Ifá/Orisa tradition in Venezuela following the first contact with the Ifá tradition in Yorubaland, Nigeria, around 2006/2007. Edibere and a few of his close associates, including his wife, participated in the annual Ifá festival known as Odún Ifá-Àgbonnìrègún, which is usually held on the first Friday and Saturday in the month of June, with rituals presided over by the Àràbà Àgbáyé (the highest priest of Ifá worldwide) beginning at the palace of the Oòni (king) of Ilé-Ifè, and then moving in a procession to the sacred hill of Ifá in Ilé-Ifè, popularly known as Òkè-Ìtasè. This process of the re-Africanization of the Ifá/Orisa tradition in Venezuela was fully legitimated in December 2007 when the Egbé Òrìsà-Oko invited the ÀràbàÀgbáyé, Chief Adisa Mókorànálé Awóreni for a one-month official visit to Venezuela. Today, the visit still appears to pay dividends for Edibere in terms of legitimizing his position as a priest of Ifá and Òrìsà, who does not depend on the traditional lineage of a Cuban padrino to legitimize his authority as a babalawo (as is usually the norm in the Diaspora). Rather, Edibere prefers to project himself in Venezuelan Ifá circles as one whose authority derives directly from the highest hierarchy of the tradition in the Yoruba homeland, the Araba-Àgbáyé, the one considered worldwide to be the descendant of Òrúnmìlà-Bara-Àgbonnìrègún, the mystical founder of Ifá religion. Thus, based on his purported association with the Àràbà and other highranking Ifá and Òrìsà priests in Yorubaland, Nigeria, Edibere has been able to attract many disciples to his temple, which has resulted in an astounding 17 As we have already seen, the term santero describes priests and devotees of the ocha (orisa).In the same manner, the term ifalero is sometimes used to describe priests and devotees of Ifá.

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number of Ifá initiation ceremonies. On the official site of his temple, Edibere displays an impressive list of 547 Omo-Awo (disciples) whom he has initiated into Ifá so far. In the page titled “Babaláwo del Egbé ÒrìsàOko” located under the subheading “Família Tókun” (Tókun’s family), the civil name of each individual Omo-Awo is given, in addition to the signature of his/her personal Odù of initiation, displayed on a virtual opón-Ifá (divination tray), as well as his/her Ifá name, followed by Edibere’s own adopted Ifá name, Tókun, which now stands as the “surname” of each initiate. 18 This extensive list of Omo-Awo shows Edibere to be the most proficient babalawo in the world by far when it comes to initiating new Awos, since all 547 initiations must have been carried out between late 2007 and early 2012, an average of almost 137 initiations per year or 11.4 per month! If, on the one hand, these highly impressive figures demonstrate how truly popular the Yoruba Ifá-Òrìsà tradition has become in Venezuela over the past one and half decades, on the other, it reflects the success of the publicity surrounding the practice of Ifá/Orisa tradition by Edibere 19 under the favorable conditions provided by the improved socio-economic standards of living in Venezuela under President Chávez’s “BolivarianSocialism of the 21st century.” As the analysis of an interview that I conducted in April 2012 with Enver Olayemi Arbelaez, the Oluwo of the Egbé Otúrúpòn-Ìsokùn and his Ojugbona Awo, 20 Ricardo Acevedo (Ifatooyangan), will amply demonstrate, the considerable rise and stability in the employment rate and living standards of Venezuelans under the Bolivarian government of President Chávez has made it possible for virtually

18 www.edibere.com.ve/nuevo/familiah.php (May 5, 2012). 19 Ibid. A good example of this publicity savvy of Edibere can be seen in the 4th Èsù Festival held on the Initiation ground of the Egbé Òrìsà-Oko on February 11, 2012. The massive crowd that attended the event was treated to free food, transportation from Caracas and other places, a musical concert by the Orquesta Òrìsà-Oko, as well as ritual sessions with renowned Ifá priests from the Yoruba homeland such as Prof. Wande Abimbola, the Àwise-Àgbáyé, who, as announced in the flyer of the event, was slated to be in charge of the ritual washing of Èsù. Though Abimbola did not attend the festival, another apparent YorubaAfrican stood in for him before the Venezuelan crowd, it is doubtful however if the organizers informed the enthusiastic crowd of this fact. It is also noteworthy that Edibere chose as the motto of this religious festival not some modest “ìwàpèlé” formula from the Yoruba religious philosophy, but an expression that is typical of Chavismo in its most aggressive form, “¡Seguimos Triunfando!” 20 Oluwo and Ojugbona Awo are the two highest ranking priests in a typical Ifá temple or small community.

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everyone to be able to afford the usually high costs of an Ifá initiation. 21 This is exactly the point that the Oluwo Enver Olayemi makes in the extract that serves as the epigraph of the present paper. Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn and the formation of a new generation of Ifá priests in Venezuela

When the Egbé Orisa-Oko of José Hidalgo Edibere took the Àràbà-Àgbáye to Venezuela in December of 2007, Venezuelans had the opportunity to see for the first time a high representative of the Ifá/Òrìsà tradition from the African homeland. During this historic visit, Venezuelans from all walks of life were encouraged to avail themselves of the opportunity of meeting and receiving personal blessings from the Àràbà-Àgbáyé, aptly described in the publicity leaflets released by the Egbé Orisa-Oko as “la máxima autoridad religiosa de los Yorubas” 22 (the highest ranking religious authority of the Yoruba nation). As a result, many Venezuelans were initiated into Ifá and other Òrìsàs by Edibere, with the (implicit) blessing of the Àràbà, which made the initiation a lot more prestigious and “complete” in the opinion of most Venezuelans, especially those who had already received a mano de Orula 23 from different Cuban-Lucumí priests before the arrival of the Àràbà. Included among the scores of Itefá – the Ifá initiation ceremonies – that Edibere carried out at about the initial period of his re-Yorubanization drive were those of Enver Olayemi Arbelaez and Ricardo Acevedo, two young Venezuelan bank workers who decided on the Ifá/Òrìsà religious tradition after trying virtually all other Afro-Latin religions, from Cuban Palo Mayombe 24 to the more indigenous cult of María Liónza. 25

21 Interview with Enver Olayemi Arbelaez and Ricardo Acevedo “Ifatoyangan,” Oluwo and Ojugbona of Egbé Otúrúpòn-Ìsokùn, respectively, on April 19, 2012. 22 Cf. the first edition of Edibere Magazine, 2008 where the Àràbà’s picture appeared in full regalia on the cover, with the inscription, “el descendiente de Orunmila” (the descendant of Orunmila). 23 Known as “owó kan Ifá” in Yoruba, the mano de Orula is a preliminary ritual in the preparation of a future Ifá priest. 24 Palo Mayombe, also known as Palo Monte or Regla de Congo,is an Afro-Cuban religious tradition based on the religious worldview of the Bantu-speaking peoples of Africa. 25 María Liónza, also known as the cult of the “tres poténcias” (three powers), is a syncretic religion that combines the healing and ritual practices of the Venezuelan indigenous tradition with elements from the African and European religious cultures. Its principal temple is known as la Montaña de luz (Mountain of

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Attracted by what they considered a golden opportunity to move closer in their religious quest to “Africa, de dónde vienen nuestras raíces” (Africa, our roots), the two Omo-Awos began to assiduously study the sacred texts of Ifá under the guidance of babalawo Solagbade Popoola, an itinerant Ifá priest from Lagos, Nigeria, who also has disciples (Omo-Awo), and oversees temples in Trinidad and in Colombia. According to Enver Olayemi and Ricardo Acevedo, it was actually Solagbade Popoola who had consecrated the temple of José Hidalgo Edibere, known as Egbá Òrìsa-Oko. However, apparently due to personal disagreements, Popoola left Edibere and established another temple in Caracas known as Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn on February 18, 2011. Under the spiritual guidance of Popoola, the young Awos who make up the membership of the Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn have been actively working to give a new outlook to the Ifá/Òrìsà religious practice in Venezuela, bringing it closer to the practice in the YorubaAfrican homeland. With a membership of more than a hundred awos – 20 or so of whom are very active members highly committed to a rigorous regime of training and regular observances of Ifá tenets and activities – the Egbé ÒtúrúpònÌsokùn takes its vocation as a Yoruba Ifá temple in Venezuela very seriously. This is attested to by the mission statement posted on its Facebook page: »Templo-Egbe Oturupon-Isokun, inaugurado el 18 de febrero de 2011 por el líder del mismo Chief Oluwo Solagbade Popoola, dicho templo es regido por enseñanzas de este prestigioso babalawo, todas las practicas hecha en el mismo son avaladas y enseñadas por él. Solagbade Popoola: Actual Coordinador de la Ética y Escrituras Sagradas en el Concilio Internacional para la Religión Ifá – ICIR. Presidente/Rector del Ifá International Training Institute – IITI. El templo está diseñado bajo las doctrinas Yorubas genuinas, las cuales no solo se basan en el aspecto ceremonial (CONSULTAS, EBO, CEREMONIAS) sino que hacemos énfasis en el aspecto religioso al difundir la palabra de Olodumare a todas las personas, con el fin de orientarlas sobre cómo mejorar los distintos aspectos de su vida y la de su entorno.« 26 Light). Interview with Enver Olayemi Arbelaez and Ricardo Acevedo. April 19, 2012. 26 “The Oturupon Isokun Temple, founded on February 18, 2011 by its supreme leader, Chief Oluwo Solagbade Popoola, is a temple whose affairs are directed by the teachings of this prestigious babalawo, who also oversees and directs all the activities of the temple. Solagbade Popoola is himself the current Director of Ethics and Sacred Scriptures of the International Council of Ifá Religion – ICIR, and President/Rector of the Ifá International Training Institute – IITI. The tem-

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One remarkable feature of the Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn temple is the ongoing efforts to make the activities of the temple conform to what they consider the true Yoruba-African model. A phrase often repeated by members of the temple is: “hacer lo más parecido a la práctica tradicional africana.” The young people who make up the Egbe greatly value this constant assurance that their practice is as close as possible to what obtains in the traditional Yoruba homeland. They hope to make a difference in Venezuela by placing emphasis not on the consultant/client relationship that is common between Ifá/Òrìsà priests and the rest of the local population, but rather on a rigorous observance of regular ritual activities such as the fortnightly itadogun similar to those in Yoruba-Africa. Toward this end, they also promote activities like weekly lectures based on the curriculum of the Ifá International Training Institute, encuentros de actualizaciones en rituales de Ifá. These actualization workshops on Ifá rituals are open to all interested persons, whether or not they are members of the temple. Invitations to such events almost always carry an open message to members of other Ifá/Òrìsà temples in Venezuela. This can be interpreted in one of two ways: either as a way of promoting unity among Ifá/Òrìsà adepts in the country or as a challenge to “rival” temples whose ritual practices are not considered “purely Yoruba.” The latter suggests an effort to indirectly take sides in the debate on purity and syncretism in Afro-Latin religions. 27 Even the Popoola Magazine published by the temple carries the motto: “100 por ciento Isese.” In other words, its contents conform 100 percent to the traditional Ifá/Òrìsà practice of the Yoruba homeland where the religion is often referred to generally as Ìsèse or Ìsèdálè.

ple is designed in conformity with genuine Yoruba doctrines which are not only based on ceremonial aspects like (Ifá) consultations, ebo and ceremonies, but emphasis is also placed on the religious aspect by propagating the word of Olodumare to all people with the aim of orienting them toward improving various aspects of their lives and their environment.” (free translation by the author) 27 Another possible reading, which was actually confirmed in the interview this author had with the Oluwo and Ojugbona of the Temple, is that the Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn is interested in demystifying what other temple leaders hoard from their members in the name of ritual secrecy and “prohibitions” such as the one held by Cuban-lucumí priests that women cannot be initiated into Ifá. That is probably why they specifically mentioned that their event was open to babalawos (male priests) and iyanifa (female priests) alike, along with promising potential attendees of their weekend Ifá actualization course that both the lecture and ritual explanatory texts would be distributed to participants irrespective of their religious (temple) affiliations or creed.

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However, this insistence on the purity of the practices of the Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn may be considered problematic if one looks carefully at the content and form of the practices purportedly carried out “al estilo tradicional nigeriano,” as repeatedly declared in their brochures. To begin with, the reference to a “Nigerian traditional style” can only be taken as relative, since, in the best of situations, it can only refer to a particular Yorùbá-Nigerian “tradition,” specifically, that of their guide and leader, Chief Solagbade Popoola, or at least what they believe to be “his” tradition. 28 This is perhaps better understood on a closer analysis of how and what the members of the Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn understand by the diverse ritual activities of adoration and appeasement of Ifá and the Òrìsà such as Súplicas Matutina (daily morning supplications), Días de Ifá (translated in the Egbé’s Facebook page as “how to greet Ifá in the morning”), la ceremonia de Ose Itadogun (the fortnightly held ritual ceremonies for Ifá), etc. A typical example would be the description and comments surrounding what they called “Servicio de Templo” or Ile Ijuba. For interested readers, it may be instructive to look at the complete text of the invitation circulated on the Facebook page of the Templo-Egbe Oturupon-Isokun, which reflects the importance accorded by the members of the temple to this “novelty” in Ifá/Òrìsà worship ethos and praxis in Venezuela. First and foremost, the discussion and comments generated by some of these postings may suggest that the various innovative ritual activities of the Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn that are supposedly modeled after the “purest Nigerian tradition” are still fraught with remnants of the Catholic liturgy. In fact, with its opening song, the kyrie, the credo, the sermon, and the offertory, any Catholic who has the opportunity to participate in what the Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn calls the Servicio de Templo de Ifa will be struck by the similarity of the sequence of the liturgy to that of a normal Catholic mass. What is probably left out are the bible readings (replaced by Ifá textual readings) and the consecration of the host that are typical of a Catholic missa. It is equally revealing that participants are informed in bold letters that, in order to attend the Servicio de Templo, they must be dressed in

28 It is equally important to point out, with various theorists of cultural and identity studies, that religious tradition is as dynamic as any other aspect of human culture. It is therefore untenable to believe that a particular tradition, in this case, the Yoruba religious tradition as practiced in the Yoruba-African setting, has ever been, or will continue to be, constant and unchanging over time.

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white, which is considered the only color appropriate for Òrìsà worship in the Americas. Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn: a commitment to Ifá education and practice

Perhaps a major advantage of the absolute majority of members of the Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn being young working-class individuals between 22 and 42 years of age is that they have a greater propensity to acquire and deepen their knowledge of the Ifá/Òrìsà religion through active study. Rather than being daunted by the linguistic barrier associated with having a leader and guide who only speaks Yoruba and English, and not a word of Spanish, they have created an efficient system in which they can access Solagbade Popoola’s theological thoughts and teachings through translation. First, the writings are translated from Yoruba into English by Popoola himself, and then from English to Spanish by Popoola’s disciples, the lion’s share by one particular Latino Awo living in the United States. 29 It should be pointed out that the spiritual guide of the Egbé ÒtúrúpònÌsokùn, Chief Solagbade Popoola, is well-known in Ifá/Òrìsà circles as an Ifá intellectual. He has published many of his teachings and lectures in the forms of books and articles, above all in the Orunmila magazine of which he is also the editor-in-chief. It is therefore no surprise that his disciples place considerable emphasis on learning and intellectual training in Ifá by reading appropriate literature. The length to which the Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn is willing to go in its commitment to learn about and propagate the Ifá/Òrìsà religion as practiced and taught by their Yoruba-African model is remarkable. The Venezuelan Oluwo of the Temple, Enver Olayemi Arbelaez alluded to this level of dedication in the aforementioned interview conducted by this author. He claimed that one major expectation of the newly released Popoola Magazine was that it would serve as a source of authentic Yoruba Ifá/Òrìsà knowledge to those of his compatriots who, either for lack of time or opportunity or because they are too shy or jealous, are not able to participate in the other teaching programs of the Egbé such as the regular courses and seminars offered by the IITI, the teachings propagated on their Facebook pages, etc. This is corroborated by Ricardo Lopes, the editor of Popoola Magazine, who asserts in his editorial note that the magazine has the

29 Interview with Enver Arbelaez and Ricardo Acevedo, April 19, 2012.

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objective, among others, of “sharing with the entire religious community of Venezuela and the world at large our knowledge, experiences, wisdom and the literature accumulated in the course of over thirty years by our director (Solagbade Popoola).” 30 Conclusion

Clearly, the Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn, under the spiritual guidance of Solagbade Popoola, is gradually establishing itself in Venezuela as a major actor and agent of the re-Africanization process of the Ifá/Òrìsà tradition. It may be argued that the members of the temple are still too young and impressionable to make a serious impact on a society where the Cubanlucumí tradition is very strong and better organized with its more than 150members-strong ASOIFÁ – Asociación de Seguidores de Ifá en Venezuela (Association of Followers of Ifá in Venezuela) – which, since 2004, has been organizing the annual reading of the Letra del Año. 31 They are also not as rich and influential as the Egbé Òrìsà-Oko of Edibere. However, one can also advance, on the other hand, the fact that the members of the Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn Temple are actively investing in the long-term process of restoring a kind of biological lineage system through the involvement of their own children, who are ritualized from their infancy into the Ifá/Orisa tradition through the Ikosejaye 32 rite of passage. This is seen by most 30 Editorial (2012), Popoola Magazine April/1. 31 The Letra del Año is an ancient Ifá tradition that has been practiced in Cuba since the early 20th century. It consists of a collective Ifá consultation by the council of babalawos in a town or country at the beginning of the year to determine what the year holds for the entire community, the ire (blessings), and the ibi (dangers) that may affect the community, the ebo (sacrifices), and the etutu (propitiations) that should be offered to the deities to attract the ire and ward off the ibi. In the Yoruba homeland, this ritual is usually carried out in an elaborate three-day ceremony starting at the Ooni’s palace at Ile-Ife, and concluded during an all-night vigil at the World Ifá Temple in Oke-Itase, Ile-Ife. Today, this ceremony is considered a kind of homecoming, and/or compulsory pilgrimage for Ifá devotees all over the world, most especially since the UNESCO declared Ifá as a World Intangible Heritage in 2005. While the Letra del Año is “read” at IleIfe at the beginning of the Ifá ritual year (early June), in the Diaspora, it is “read” at the beginning or the end of the secular year, i.e. in December or January. 32 Ikosedaye, also known as Esentaye or ikosedjaye is,an Ifá ritual conducted for new-born babies. It is a consultation of Ifá to determine the “path,” destiny, and taboos of the new-born in life. It is expected to reveal the blueprint of the child’s future: his/her profession, the protector Orisa, the colors and environments that are best for his/her upbringing, etc.

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members as a trump card in the consolidation of the re-Africanization or, more appropriately, the re-Yorubanization of the Ifá/Òrìsà tradition in Venezuela. On another level, the youthful vigor, professional independence, and studious intent of the Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn members can be conceived perhaps as the key to the much sought after re-approximation 33 of the two sides of the Yoruba-Atlantic in matters relating to the content, form, and praxis of the Ifá/Òrìsà and other Yoruba cultural traditions. If, for example, the Ifá Heritage Institute, a Category 2 UNESCO Institution founded since 2009 in Oyo, Nigeria under the presidency of Prof. Wande Abimbola (Awise Awo Agbaye) as a result of the 2005 UNESCO recognition of Ifá as an Intangible World Heritage has not been successful at attracting young omo-Awo (Ifá students) from the Portuguese and Spanish-speaking Yoruba Diasporas like Brazil, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, or Venezuela due to clashes and misunderstandings based on what can be described as doctrinarian and liturgical issues that are further compounded by commercial rivalries between followers of the Cuban lucumí tradition and the Yoruba-African tradition. This problem has been further compounded by the linguistic chasm that separates the two sides i.e. English/French and Yoruba on the African side; Spanish and Portuguese on the Latin-American and Caribbean side. It is the humble believe of this author that one can begin to hope that the fact that the young people who make up the active membership of temples like Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn and who are now beginning to approach and interpret their affiliation and subscription to the Ifá/Orisa practice in a more holistic and less commercial light, apparently uncontaminated by the feuds raging on among the older generations, will help in actually making the required leap towards re-approximation possible. As the members of the Egbé Òtúrúpòn-Ìsokùn prepare to make their first group visit to Yorubaland in Nigeria between May and July 2012, 34 let us hope that their conviction about the culture and religion of the Yoruba 33 I have used, or rather, borrowed the word “re-approximation” here from my earlier theoretical discourse on the relationship between Yoruba-Africa and it’s Latin-American diasporas where the term originally means a “rapprochement,” i.e. the forging of closer physical, economic, cultural, religious and even political ties between the two sides of what I call the “Yoruba Atlantic” (cf. Ayoh’Omidire 2005; 2009a). 34 The visit was indeed consummated with ten members of the Egbé ÒtúrúpònÌsokùn, led by their Olúwo, spending two weeks in Nigeria and participating in the 2012 Odun-Ifá ceremony in Ile-Ife.

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that they exhibit so proudly in Venezuela, where they have received enthusiastic names like Ifatooyangan (Ifá-is-great-enough-to-boast-of), will not suffer any significant setback in their encounter with their brother Ifá priests and Òrìsà devotees in Yorubaland. As the Oluwo of the group succinctly puts it at the end of our interview: »Mi expectativa es ir a presenciar cuál es la manera con que los Yoruba llevan a la religión, porque hay muchas personas que especulan que los Yoruba ya no mantienen Ifá, que los yoruba ya no mantienen los orichás, que eso en África se acabó, y que hoy hay muy poca población dentro de la tradición.« 35

However, as the experienced Venezuelan santero Adrián de Sousa aptly concluded based on the Yoruba religious and socio-moral tradition, especially the Omoluwabi concept as propounded by various Yoruba scholars and intellectuals, the totality of the human values ensconced in the Yoruba religious philosophy and cultural worldview is sufficient to sustain the faith of its adepts and adherents. This is especially true of the Atlantic World where such Yoruba values can serve to de-hegemonize the values of globalization, seen at times in some sensitive quarters as highly invasive. »El acercamiento desprejuiciado a una cultura ancestral como la Yoruba es ya un paso positivo. La comprensión de los mitos Yoruba es la savia necesaria para que florezca en nuestras conciencias la comprensión de la era contemporánea. Lo importante es ver con los ojos del corazón aquello que los ojos no alcanzan [...]. Cuando se reconozca cuánta riqueza emana de esa cultura que premia en su justo valor la importancia de la familia, la caricia de un ser querido, la sonrisa de un niño o de un anciano, la inigualable necesidad de un maestro, la importancia de la salud, la alerta contra la ignorancia que nos hace esclavos, estaremos conscientes de la diferencia entre valor y precio. Se puede comprar una casa, un automóvil; sin embargo, nadie ha podido pagar por una acción honesta, su valor es inapreciable.« (Sousa 2004: 39)

In the final analysis, whatever may have been the source of the appeal of the Ifá/Òrìsà tradition that was responsible for drawing so many Venezue35 “My expectation is to go and see how the Yorubas handle their religion, because there are many people who go about claiming that the Yoruba no longer practice Ifá, that they no longer practice Orisa, that all this is already part of the past in Africa, and that there are very few people to be found in the religion today.” (free translation by the author)

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lans to the new temples, one can safely conjecture that, judging by their impetus and tenacity of purpose, the new generation of Ifá/Òrìsà practitioners as represented by the Egbe Oturupon-Isokun in Venezuela will definitely be necessary to solidify the newfound convictions in a country where, given the more recent prevailing political and social conditions, more and more people are becoming disenchanted daily by the promises of the Bolivarian Socialism of the 20th century, whose incoherencies now glare them in the face after the untimely exit of the Comandante in 2013. In other words, now that Venezuelans are faced with a harsher reality under the Maduro Government, it may be up to the young ifaleros to demonstrate to their compatriots how Ifá might be a viable option in their individual and collective existentialist quests for a better world. In doing so, they would perhaps be able to encourage all Venezuelans to take the next necessary leap and thus allow Ifá to mend our broken world as promised by Awise Wande Abimbola in one of his publications.

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Abimbola, Wande (1997): Ifá will mend our broken World: Thoughts on Yoruba Religion and Culture in África and the Diáspora, Roxbury: Aims Books. Andrews, George Reid (2004): Afro-Latin America 1800-2000, New York: Oxford University Press. Ascencio, Michaelle (2007): Las diosas del Caribe, Caracas: Editorial Alfa. Ayoh’Omidire, Félix. (2004): ÀKÓGBÁDÙN: ABC da língua, cultura e civilização iorubanas, Salvador: EDUFBA/CEAO. Ayoh’Omidire, Félix. (2005): Yorubanidade Mundializada: O reinado da oralitura emtextos yorubá-nigerianos e afro-baianos contemporâneos, (unpublished) Ph.D. thesis, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador – BA, Brazil, available online at http://www.repositorio.ufba.br:8080/ri/handle/ri/109922. Ayoh’Omidire, Félix. (2009): “The Yoruba Atlantic Diaspora – Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago.” In: Tunde Babawale/Akin Alao/Félix Ayoh’Omidire/Tony Onwumah (eds.), Ensino e divulgação da história e da cultura da África e da DiásporaAfricana (Teaching and Propagating African and Diaspora History and Culture), Lagos: Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC), pp. 305-326. Barnet, Miguel (2001 [1995]): Afro-Cuban Religions, Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers. Bastide, Roger (1971): As religiões africanas no Brasil, São Paulo: Pioneira. Bastide, Roger (1973): Estudos afro-brasileiros, São Paulo: Perspectiva. Biobaku, Sabúrì (1955): The Origin of the Yorùbás, Lagos. Cabrera, Lydia (1980): KoekoIyawó: Aprende Novicia, Miami: Colección del Chicherekú en el exílio. Cabrera, Lydia (1983 [1954]): El Monte, Miami: Colección del Chicherekú. Cabrera, Lydia (1986 [1957]): Anagó: VocabulárioLucumí, Miami: Ediciones Universal/Colección del Chicherekú. Capone, Stefania (2005): Les Yoruba du Nouveau Monde: Religion, ethnicité et nationalisme noir aux Etats-Unis, Paris: Editions Karthala. Ellis, A.B. (1964 [1894]): The Yorùbá-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa, Chicago: Benin Press. Falola, Toyin/Childs, Matt. D. (eds.) (2004): The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Frigério, Alejandro (2004): “Re-Africanization in Secondary Religious Diasporas: Constructing a World Religion.” In: Stefania Capone (ed.),

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Religiones Transnationales, Revue internationale d’anthropologie et de sciences humaines 11/12, pp. 39-60 Herskovits, Melville J. (1990 [1941]): The Myth of the Negro Past, Boston: Beacon Press. Howard, Philip, A. (1998): Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth century, Baton Rouge : Louisiana University Press. Hucks, Tracey E. (2012): Yoruba Tradition and African American Religious Nationalism, Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press. Johnson, Samuel (1921 [1897]): The History of the Yorùbás, Lagos: C.S.S. Bookshops. Matory, J. Lorand (1994): Sex and the Empire that is no more: Gender and Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Matory, J. Lorand (2005): Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, New Jersey/Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press. Law, Robin (1977): The Oyo Empire c. 1660-1836: A West African Imperialism in the Era of the Slave Trade, Oxford: Clarendon. Law, Robin (1997): “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Nago’ as Ethnonyms in West Africa.” In: History in Africa 24, pp. 1-6. Olupona, Jacob K. (2011): City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination, Beckeley/Los Angeles/London: University of Califonia Press Ltd. Olupona Jacob K./Rey, Terry (eds.) (2007): Òrìsà Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yorùbá Religious Culture, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Ortíz, Fernando (1973 [1906]): Los Negros Brujos, Miami: Ediciones Universal. Ortíz, Fernando (1995): Los instrumentos de la música afrocubana, La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas. Popoola, Solagbade/Oyesanya, Fakunle (2008): IkunleAbiyamo: The Ase of Motherhood. An Ifa Overview, London/Paris/New York/Lagos: Asefin Media LLC. Sandoval, Mercedes Cros (1975): La Religión Afrocubana, Madrid: Plaza Mayor. Sousa, Adrián de (2004): “Palabras con Eco.” In: Los Orichas 1/8, Caracas, Venezuela. Turner, Lorenzo Dow (1942): “Some Contacts of Brazilian Ex-Slaves with Nigeria, West Africa.” In: Journal of Negro History 27, pp. 55-67.

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Verger, Pierre (1968): Flux et reflux entre la côte des esclaves et Bahia, Paris: Mouton. Verger, Pierre (1981): Orixás, Deuses Iorubás na África e no Novo Mundo, Salvador: Corrupio. Yai, Olabiyi Babalola (1993): “In Praise of metonymy: The Concept of ‘Tradition’ and ’Creativity’ in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over time and space.” In: Research in African Literature 24/4, pp. 29-37.

CaribBerlin: Multiple Paths in the Religious Life of a German Oricha Priest L IOBA R OSSBACH DE O LMOS In February 2012, Mark Bauch 1 celebrated his religious birthday, that is, the 3rd anniversary of his initiation into the Afro-Cuban Regla de Ocha, usually called Santería, with afternoon coffee and cake. Frozen cakes from the discount market replaced the favorite foods of the Oricha 2 deities regularly used in Cuba. In Havana, where Mark was initiated as a child of the divinity Ochún – with Elegua, the often sly messenger between the human and divine worlds, as his paternal deity – ochinchín 3 would have been placed in front of the artfully decorated throne altar, together with various desserts (Bolivar Aróstegui/González Dias de Villegas 1993: 46), including the legendary “cake,” i.e., a sponge cake adorned with beaten egg whites in the favorite colors of the Orichas, which Menéndez recently described as a symbol of the autonomy of Santería from its West African Yoruba origins (Menéndez 1995). However, Mark the oloricha 4 decided to have a German-style celebration instead. It is difficult to say whether this choice was due to the young man’s personal eccentricity or whether it was a necessary adjustment that occurs when a religion begins to establish itself on foreign territory, as has been the case with Santería in Germany for nearly 20 years. It was reported that the German Santeros Thomas A. from Hamburg and Varuna H. from Dortmund celebrated the anniversaries of

1 2

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I would like to thank Mark Bauch for sharing his religious experiences with me. Oricha (also spelled Orisa or Orixa outside of Cuba) is a deity that reflects energies of divine creation and deified ancestors in all Yoruba-based religious systems. Ochinchin is a special dish of cabbage, spinach, almonds, and crayfish. Oloricha is a word in the ritual language meaning “owner of Oricha.”

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their initiation with a German-style birthday party as well. 5 Bernard B., on the other hand, who was initiated together with Mark on February 2, 2009 in Havana and is thus his religious brother, found some tropical tubers in a Berlin specialty store and cooked them Cuban-style for his initiation birthday. The Regla de Ocha clearly allows a certain amount of personal and religious leeway when it comes to the worship of the Orichas. 6 The intention of this paper is to discuss this leeway, the margins of what is possible and what not, especially in situations like that in Berlin, where different cultural influences predominate. Thus, I will first provide some general information on Santería, and will then bring up some aspects of the migration of this religion and its establishment abroad, with special emphasis on Germany, in order to then discuss the different influences that have affected the religious biography of the Berlin Santero Mark Bauch. Finally, I will present some general considerations on the dynamics of the migration of the Afro-Cuban Oricha religion. If the Caribbean has for many years been considered a laboratory of cultural transformation processes (Ette 2005: 153; Zeuske 2004: 12), this article intends to show, based on the case of Afro-Cuban Santería, that the Caribbean continues to conduct new cultural experiments in the diaspora as well. Santería on its Way

Germany is neither the first nor the only place where the Oricha religion has undergone changes due to the migrations of its practitioners. Quite the contrary, transformation has always played a role in this religion, ever since Yoruba slaves from West Africa brought their religion to Cuba in the 19th century – and perhaps even before then. What one might call “polytheistic tolerance” – Jan Assmann’s term (2003) in his critical assessment of Mosaic monotheism – i.e., the West African openness to different deities or religious belief systems and practices (cf. Apter 1991), is what made it

5 6

The author received this information personally from both individuals during a meeting in Berlin on 21.06.2009. The study on Santería in Germany was carried out within the framework of a research project at the Institute for Comparative Cultural Research – Cultural and Social Anthropology at the Philipps University Marburg from 2004 to 2012. The study was directed by Professor Dr. Mark Münzel and, from 2010 on, by Professor Dr. Ernst Halbmayer. Financial support came from the German Research Foundation (DFG), for which the author wants to express her gratitude. I would also like to thank Andreas Hemming for proofreading the original manuscript.

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possible for practitioners to adapt to Cuban colonial conditions in the first place. Santería has thus been considered the embodiment of syncretism for many years. Today, cultural and religious mixtures via cultural contact are no longer considered exceptions in need of explanation, but rather are the rule. Given this specific character, with its narrative, iconographic, mythological, and ritual permeability, mixture appears to be almost a precondition of Santería’s very existence. In many Cuban cult houses, Yoruba deities or Orichas, Roman Catholic saints, spiritualistic arrangements for the deceased, and altar vessels of Bantu deities 7 coexist peacefully, even when they are worshipped separately and differently. The preference of one tradition over others not only varies from priest to priest, but also regionally within Cuba, and only the Ifa divination system of specialized oracle priests or Babalawos reserved for heterosexual men claims an unquestionable superiority in the plurality of these religious traditions. Many priests are initiated in more than one religious tradition, and as they grow in age and experience they feel authorized to introduce innovations (within certain limits), especially when they have reassured themselves of the deities’ approval by divination. Many ramas or religious lineages follow ritual practices that are balancing acts between the preservation and the autonomous shaping of tradition. All this is the result of a religion structured by a variety of autonomous cult houses free of any integrated, dominating institution. Even the pro-governmental “Asociación Cultural Yoruba de Cuba,” which was founded in 1991 to coordinate the Yoruba-based religious cult houses and communities in the country, has been unable to establish unified liturgical or ritual standards. Clear rules of precedence operate solely in ceremonies, where the participating priests conform to a relative hierarchy based on the number of years since their initiation and the extent of their religious knowledge and experience. Nevertheless, the basic matrix of the Oricha religion is maintained, which includes: mythology and iconography, a specific way of thinking and approaching the world, divination, trance, initiations, and extensive practices of purification and sacrifice. Some scholars of religious studies emphasize these commonalities and argue that this West African religion, together with modern offshoots such as Santería in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, or the Orisha religion in Trinidad, make up a Yoruba religion that should be 7

Bantu deities refer to the Palo Monte religion, which is centered on a religious receptacle or a consecrated vessel filled with sacred earth, sticks (palos), human remains, bones, and other items. Each altar (nganga) contains the spirit of someone dead who guides the religious activities.

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classified as a world religion, not least because of its growing number of devotees (Prothero 2011: 257-259; Palmié 2013: 218). The Yoruba religion(s) are mundane religious systems that promise advice and assistance in everyday secular life. Priests and followers of Santería took their religion with them when they left Cuba in recent decades, and the permeability that marked the religion in Cuba facilitated the transnationalization of Santería abroad. The United States and Puerto Rico were the first stations abroad, followed by Venezuela, Mexico, and other Latin American countries. The religion arrived in Europe in the 1980s. However, the establishment of the religion in new surroundings is still a very complex issue. Santería has to come to terms with conditions in the new environment, but these new conditions also tend to influence thinking and ritual practices. The reasons have to do with the polymorphic nature of the Orichas. These are either deified ancestors or energies related to the creation of the world, or both. Each Oricha expresses itself and is manifested in specific colors, numbers, oracle signs, rhythms, plants, animals, foods, and at times even in natural places or urban spaces. Fixed sites of worship comparable to pilgrimage sites are rare, but places do exist that are associated with the Orichas. Entrances to cemeteries are assigned to the deity Oyá, who also manifests in storms. Every hill, mountain, and cave represents Obatalá, who was in charge of the creation of man, and who is also present in the coldness of ice. Every river is related to Ochún, who articulates herself in floods; Yemayá is related to the sea; and Elegua is connected to crossroads. Relics of previous purification ceremonies or offerings are placed there where the presence of the relevant Oricha is supposed to be in place. Furthermore, the Babalawo is able to summon – and sometimes does summon – the Oricha by painting an oracle sign associated with him on the ground. 8 In any case, the Oricha devotees tend to undertake individual interpretations of their unknown surroundings and create new religious topographies based on the established Orichalandscape (Galván Tudela/García Viña 2008: 241). Santería in Germany

In Germany, faith in the Afro-Cuban Orichas was established in conditions marked by the division of the country. Santería is a marginal phenomenon 8 The Babalawo Jorge P., a Berlin resident, provided this information, which was then confirmed in Cuba by Babalawo Antonio Aguila (Interview 25.11.2011 at Havana).

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in this country, but even so, it can be considered a remarkable one. The first practitioners of the religion arrived in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which was marked by a form of “Prussian socialism” characterized by official atheism. These first practitioners were young workers who, within the framework of a bilateral agreement between Cuba and the GDR on the exchange of skilled laborers, received training in nationalized enterprises, thereby satisfying the high demand for manpower in socialist Germany. In the just over 10 years between 1978, when the agreement was signed, and the reunification of the two Germanys, between 24,000 and 30,000 Cubans came to the GDR to work for periods of either four or eight years (Gruner-Domic 1997). Others came in exchanges between the two countries’ sports federations and for the formation of political cadres. The Cuban side tested the loyalty of these so-called “cooperantes” to socialism – given their young age, most of them were unlikely to be very engaged with religion or religious activities. Nevertheless, some of these young Cubans came from families with religious backgrounds. Many of these “Kubis,” as these Cubans were called (Cala Fuentes 2007: 58), still doubt, even today, that religious objects of Santería, much less their Orichas, who are incorporated in otanes (consecrated stones), could have been brought to the GDR, with the possible exception of some protective objects or so called “resguardos” (protective charm), such as red handkerchiefs. But a few people did bring such objects in, most often when returning from vacations in Cuba, since the customs controls were less strict then. Due to the so-called reunification of the two Germanys in 1990, many of the Cuban workers had to return to Cuba. Some managed to stay, however, and of those who left, many returned after a short trip to Cuba. The West German Statistical Office calculated that the number of Cubans living in Germany grew from 295 in 1989 to 3,361 in 1991 (Statistisches Bundesamt n.d.: 3-4). The figure for 1989 represents the number of Cubans living in West Germany alone. By 2004 this number grew to around 8,500 persons and has stabilized since then. 9 As they did elsewhere, the Santería encountered new challenges in Germany. Animal sacrifices, which are vital to the identity of the religion, are prohibited in Germany, and so were performed during occasional visits 9

A similar phenomenon can be observed for other foreign skilled workers in the GDR. There were 28,450 Vietnamese citizens in West Germany in 1988 and 78,139 in unified Germany in 1991: most of the ca. 50,000 “new” foreigners in Germany were laborers in what was formerly the GDR (Statistisches Bundesamt n.d.).

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to Cuba. Many ceremonies make extensive use of tropical herbs and woods, which have to be flown in or purloined from botanical gardens, if they cannot be found locally. If similar alternative flora is available locally, their suitability must be confirmed by quick oracular inquiry. But the new environment was also included into this religion’s thinking in another way: Several Babalawos and Oricha priests explained that in Germany, Oricha tend to articulate themselves less in divination than the spirits of the deceased. From their religious perspective, the reasons for this were obvious: Although the Oricha are omnipresent, there are only a few powerful incarnations of these deities in Germany since there are only a small number of initiated devotees living in the country that own them in the form of consecrated otanes. However, in a country with an extremely violent legacy that includes the Nazi regime, the Holocaust, and the Second World War, there are innumerable unmourned dead; and the spirits of those dead people abound and constantly articulate themselves in divination. 10 Santería clearly has its very own diagnosis of the spiritual state of the country. It is difficult to interpret the relationship between this diagnosis and the religious motives of German followers who decide to engage in Santería. My research showed that a relatively large number of Germans were initiated in this religion after a supernatural spiritual experience. They had often been involved in other religions, and they often try to integrate these religions into their new lives with their Oricha. Varuna H., who was initiated as a child of Obatalá, said that she had been in contact with supernatural entities since her childhood and sees herself as engaged in what she called a “witch cult,” i.e. a cult with the wise old women who were so massively persecuted during the Inquisition. The alternative practitioner and Reikimaster B. Erkumay 11, who lives in Hamburg, reported similar experiences and sought guidance first in Islam, the religion of her father, before she found her way to Santería. A Bavarian son of Elegua already knew as a child that he was somehow spiritually different from the other children. C. 10 The Cuban Babalawo Jorge P. (interview 02/03/2005), who lives in Berlin and consults the Ifá oracle, as well as a German Santero from Munich who uses a cowrie-shell divination known as Diloggun (interview 17.02.2006), independently mentioned the frequent occurrences of oracle characters related to the dead who provide this explanation. 11 Every informant mentioned in this article was asked whether he or she wanted to be mentioned anonymously or by name in publications by the author. Their individual requests were granted. For this reason, people’s surnames are listed in some cases, and only their first names in others.

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Stiller from Berlin, a daughter of Olokun, is convinced of her visionary skills, but has earned more rejection than acceptance when admitting to them in her professional and private life. The already mentioned Bernard B. was attracted to North American shamanism before his initiation into Santería, but has always felt intuitively closer to African spirituality. Glimpses into the Personal and Religious Biography of Mark Bauch

Mark Bauch, who was born in Göttingen and now lives in Berlin, found the solution to his spiritual problems in the Regla de Ocha. He has never demonstrated the typical severity of a religious convert, but has integrated his earlier convictions, especially Buddhism, into his present religious beliefs. Mark is an artistic person and writes poetry that he publishes on the Internet (Bauch/Bertram 2003). After training and working as a nurse, he studied art history at the Technical University of Berlin from 2006 to 2010, but has never found a job in that field that would allow him to earn a living. Mark said that he had always been a spiritual person. But shortly before his thirtieth birthday, he began to be plagued by nightmares. Almost by chance, he realized that the dreams were about dead people or about places where people died: hospitals or battlefields. It seemed as if the dead were sending messages to the living through him. Later, he had encounters with dead people in a waking state. The young man, who had imagined a future as a Buddhist monk, became extremely confused. His expert knowledge as a trained nurse suggested that he should worry about his mental health. What followed was an odyssey that finally led Mark to a German Babalawo who was initiated in Cuba but lived in Wiesbaden. He quickly identified Mark as a son of the deity Ochún and sent him to Joaquín La Habana, a Cuban Santero, dance, and performance artist who had been living in Berlin since the early 1980s. Joaquin La Habana, who has an impressive permanent altar to his main deity Ochún in his house, does not have what could be called a typical Cuban Santería biography. On his mother's side, he comes from a traditional religious family. As a child he followed his father to the United States, where he completed dance and theater training only to then rediscover his religious heritage, far away from his home country. After a detour to Nigeria, he was finally initiated in Cuba. In Berlin he now attends to several religious godchildren. When he met Mark for the first time, Joaquin immediately realized that the young man had the qualities of a medium through which the spirits could articulate themselves. In spiritual masses, where spirits of the dead are summoned with songs, prayers,

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perfume, flowers, and cigar smoke, and where they sometimes possess participants, giving them advice and guidance, he helped to identify the spirits accompanying Mark and taught him how to control his spiritual experiences. Joaquin became Mark’s religious godfather. In Germany, Mark later received a series of lower initiations into several Orichas, including the mysterious deity of the depths of the sea, Olokun, who is said to provide health, welfare, and stability. Together with his godfather Joaquin, he performed the respective ceremonies on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Mark also received washed Ochún, stone representations of the Oricha sacralized through sacrifices and herbal ablutions as a previous initiation in order to protect her (i.e. Ochun’s) son before he underwent his proper initiation in 2009. In the spiritual masses that Mark began to attend regularly in Berlin, he met Palmira W. She would become the second godfather or iyogbona for his initiation, a term used independent of the actual biological sex – the second godfather represents a more caring, motherly aspect in the initiation, as opposed to the paternal connotations of the first godfather. Palmira is from Venezuela, where she was initiated into Santería as a daughter of Obatalá. She lived in Berlin until a few years ago, and has arranged many spiritual masses together with Joaquin La Habana. Palmira was already familiar with spiritual work before she became a Santería devotee. She was a follower of the popular Venezuelan religion of María Lionza, and she remained loyal to that form of spiritual expression. In María Lionza, different legions of spirits are invoked and mobilized in ceremonies for the care and healing of those who seek advice and health. In addition to figures of the Indian Guaicapuro and the Negro Felipe, the focal point of the religion is “Queen” María Lionza. In this figure, elements of Indian mythology and aspects of the Virgin Mother come together. This trio of figures, it is said, represents the ethnic composition of Venezuelan society. The legions of spirits, which constitutes the court of María Lionza, have renewed themselves periodically. In addition to the Vikings, AfroCuban deities have manifested themselves in ceremonies in recent years, and their statues have been incorporated into the altars of the religion (Mahlke 1992; Ferrándiz 1999; Pollack-Eltz 2001a, 2001b). Palmira belongs to a growing number of followers of the María Lionza religion who, with the arrival of Cuban immigrants in Venezuela, were also initiated in Santería. It is said that the Regla de Ocha and the Regla de Ifa are more powerful than the María Lionza religion, but numerous similarities have allowed for a coexistence of both María Lionza and Santería. Devotees can be initiated in Santería without renouncing their Maria Lionza

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tradition, but initiation in Santería is seen as a stronger form of protection, or is carried out in the expectation of curing a disease. The Power of Tobacco

At the end of October 2011, I visited a cult center in the outskirts of Caracas, to which Palmira W. still has ties. The female head of the center was still in the novice year of her Santería initiation – her iyaboraje. While it is forbidden for many initiates to expose themselves to strong spiritual energies during this period, it is allowed for others, especially if they were previously active in other spiritual traditions. This was the case here. During my visit she conducted a healing ceremony, treating a young nurse with a serious case of shingles (culebrilla). With prayers, songs, and strong cigar smoke, the familiar spirits of the patient were called and strengthened, with the patient lying on the floor at the center of overlapping circles that had been drawn in white wax and marked with burning candles. With the prayers, songs, and cigar smoke, an uncontrollable spirit manifested itself in the patient, which the cult leader identified as an Indian one. Tobacco and cigars may seem to be negligible in this example, but a closer look immediately reveals their cultural significance. As an exotic American plant, tobacco soon became a natural stimulant in Europe and an important commodity in the Atlantic triangular trade. In Africa, it was also used as currency in the slave trade, and in contrast to most other products, such as sugar, textiles, and slaves, it was in demand everywhere in the triangular trade. It seems that slaves in Cuba began to smoke tobacco very early on (Oviedo 1851: 139; Ortiz 1987), and also started using it for religious purposes. In the Regla de Ocha today, cigar smoke is blown at a number of Oricha deities, such as Elegua, Ogún, or Changó. Elegua occasionally receives a cigar as a gift. Above all, the smoke of cigars is an important means of summoning the spirits in the spiritualist masses, and therefore cannot be dispensed with. There is a form of divination through the smoking of cigars that is common in the María Lionza religion but unknown in the Afro-Cuban religions. And it is this form of divination that the Oloricha Mark Bauch, who was initiated in Cuba, now practices in Berlin, without ever having been in Venezuela or in a María Lionza cult center. He learned this kind of divination from his second godfather Palmira W. That might not come as a surprise, but neither is it self-evident, since Palmira’s other godchildren do not practice cigar smoking.

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Mark occasionally sits down in front of his altar for the ancestors placed in the kitchen and blesses two cigars, of which the first is for his own spiritual cleansing and the second for divination. Then he recites prayers and songs, most of which originate from the Catholic hymnbook. He then lights the cigar, which is preferably held between the thumb, forefinger, and middle finger. The cigar should not be moved or rotated, and should be puffed rather than actually smoked, with a spittoon ready for the bitter saliva. Interest is focused on the resulting ash, which should not fall off, but will be interpreted according to a fixed scheme in which the top and bottom and the left and right sides indicate certain social and physical conditions. The presence of disturbing or benevolent spirits circulating around a person can be read from the ashes as well. In the past, Mark used tarot cards to channel his visionary inspirations, but today he is more likely to use cigars. Conclusion

For the Santería religion, with its own inherent modes of thinking and action, and with its transnational diffusion and its new followers in foreign countries, one-dimensional interpretive models are inappropriate. The idea that a religion adapts to a new environment is based on just such a onedimensional, linear model of thinking. In the case of Santería, which incorporates aspects of the respective local environment – the local flair, so to speak – a bilinear or dialogical exchange model, at the very least, has to be considered. From the perspective of an initiated devotee, the dynamic resembles a bifurcation reminiscent of kinship studies. In fact, the relationship between the two religious godfathers of an initiate and the initiate himself is constructed on the basis of a ritual kinship pattern of parenthood, with the first godfather symbolizing the father and the second the mother, independent of their actual biological sex. In Mark Bauch’s case, central aspects of his religious biography have their origins here. I have focused my presentation on the cigar divination stemming from the María Lionza tradition of Mark's second godfather. I have presented the influence of his first godfather, Joaquin La Habana – whose own religious biography shows significant discontinuities that might underline a special openness towards other religious traditions – in less detail. One example of this openness is Joaquin’s regular participation in Candomblé ceremonies, i.e., ceremonies of the Brazilian branch of the Yoruba religion, in a center in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district (Montoya 2011). Such ritual kinship relations are important for an understanding of religious dynamics. Particularly when Santería arrives at a new destination or when it is no longer practiced

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exclusively by Cuban priests but also by followers and initiates from these new host countries, knowledge of the practices and influences of the godfathers is important in order to trace the religious thought and actions of Santería initiates, especially those of non-Cuban origins. Having said this, the ritual kinship relations should not be understood in a deterministic fashion. Mark’s second godfather Palmira trained him in divination using cigars. However, his religious brother Bernard B., for whom Palmira was first godfather, does not use cigars. This emphasizes the role of individual disposition. I have pointed out several times in the past that Wolfgang Welsch’s concept of “transculturality” (1997), and not Fernando Ortiz’s more popular concept of “transculturation” (1987: 92-96), points to the special relevance of the individual under the conditions of globalization. In the contemporary world of migration and globalization, cultures are increasingly coming into contact and mingling with one another. In cities such as Berlin, Caribbean, African, and Latin American influences meet and produce interfaces where people can combine different elements not entirely arbitrarily, but at least autonomously. This is precisely what the case of Mark Bauch demonstrates. He is an initiated child of the deity Ochún, but makes use of the flexibility of Santería in order to autonomously combine different elements from an existing repertoire of religious thought and practices that a city like Berlin is uniquely equipped to offer. This mix of influences could never have taken place in Cuba or Venezuela, where the traditional Catholic faith and folk religion beliefs remain strong. A seemingly marginal diaspora thus acquires its own relevance.

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References

Apter, Andrew (1991): “Herskovits’ Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora,” in: Anita Maria Leopold/Jeppe Sindling Jensen (ed.), Syncretism in Religion. A Reader, London: Equinox, pp. 160184. Assmann, Jan (2003): Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder der Preis des Monotheismus, München: Hanser. Bauch, Mark/Marco Bertram (2003): 13 Reise-Fragmente, Berlin: Reiseleben. [Books on Demand]. Bolívar Aróstegui, Natalia/González Díaz de Villegas, Carmen (1993): Mitos y leyendas de la comida afrocubana, La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Cala Fuentes, Leonel R. (2007): Kubaner im realen Paradies. AusländerAlltag in der DDR. Eine Erinnerung, Berlin: Dietz. Ette, Ottmar (2005): ZwischenWeltenSchreiben. (ÜberLebenswissen, 2). Literaturen ohne festen Wohnsitz, Berlin: Kadmos. Ferrándiz Martín, Francisco (1999): “El culto de María Lionza en Venezuela: tiempos, espacios, cuerpos,” in: Alteridades 9/18, pp. 39-55. Galván Tudela, José Alberto/García Viña, Ángela Yurena (2008): “Religiones afroamericanas en Canarias,” in: Francisco Diez de Velasco (ed.), Religiones entre continentes: minorias religiosas en Canarias, Barcelona: Icaria, pp. 237-253. Gruner-Domic, Sandra (1997): Die Migration kubanischer Arbeitskräfte in die DDR 1978 – 1989, Berlin: Humboldt-Universität [Master’s thesis]. Mahlke, Reiner (1992): Die Geister steigen herab, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. Menéndez Vázquez, Lázara (1995): “¡¿Un cake para Obatalá?!”, in: Temas 4, pp. 23-51. Montoya Bonilla, Yolanda Sol (2011): Fazendo, olhando, atapdando. Ilé obá sileké: candomblé brasilero en Berlín, Marburg: Curupira. Ortiz, Fernando (1987) [1947]: Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, Caracas: Bibliotéca Ayacucho. Oviedo, Fernández de/Valdés, Gonzalo (1851): Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra-firme del mar océano, Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia. Palmié, Stephan (2013): The Cooking of History. How Not to Study AfroCuban Religion, Chicago: The University of Chicago. Pollak-Eltz, Angelina (2001a): “The Venezuela Cult of María Lionza,” in: Stephen D. Glazier (ed.), Encyclopedia of African and AfricanAmerican Religions, New York: Routledge, pp. 357-361.

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Pollak-Eltz, Angelina (2001b): “The Globalization of an Afro-American Religion. Cuban Santería (Regla Ocha) in Venezuela,” in: Lawrence Olúfémi Adéwolé (ed.), Ifá and related Genres, Cape Town: Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society, pp. 114-122. Prothero, Stephen (2011): Die neun Weltreligionen. Was sie eint, was sie trennt, München: Diederichs. Statistisches Bundesamt (n.d.): Fachserie 1, Reihe 2, Tabellen 5-91: Ausländer nach Staatsangehörigkeit von 1986–1999, Wiesbaden: Statistisches Bundesamt. Welsch, Wolfgang (1997): “Transkulturalität. Die veränderte Verfassung heutiger Kulturen,” in: Via Regia. Blätter für internationale kulturelle Kommunikation 20, 19pp. via-regia-kulturstrasse.org/bibliothek/pdf/ heft20/welsch_transkulti.pdf Zeuske, Michael (2004): Insel der Extreme. Kuba im 20. Jahrhundert, Zürich: Rotpunkt.

Processes of Cultural Transfer in 19th-Century Literature: The Caribbean within the Context of the Cultural Radiance of Europe, exemplified by France and Spain (1789-1886) G ESINE M ÜLLER

A Comparison of Processes of Circulation and Transfer

The comparative approach to the literary production of the former colonies of France and Spain is not about static entities, but about processes of transfer and circulation that unfold simultaneously, subject to very diverse dynamics, between the center and periphery in a colonial threshold situation – processes that at the same time are also manifoldly intertwined. Just as the knowledge newly organized under Napoleon, and its representations and exponents, circulated in the respective mother countries (e.g., France), the writers of the colonial spaces did also circulate, not just between ‘their’ periphery and ‘their’ center, but (in the case of the hispanophone writers) between various peripheries and centers. The sphere of literature is constantly transcended, because the writers always also saw themselves as politicians, and – as becomes apparent from the very titles of literary texts from the French Caribbean – as ethnographers and historians. This identifies them as the central figures of multi-discipline encounters within the context of transcontinental processes of transfer. In order to reconstruct the horizon of knowledge and ideas of that time en bloc, it is not enough to read ethnological, historiographical, and literary texts simultaneously. Rather, an analysis of the dynamics of exchange and circulation shall reveal the various microhorizons (such as those oriented towards the respective

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national center) in which the actors move. Due to the exclusive orientation towards one center, these microhorizons distinguish themselves more clearly from each other in the periphery than in (post-)enlightenment scholarly Europe with its extensive networks. In turn, overlappings and links between relatively autonomous hermeneutical spaces thus become all the more apparent in the texts and debates. In contrast to the approach of Edward Said (1993), the actors in the colonies are not viewed as mere functions or objects of a hegemonial discourse, but as subjects participating in a continuous (virtual and physical) process of interchange with (various) European discourses and the proponents of these discourses. This very interchange between center and periphery has a profound impact on the horizons of knowledge and on the representations of reality in the European centers themselves, particularly in France, whose stronger cohesive power is due precisely to its flexibility in absorbing the contributions from the colonies into its own system of representation, thereby undergoing institutional and intellectual changes itself – an integrative strength lacked by the Spanish mother country in the 19th century, both in the sphere of literature and in that of science. The cultural marginalization of the Spanish mother country, on the other hand, gives rise to a multirelational reorientation of the hispanophone Caribbean, which finds prolific expression in the literature. Thus, I would like to demonstrate how the pattern of intensified mutual exchange, which – unlike in the case of the francophone Caribbean – goes beyond a bipolar dialogue between colonizers and colonized, and opens up to collateral processes of transculturation, significantly contributes to the emergence of foundational fictions. Hence, these writings do not only establish national literatures, they also need to be viewed as representations (or at least as antecedents) of a transnational literature. Not only does the reference to France, profound in both the French and the Spanish Caribbean, have an impact on the strivings for emancipation. In the French colonies, they manifest themselves in dependence on the mother country, and basically an interest in the perpetuation of the status quo; in the case of Spain, in cultural dependence on a foreign country, and thus dissociation from the own mother country. The diversity of relational references also fosters the voluminousness and originality of cultural production, thus indirectly contributing to political self-assertion. With the turmoils of the French Revolution, the concurrent transvaluation of passed down values, and the frequent changes of government between 1789 and 1815, the relationship between the Caribbean islands and

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their respective mother countries had become questionable, and called for a redefinition. Abolitionism and the mulatto Issue

Despite the Bolivarian liberation movement, and despite the fact that almost the entire South American subcontinent had freed itself from the shackles of colonialism, people in the Caribbean were not primarily concerned with the issue of independence; it was slavery, and the social and political problems associated with it, that preoccupied them. Once the abolition issue had been put on the agenda during the revolution, and once the Haitian slaves had taken matters into their own hands, it could no longer be ignored and dismissed, and dominated the debates even when it was not directly addressed. In the texts, however, there is often a shift from the abolition issue to that of equal rights for the colored population (mulattoes), the majority of which had already been liberated at that time. The mulattoes were very active economically, and thus quite influential – factors that gained them many enviers among the less affluent whites, and repeatedly led to violent eruptions along the racial front lines, such as the pogrom of 1790 on Martinique, which marked the beginning of the revolutionary and civil war like events on that island. To complicate matters further, the mulattoes, once they had acquired wealth, often owned slaves themselves, with the result that they were viewed as traitors by the blacks, and hated even more than the white slaveholders. Only the works of those writers who were openly anti-abolitionist are not lacking in outspokenness. These advocates of slavery play a prominent role mainly in the literature of the French colonies. Even though most of the writers belonged to the elites, the amount and soundness of information available about their lives and doings – apart from their works – vary widely. The results of my research suggest that they were split into two camps, which continued to exist even when slavery was abolished in 1848. On the one side, there were the (white) Béké authors, such as Auguste Jean Prévost de Sansac, Xavier Eyma, Louis de Maynard de Queilhe, and JeanBaptiste Rosemond de Beauvallon, who advocated the maintenance of the status quo and, with their exuberant, romanticizing descriptions of nature, not least also obfuscated social imbalances. On the other side, there were the socially involved authors who were well disposed towards the mulattoes – and probably also towards the slaves –, such as J. Levilloux, Chapus (both of whom were apparently mulattoes themselves), Bonneville (who was married to a colored woman), and Eugène Agricole (the first black

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writer of Martinique; it is quite telling that he did not make his appearance until about 1870). In contrast, the writers of independent Haiti, spirited by the emancipation won after much bloodshed, decidedly came out in favor of the basic equality of the blacks. At the same time, this was the first black literature ever written, which emerged comparatively soon after 1804, given that the entire white educational elite had either been banished or had perished, and that, with the exception of a few literate mulattoes, the vast majority of the population, which by then was almost homogeneously black, could not even write their names. This held also true for the political leaders. Among the Spanish-speaking writers of the Caribbean, the Condesa de Merlín was the most prominent advocate of slavery, whereas many other works, such as those by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and Cirilo Villaverde, today rank as abolitionist novels, even in those cases where the authors project the issue onto a mulatto slave and do not explicitly deal with the Negro issue, as in the novel Sab (Gómez de Avellaneda 1841). In the discussions about equal rights and the abolition of slavery, which always resonate in the literature of that time, the importance of the centeraxis periphery and of the interchange between colony and mother country becomes very evident. While the central governments were in charge of regulating these colonial matters by means of legislative actions, there also seems to have been a lively exchange of ideas between intellectuals and writers from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In that context, the abolitionist movement in France, centered around illustrious names such as Alphonse de Lamartine and Alexis de Tocqueville, distinguished itself much more than its counterpart in Spain, where a bill regarding the abolition of slavery was submitted (and thrown out) in 1811, yet not much happened subsequently until events escalated in the 1870s. This difference had a pronounced impact on the cultural ties with the respective mother country, as well as on the literature: With regard to social and political matters that were of crucial importance to the colonies, Franco-Caribbean literature could develop in an atmosphere of mutual exchange with the literature of its mother country; the Spanish-speaking intellectuals, however, had to look for other, and new, points of reference outside of Spain when it came to that key issue. While this is just one indicator of the integrative ability of French culture, it also clearly shows that it was possible to look within the existing relations of power and dependency for the solution to problems that fundamentally affected literature. The lack of resonance in Spain, on the other hand, caused people in the colonies to take matters into their own hands, which eventually led to a call for political emancipation, and for a separa-

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tion of the colonies from the mother country. This is clearly illustrated by the debates about politics and literature held independently of Spain by the del Monte circle on Cuba, even though the views advanced there were not exclusively of an explicitly abolitionist nature. Rather, the call for homogenization, cleansing, and the encouragement of interethnic marriages, voiced by those circles on the basis of racial aspects, is in line with the role of the mulatto as a unifying figure and as a synthesis of white culture and black nature, propagated by many works of literature in the Spanish and French Caribbean – a go-between role that met with strong disapproval among the advocates of slavery; after all, they viewed the mulattoes, who had acquired property and education, as a dangerous mixture that stirred up the otherwise content black slaves in their patriarchal plantation idyll by spreading harmful social-revolutionary ideas from Europe (Maynard de Queilhe, Prévost de Sansac). The periphery-center axis

Thus, as far as the French-speaking writers are concerned, their cultural ties with their mother country do not seem to have decreased in strength. This holds true for both their biographies and their literary orientation. The writers had studied in Paris, and when the protagonists of their works, such as the characters of the novel Les créoles ou la vie aux Antilles (1835) by the Martinican author Levilloux, must sail back to their Caribbean homes upon having completed their education en métropole, they leave the mother country only wistfully, with a “hymne d’amour et de reconnaissance” (Levilloux 1977: 32) on their lips. This Francophilia turns out to be no problem for those writers from the colonies who are explicitly loyal to France, as well as being patriots. The political and social conflict rather leads the two literary-political fractions to outdoing each other in terms of patriotism – most of all when it comes to the sensitive issue of their loyalty with the mother country at the time of the British invasion in 1794. In close interchange with the historiography of their mother country, they thus seem to contribute significantly to the construction of a historical myth that still continues to dominate the Eurocentric Mémoire historique, which still is commonplace in the French school books, and is deplored by intellectuals like Glissant as a belittlement of Afro-American contributions to the development of the country. This criticism is directed at the depiction of the revolutionary period in the Caribbean, as well as at the so-called schoelcherisme, which takes the view that the abolition of slavery in 1848 was not

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hard-won by the slaves themselves, but entirely owed to the abolitionist movement in the mother country (Reinstädler 2006: 115-116). Even in independent Haiti, upward mobility was achieved almost exclusively by adopting French culture, and many people tried to get an education in France. In the literary manifestations, such as the first Haitian novel, Stella, by Émeric Bergeaud (1859), freedom is personified by a white woman, and the national poet Coicou assures the former mother country, after the Prussian military defeat on France in 1871, of the loyalty and love of the Haitians: “Oui, France, nous t’aimons, comme plusieurs, sans doute, / De tes propres enfants ne t’aimeront jamais; / Et partout où ton doigt nous indique la route/ C’est là que nous cherchons l’harmonie et la paix.” He then goes on to declare Haiti “France noire” (Massillon Coicou 1892: 113117), whatever he may mean by that. While such lyrical outpours sound almost reannexionist (Napoleon and the former slaveholders, against whom the ancestors had risen up, are portrayed as nothing less than traitors who betrayed genuine French principles and integrity), early Haitian literature, in the form of shorter stories and poems that were efforts to reflect and overcome the violence suffered during the revolutionary period, is much more confrontational and almost bellicose. Multirelationality

In contrast to the Franco-Caribbean writers, the intellectuals of the Spanish Caribbean apparently became completely disenchanted with the center of their colonial culture. Thus, the novelist and polemic Félix Tanco mocks the “epigonism” of Spanish literature of his time (Wogatzke 2006: 100), and thereby reveals the impact of the cultural (self-)marginalization of Spain on its colonial territories. Writers like him did not want to become epigones of the epigones, but rather tended to let go of their center as a primary cultural point of reference. Literature is thus levitating within the spheres of influence of the various cultural centers of gravity, basically opening up to these centers. For the multirelationality hypothesis to be tenable, we need to provide evidence of influences from non-Spanish cultures, and of an exchange of ideas with these cultures. French culture doubtlessly had an impact on the literature of the Spanish Caribbean, even though only few writers lived in Paris. Yet the Cuban author José María Heredia advised his compatriots to read not only French (mainly Romanticist) literature, but also works from Great Britain and the United States. He translated the works of Byron, and particularly recommended the reading of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to his compatriots. Was it the romantic theme

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(a journey) and Byron’s rootlessness that made many Spanish-speaking writers of the Caribbean view his fate as akin to their own experience of writing between the worlds? From the United States, Heredia wrote letters and articles in which he expressed his admiration for Washington, the American people, and the Revolutionary War, which he called a “courageous feat” (1980: 192-193). The early popularity of the historical novel, and the recourse to precolonial Indian civilizations in order to develop a national mythology – found, for example, in historical novels à la Cooper –, reveal amazing similarities to the literature of the Caribbean (cf. Fluck 1997: 84-165). These similarities did also pertain to the Spanish-language literatures of the Latin American mainland, for which the Hispano-Caribbean writers did not need any translation (or interlingual reception). Interestingly, a penchant for the historical novel, and the recourse to a mythic heritage from the preColumbian native population, can also be observed in the works of FrancoCaribbean writers such as J. H. J. Coussin, whose Eugène de Cerceil ou les Caraïbes was published as early as in 1824, that is, just one year after Cooper’s first Leatherstocking Tale, The Pioneers (1823), and much earlier than the best-selling novels by Dumas (père). Yet a fleeting glance at the titles already reveals the close relationship with historiography and ethnography claimed particularly by Franco-Caribbean literature. With their exuberant descriptions of nature, the writers draw on Chateaubriand, and thus model themselves on genuinely literary examples, yet it seems reasonable to assume that there was a dialogue with the emergent French ethnology as early as in the 1820s and 1830s. When the writers take an external perspective in the titles of their works, this indicates that the primary recipients of their writings are located in the mother country: Outre-mer (Maynard de Queilhe, 1835), Description de l’île de Martinique (Prévost de Sansac, 1840), Les créoles ou la vie aux Antilles (Levilloux, 1835). Places of writing outside the Caribbean: Paris as a privileged center of colonial dynamics

Edward Said, in his classic Culture and Imperialism (1993), raises the question of the hegemonial tendencies that are conveyed through literature and art, and thus carried into the colonial space. He is mainly concerned with images and forms of representation that relate to the alterity of the non-European territories and their inhabitants, and develop a gravitational force that integrates this ‘Other’. This is achieved by propagating eurocentric categories and values, which position the Other inside and at the same

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time outside of itself, and define its place in society. Thus, domination is culturally legitimized – biopolitics whose power and potential for consensus are even more enhanced by the cultural filter. Even though Said’s primary focus is on English literature and its role in the stabilization of the Empire, he also cites some examples of the – completely different – influence exerted by French culture on the colonial space. On the one hand, he refers to the omnipresent interpretations of Napoleon in the literature, where the Corsican ancestry and physiognomy of the commander and emperor are exotically stylized; Napoleon thus emerges as a positive role model that, according to Said, could develop a special cohesive power, particularly among the colored population of the overseas territories. On the other hand, he refers to the masterly skill with which the literature makes use of the academic discourses about the Orient and Africa; thanks to literature, the scholarly established knowledge about the culturally and ethnically Other gained a broad impact – an impact that otherwise would have been unimaginable, given the separation of disciplines in Britain. Said’s concern may be justified, and his findings may be insightful; yet the (potential) recipients of these hegemonial discourses appear only implicitly as marginal figures in his writing, and they continue to be mere objects. The question for me is rather how both sides were active as participants within mutual processes that established cultural hegemony. In that context, the hispanophone literature of the 19th century indeed seems to prove Said right regarding his hypothesis that art and science form the foundation of the empire, a foundation that – if removed – would cause the empire to collapse, at least in the longer term. After all, this is exactly what happened to the colonies of Spain. The complexity of a functioning cultural hegemony becomes apparent from its ability to integrate resistance, even within the center of the colonial power itself. The integrative Napoleon character described by Said has its counterpart in the complex, multiply refracted character of Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian fighter for independence, in Lamartine’s abolitionist drama of the same title. Lamartine stylizes Toussaint as an agent of his own anti-Bonapartism and his disapproval of slavery, yet in doing so he creates a black Napoleon, “who personifies all the positive qualities attributed to the white man [Napoleon] by the latter’s apologists” (Middelanis 1996: 115). While this is just a small element within a much more global hegemonial discourse, it is nevertheless even reflected and reproduced, as an almost non-verbal form of representation, by the act of resistance itself. These dialectics of power become even more obvious when the colored protagonists of emancipatorily oriented Franco-Caribbean

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novels seek their salvation in patriotism, and look upon the mother country as the only guarantor of recognition and equal rights – probably for good reason, because despite all criticism of schoelcherisme it is more than doubtful that slavery would have been permanently abolished if it had not been for the longtime support by prominent abolitionist circles in France, which centered around intellectuals like Lamartine, Bissette, Schoelcher, E. Arago, L. Blanc, Montalembert, Tocqueville, etc., or if the February Revolution had not occurred. Yet the stability of the power system rooted in cultural hegemony manifests itself in the very flexibility of that system: The right to compensation granted to the expropriated slaveholders immediately established a new (capitalist) basis for the exploitation of the (black) lower classes. Misery was no longer the result of skin color, but of material destitution and lack of educational opportunities (cf. Nicolas 1996: 117; Reinstädler 2006: 216). Yet the focus shall not be primarily on the (flexible) stability of the global whole, but on the dynamic microstructures of interchange and circulation. Paris was the central intellectual hub where the francophone writers from the (former) Caribbean colonies met representatives of the culture and sciences of their mother country. Hugo, for example, seems to have been friends with writers as different as Levilloux and Maynard (cf. Toumson 1979: 69). That interchange gave birth to knowledge and ideas, which in turn circulated within the networks. Evidence of patterns of reception in the Caribbean is provided by the local cultural production itself, and facilitates a specific access to the texts and mediators that have proven to be relevant to the specific colonial space (the Caribbean). These include 1) those writers and works that met with a particularly intense reception in the colonial space, or were even treated in colonial literature; 2) the immediate contacts between the actors themselves; 3) the multidisciplinary interchange referred to by Said when he emphasizes the close ties between literature and science in post-Napoleonic France. Types of Reception

French Romanticism has witnessed a particularly intense reception in the Caribbean. This holds especially true for writers like Lamartine, Chateaubriand, and Hugo, who explicitly concerned themselves with themes and motifs relating to the New World in general, and sometimes also to the Caribbean in particular. Apart from the classics, there are references to the Bucolic poetry of the early or pre-Romantic era of the late 18th century, and, of course, again and again to Rousseau, whose influence on the Carib-

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bean writers can hardly be overrated. So far, five patterns of reception can roughly be distinguished, which primarily relate to French Romanticism: • Explicit reception of French Romanticism as an unfiltered glorification of

the French cultural nation (main exponent: Poirié Saint-Aurèle) • The reception of French Romanticism is reflected in the reading habits of

the protagonists regarding narrative texts (mainly reading of works of Lamartine or Chateaubriand) • Implicit reception of social-revolutionary Romanticism (mainly modeled on the works of Victor Hugo) • Modelling on the perception of the other, as expressed in the works of French Romanticists, in order to define the perception of the self (autoexoticism) • Romantic descriptions of nature, modeled on writers like Chateaubriand. The patterns of reception, adaptation, and transformation serve as points of departure for a new look at the known texts (cf. Neumann/Warning 2003: 7-16), whose mastery and elegance Said’s center-oriented approach apparently failed to grasp. Yet despite the enormous differences between the British and French models of rulership, which Hannah Arendt aptly pins down to the “dispute [about principles] as to the rights of an Englishman versus the [universalist] human rights” (1995: 385-404), Said’s way of looking at (imperial) concepts of space and cartographies (cf. Said 1993: 149) is insightful. The comparison with England is all the more important as the territorial rivalry for the Caribbean islands (mainly at the turn between the 18th and 19th centuries) also found expression in an ideological rivalry, where each of the two colonial powers tried to come up with a more tenable justification of colonialist claims to power – certainly a major driving factor leading to the abolition of slavery in the British possessions in 1833/34. Yet Said is primarily concerned with the justification of colonial dominance and expansion before the domestic public, while my approach also looks at the integration of the colonial subjects themselves. The reference to an order willed by God and maintained by Europeans, found in a crude form in the writings of Carlyle, is only of marginal importance in the much more secular French texts. Nevertheless, they carry European ideas of a locus amoenus (or utopos) into the world of the colonies, as is exemplified by the works of Chateaubriand and late Bucolic poetry with its romanticizing descriptions of nature. Thus, they put that colonial world into a new frame of reference, transcended it, and imbued it with a new meaning, which seems to have been eagerly absorbed and adopted by 19th-century

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Latin American literature as a whole, no matter how social-revolutionary that literature may have purported to be (cf. Iser 1993). The New World and new ways of organizing knowledge: ethnology, historiography

Ethnology, which was formally established as a discipline in France at the beginning of the 19th century, and during that early phase of its existence launched into a productivity that has hitherto gone largely unnoticed, played a key role in the exchange of ideas with the New World and its inhabitants. After all, new knowledge, and accordingly new ideas relating to the Other, were generated precisely at that interface, and contributed to shaping the European image of humankind, as well as – in the long term – to the claim to world domination that would reach its fatal culmination during the phase of the scramble for Africa. Yet it is striking that even the abolitionist-minded intellectuals of the Caribbean make use of these categories as if they were the most natural thing in the world – categories that since Buffon did not only reflect common taxonomies, but also defined the legal framework of the colonial social hierarchies (including slavery) within which the actors moved in their everyday lives (cf. Dorigny/Gainot 1998). The scholarly disciplines (above all, ethnology and historiography, but also geography and archaeology), still in a process of consolidation during the first half of the 19th century (before the foundation of large institutions like the Societé and École d’Anthropologie de Paris, and of the Revue historique in the 1850s-1870s), were stylistically close to the literary world in their ethnographic portrayals of the New World; this holds particularly true for literary travelogues. Clear classifications of the writings of that period, and distinctions between them, are thus hardly possible, unlike in the case of Humboldt. Dialogue and transfer, both between science and art and between the producers of knowledge in the mother country and in the colonies, should thus not be viewed as one-way flows, but as a reciprocal process, despite the powerful radiance of French culture. Like nowhere else, the lasting success of the French mission civilisatrice, as well as the flexibility and absorbency of the hegemonial system, become evident in ethnology, which itself already is a response to the exotic and increasingly romanticizing interest of the French educated strata in the differentness of the overseas regions and its inhabitants, an interest that had begun to deepen in the 18th century (Riedel 1994: 114-115). Moreover, ethnology professionalized the exchange of ideas without yet completely abandoning the

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heritage and aspirations of the polymaths of the Age of Enlightenment (Thoma 2006). Just like travel literature, ethnology has fostered the literary reception of Caribbean writers in their respective mother countries. This holds true for the reception of Hispano-Caribbean literature more than for that of FrancoCaribbean literature, because the former features a more pronounced problematization of the inner tension between the Self and the Other, and a more inventive identity outline, even though (and exactly because) the mother country Spain itself was far from matching up to the French mother country when it came to the development of new systems of knowledge.

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References

Arendt, Hannah (2003): Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft. Antisemitismus, Imperialismus, totale Herrschaft, Munich/Zurich: Piper. Bergeaud, Émeric (1859): Stella. Paris: E. Dentu Coussin, J.H.J. (1824): Eugène de Cerceil ou les Caraïbes, 3 vol, Paris: Igonette. Coicou, Massillon (1892): Poésies nationales, Paris : Goupy et Jourdan. Coussin, J.H.J. (1824): Eugène de Cerceil ou les Caraïbes, 3 vol, Paris: Igonette. Dorigny, Marcel/Gainot, Bernard (1998): La Société des Amis des Noirs (1788-1799): Contribution à l‘histoire de l‘abolition de l‘esclavage, Paris: UNESCO. Fluck, Winfried (1997): Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans 1790-1900, Frankfurt, Main: Suhrkamp. Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis (1997 [1841]): Sab, ed. by José Servera, Madrid: Cátedra. Heredia, José María (1980): Prosas, ed. by Romualdo Santos, Havanna: Letras Cubanas. Iser, Wolfgang (1993): Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre: Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Levilloux, J. (1977 [1835]): Les créoles ou La vie aux Antilles. Followed by: Bentzon, Thérèse: Yette, Morne-Rouge: Horizons Caraïbes. Maynard de Queilhe, Louis de (1835): Outre-mer, 2 vol, Paris: Renduel. Middelanis, Carl Herrmann (1996): Imperiale Gegenwelten: Haiti in den französischen Text- und Bildmedien, Frankfurt/Main: Vervuert. Neumann, Gerhard/Warning, Rainer (eds.) (2003): Transgressionen: Literatur als Ethnographie, Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach. Nicolas, Armand (1996): De 1848 à 1939: Histoire de la Martinique, vol. 2, Paris: L‘Harmattan. Prévost de Sansac, Auguste (1977 [1840]): Les amours de Zémédare et Carina et description de l’île de Martinique. Followed by: Eyma, LouisXavier: Emmanuel, ed. by Auguste Joyau, Morne-Rouge: Horizons Caraïbes. Reinstädler, Janett (2006): Die Theatralisierung der Karibik: Postkoloniale Inszenierungen auf den spanisch- und französischsprachigen Antillen im 19. Jahrhundert. Unpublished PhD thesis, Berlin. Riedel, Wolfgang (1994): “Anthropologie und die Literatur in der deutschen Spätaufklärung.” In: Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 6th special edition, pp. 93-157.

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Said, Edward W. (1993): Culture and Imperialism, New York: A. Knopf. Thoma, Heinz (2006): “Von der Geschichte des esprit humain zum esprit français: Anthropologie, kulturelle Ordnungsvorstellungen und Literaturgeschichtsschreibung in Frankreich 1790-1840.” In: Hansjörg Bay/Kai Merten (eds.), Die Ordnung der Kulturen: Zur Konstruktion ethnischer, nationaler und zivilisatorischer Differenzen 1750-1850, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 99-120. Toumson, Roger (1979): Bug-Jargal ou la révolution haïtienne, Fort-deFrance: Désormeaux. Wogatzke, Gudrun (2006): Identitätsentwürfe: Selbst- und Fremdbilder in der spanisch- und französischsprachigen Prosa der Antillen im 19. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt/Main: Vervuert.

Scattered Seeds: Transnational Origins of the Decolonization Movement in Jamaica B IRTE T IMM

Planting the Seed

On September 23, 1937, the architectural draughtsman Walter G. McFarlane opened the pages of the Daily Gleaner. A small article about the first anniversary of the Jamaica Progressive League caught his attention. He was surprised to learn that this group of Jamaican emigrants in New York demanded that Jamaica should become an independent nation state within the British Commonwealth of Nations. McFarlane himself had recently returned to his home town Kingston, after he had lived in the United States for 13 years (McFarlane 1957: 11; Young 1981). While he lived abroad, he had also come across nationalist and anti-colonial thought and questioned why Jamaica was still a colony. Upon his return in 1935, McFarlane had planned to get involved in local politics, but had been harshly disappointed in the various local groups and citizens’ associations. None of them, he recalled, seemed to be open to anti-colonial thought. Many identified positively with Great Britain, while their actions were centered on parochial matters. He criticized that many of his countrymen “[…] were trying to be more English than the English born” (McFarlane: 1957: 11). McFarlane was excited to read about the activities of the Progressive League in New York and immediately decided to get involved. He wrote a letter to the directors, asking for permission to open a branch in Jamaica. McFarlane’s letter augured the fulfillment of a dream for the founders of the League. From the group’s inception, the Jamaican immigrants W. Adolphe Roberts, Wilfred A. Domingo, Ethelred Brown, James O’Meally, and others who had been instrumental in the creation of a movement for Jamaica’s decolonization, were committed to fostering a strong nationalist

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movement in Jamaica. Inspired by other transnational decolonization movements like the one in Ireland with its strong supporter base in New York, they envisioned the local group becoming the prime force of action and hoped at the same time that the Jamaica Progressive League in New York would become an auxiliary to the nationalist movement on the ground (cf. New York Amsterdam News, October 17, 1936; January 30, 1937; JPL, “Onward, Jamaica!”). Who were these men and women who not only developed strong nationalist and anti-colonial ideas after migrating to the US around the turn of the 20th century, but who now boldly sought to put them to action? What experiences and conditions challenged their loyalties to Great Britain? What motivated their nationalism? What political philosophies and movements did they encounter across the US? How were their ideas received on the ground in Jamaica? In attempting to answer these questions, they must be viewed through the lens of the transatlantic exchange processes between Kingston and New York in the 1930s and 1940s. This approach will shed light on the emigrants’ encounters and disappointment with internationalist movements like Garveyism and Socialism, and also point out the various anti-racist and anti-colonial influences that stemmed from other independence movements and eventually led to the founding of the Jamaica Progressive League in September 1936 in New York. Imperial Identities and British Loyalty

Before exploring the issues outlined above, it is necessary to understand the migration experience of the founders of the Progressive League and their social and political background. Even though anti-colonial thought and various acts of resistance had always been an integral part of the experience of the Jamaican people living under colonial rule, centuries of British colonialism had nonetheless left a deep imprint on the inhabitants’ collective mentality. Katrin Norris paints a picture of Jamaica’s “two worlds,” consisting of a black majority, on the one hand, and middle and upper classes, on the other. She observes that the upper and aspiring middle classes firmly subscribed to a belief system indoctrinated by their colonizers. This included a strong pro-British attitude and the internalization of the negative and often racist stereotypes that implied the majority of Jamaicans was not yet “civilized” or fit for self-government (Norris 1962: 9, 93). McFarlane’s observations (1957) that many Jamaicans identified strongly with Great Britain and regarded themselves as citizens of the

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British Empire is supported today by numerous scholars such as Gordon K. Lewis and Philip Kasinitz. Gordon K. Lewis, for instance, labeled it “colonial ennui, colonial self-contempt, and colonial feelings of dependency – the well-known colonial mentality in West Indians themselves” (2004: 24). More recently, Anne Spry Rush found a strong and widespread identification with Great Britain among middle class Caribbeans and termed this phenomenon “imperial British identity” (2011). In addition, historians Brian Moore and Michele Johnson have demonstrated that all sections of the society were penetrated by a strong identification with the British monarchy and that many shared a deep pride in being part of the British Empire (2004: 271ff.). Indeed, most politically active citizens around the turn of the 20th century thought that Jamaica should return to a constitution similar to the one it had before 1865. In this year, a largely self-governed assembly voluntarily surrendered its rights and requested to become a Crown Colony fully governed by Great Britain. One of the reasons for this move was that the planters who formed the assembly were terrified by the major rebellion that had erupted around Morant Bay and feared Jamaica could turn into a “Second Haiti.” The protest that developed amongst the Afro-Jamaican majority, however, was directed primarily against the inhumane living conditions and the local authority, rather than colonialism per se. Notably, anti-colonial protest among the largely illiterate and impoverished masses was largely channeled in spiritual forms such as Revivalism, Rastafarianism. Nationalist tendencies were expressed more often in reference to Africa than Jamaica, for instance in Pan-Africanism. Although the experience of racism in England and the First World War had radicalized a great number of Jamaicans and inspired nationalist thought (Smith 2004), a particular set of experiences in the US and encounters with other anticolonial movements inspired a more decisive form of Jamaican anticolonial nationalism that manifested itself in the formation of the Jamaica Progressive League. Jamaica is no isolated case in this regard. In fact, anti-colonial nationalism predominantly developed in migrant circles in the metropolises outside of the colony, where immigrants came into contact with various ideological influences (Boyle 2001). This is demonstrated, for instance, by the Irish anti-colonial struggle and its strong diasporic component (Boyle 2001), the nationalist influences from the diaspora in African and Asian countries (Kedourie 1970), and, more recently, the numerous anti-colonial movements on the African continent (Derrick 2008). The Jamaica Progressive League is also a case in point where an anti-colonial nationalist pressure

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group evolved abroad and within the transnational space that the migrants had created in New York. As a result of their exposure to different cultures and ideas after leaving Jamaica, the founders of the Progressive League were awakened to the strong imperial identities of many of their countrymen and thus to the fact that they had a lot of work to do in Jamaica. They questioned and severely criticized the widespread affinity to Great Britain and identified the psychological consequences of colonial rule as the underlying cause for the strong opposition their ideas encountered when they tried to encourage anticolonial action across the island. Wilfred A. Domingo, vice-president of the League, referred to this after their first extended stays in Jamaica (Public Opinion, March 5, 1944): »All the forces of public education in Jamaica operate to make Jamaicans belittle and despise their country, its products, history and people, whilst glorifying England and everything English. As a result, despite a deplorable social condition and a humiliating political relationship to the British Empire, there is practically no hostility on the part of the people to British Imperialism. The inhabitants are convinced that the British Empire is a benevolent organisation and that they are important units in it.«

He also admitted that his own thinking had been strongly influenced by British propaganda prior to migrating to the United States (Public Opinion, May 3, 1944): »Like most Jamaicans I had believed in a sort of hazy manner, most of the things I had been taught at school or which had been insinuated into me by my environment and reading. As a small boy I somehow felt that the British Empire was the grandest thing in the world. […] I thought the English people were God’s most perfect humans and we Jamaicans, being English, the best of all coloured peoples. […] But my contact with other West Indians in New York damaged my faith considerably and almost ruined it.«

What was it about this contact with other West Indians that made Domingo alter his perspective? Who were the founders of the Jamaica Progressive League, and what inspired their nationalism?

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Transnational Networks in Harlem

The men and women who founded the Jamaica Progressive League were part of a large cohort of immigrants from the Caribbean islands who sought their fortunes abroad in the early 20th century and mainly settled in the United States. Before launching the Jamaica Progressive League, they had already set down roots in the US that spanned two or three decades. They became immersed in the vibrant radical political and social circles made up of Caribbean immigrants, African Americans, as well as white Socialists in New York, and they played an important role in numerous political groups, parties, and newspapers (cf. James 1998). Most of the founding members were of Afro-Jamaican descent and stemmed from the ambitious, but frustrated middle class. A large number of immigrants had gravitated to New York and Harlem in particular. In the 1930s, Caribbeans made up about 25 percent of Harlem’s population, and their impact was so remarkable that Franklin D. Roosevelt called the neighborhood the “Capital of the Caribbean” (Parker 2004:105). Harlem was a bustling crossroads of black diasporic encounter in the first decades of the 20th century, and it was a lively place for philosophical and political exchanges that gave birth to various black power, socialist, and anti-colonial movements. These processes of exchange, according to Matory’s concept of the “live dialogue” (2006), resulted in a close-knit network of friendships and political alliances that transcended borders of race, class, gender, and nationality, and impacted developments not only in the US, but in the Caribbean and Africa. Experiences including their encounters with African Americans, struggle against racism and exchange and cooperation with Caribbean immigrants from other islands, along with the fierce opposition towards colonialism of many of the black activists and black and white socialists in New York, opened the eyes of numerous the Caribbean immigrants to the oppressive and exploitive nature of British colonialism. Another important factor for the immigrants was the difference between the US type of racial discrimination based on the so-called “one-drop-rule” and the Caribbean practices of discrimination they were used to that distinguished between black, brown, and white, and the privileged the lightskinned middle class over the black majority (Hall 1997:41-68). Although some immigrants tried to play down their Caribbean background to prevent racial discrimination in the US, many subscribed to the idea of transnational solidarity. In this context, Wilfred A. Domingo soon developed into an outstanding and radical intellectual of what became known as the “New Negro” (Locke 1925) movement, the political backbone of the Harlem

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Renaissance. The future vice-president of the Progressive League would later emerge as one of the key figures of Jamaican anti-colonial nationalism. Domingo established important contacts with key players such as Marcus Garvey, Ethelred Brown, among others, that helped them to realize their ideas (Moore Turner 2005: 35). Like many other members of the Progressive League, Domingo initially cooperated with Marcus Garvey whom he had introduced to the radical scene in Harlem, and who played an active role in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) (Vincent 1972: 72). Domingo was also greatly inspired by his work with renowned African Americans like Hubert H. Harrison, and he evolved into one of the most skilled orators on Harlem’s street corners. Joyce Moore Turner points out (2005: 35): »His keen, analytical mind, acerbic writing style, and gregarious manner soon placed him at the center of radical thinking among Caribbean immigrants settling in Harlem. He was often the kinsman to be contacted when new arrivees made their way from Jamaica to New York.«

Domingo became the first editor of Marcus Garvey’s newspaper “The Negro World,” which connected the powerful international network of the UNIA with its numerous branches in nearly every US state, Canada, many of the South and Middle American countries, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe (cf. Martin 1976). However, Domingo was also attracted to socialist ideas and became actively involved in socialist circles. He even campaigned for the Socialist Party of America. Eventually, his efforts to merge race and class consciousness finally led to a break with Garvey, whose race-first policy was not compatible with Domingo’s approach (Martin 1972: 466). Domingo’s vision of merging race and class approaches was shared by other Caribbean radicals like Cyril Briggs and Richard B. Moore, as well as a number of future members of the Jamaica Progressive League. It found organizational expression in the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood in the spring of 1919 (cf. James 1988:156; Moore Turner 2005:55). The group’s members included: W.A. Domingo, Richard B. Moore, Grace Campbell, Harry Haywood, Otto Hall, Otto Huiswoud, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, Theodore and Ben Burrell, Ethelred Brown, and Claude McKay (Briggs 1987). It was during these years that Domingo and many of his future codirectors of the League became friends and also developed ties with many others who would become close allies of the League. These dense networks

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would prove to be vital to the successful continuation of anti-colonial activities during World War II. They also helped to press the cause of Jamaican nationalism along the lines of international black solidarity in organizations like the West Indies National Emergency Council (WINEC). Moore Turner emphasized that the Caribbean radicals in Harlem shared (2005: 71): »[…] a common background and social concern for the plight of the victims of colonialism, and each threw himself into the fray at different positions on the barricades. Like highly energized meteorites that interacted and occasionally collided, they spread their efforts from the political international left of Marxism to the separatist Black Nationalism of Garveyism.«

However, attempts to merge race and class positions were rejected by black nationalist and socialist leaders, who demanded a singly commitment to either “race first” or “class first” ideologies. Frustrated, many of the Caribbean radicals in Harlem stepped back in the 1930s from active political involvement. Disappointment in both socialism and black nationalism contributed to a nationalist re-orientation, motivating them to join an anticolonial lobby group when the idea was introduced to the Jamaican community in Harlem. Domingo recalled how these experiences had paved the way for a number of radicals to endorse nationalist ideas (Public Opinion, July 31, 1937): »While the Garveyites dreamed of redeeming Africa by the sword or by persuasion, and the Socialists are working first and foremost for ‘the revolution’, the members of the Jamaica Progressive League are working along the path that leads to nationhood, confident that once understood by the majority of their fellow-countrymen the idea will be like an irresistible tidal wave.«

Remarkably, the impulse to form an anti-colonial organization did not originate in the radical milieu in Harlem. Nevertheless, the close-knit network of radical political activists operating in a transnational political space (cf. Sassen 2004: 649-670) helps explain how the Progressive League was able to provide the wide umbrella for a range of different individuals and to bridge diverse political and theoretical backgrounds like black nationalism, liberalism, and socialism. These networks provided fertile soil for the idea of another Jamaican to form a nationalist organization demanding self-government for Jamaica.

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Walter Adolphe Roberts and the Origins of the Jamaica Progressive League

In the summer of 1936, the white Jamaican historian, author and journalist Walter Adolphe Roberts attempted to reach out to the Jamaican expatriates in Harlem. He was not at all familiar with the radical scene and had no connections to the African American civil rights movement or the circles of Caribbean radicals. In his autobiography Roberts’ recalled the time shortly before the founding of the JPL (6): »[…] I gave all the time I could spare to the question of Jamaica. I concluded that I must look for support among the thousands of the islanders living in Harlem. I had few acquaintances in that Negro center. I had paid no attention to the recent activities there of Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican by birth but a man who agitated along international racial lines. What had I to do with his dreams of a black African Empire?«

Roberts came from a wholly different background (cf. Aarons 1983:58-63). His ideas were rooted in republican ideals and inspired by a distinctly regional perspective. Roberts regarded himself as a liberal, who neither endorsed socialist ideas nor was particularly interested in racial matters. Unlike Domingo, Brown, and O’Meally, Roberts never exhibited any tendency toward radical economic views or concern with critiquing capitalism. Roberts had migrated to the US in 1904. He became a naturalized US citizen and traveled extensively in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe. He was strongly influenced by republican ideas and admired Latin American and Caribbean freedom fighters like Simón Bolívar, José Martí, and Toussaint L’Ouverture. In fact, in 1949, Roberts published a series of articles in the Caribbean Quarterly that reflected this fascination. Acquainted from an early age with the political and historical background of the region, Roberts’ view was decidedly Pan-American in outlook. This caused him to ask why Jamaicans, who were surrounded by independent republics that had emerged from colonies, had never demanded their own independence. In a January 7, 1938 article from the Daily Gleaner, he referred to Jamaica as the “sleeping princess of the fairy tale” and suggested that the country’s independence was long overdue. Roberts had always opposed the Crown Colony political system. His position was also evident early on, namely, from the time he went to Paris and worked as a war reporter for a US newspaper in World War I. There he

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had experienced firsthand the high-water mark of nationalism and patriotic outbursts in Europe. His position was solidified when he authored a nonfiction book about Jamaica that focused on Henry Morgan, the notorious buccaneer who became governor of Jamaica (Roberts 1933:293-296), and included an appendix entitled “Self-Government in Jamaica.” It was the first public expression of Roberts’ nationalist perspective. He harshly criticized the lack of responsibility in the system of Crown Colony government and complained about its continued acceptance. Eventually, Roberts decided to take action. He turned to the migrant community in New York with the intention of garnering support to start an anti-colonial organization. A small group of Jamaicans active in the same networks, including W.A. Domingo, Ethelred Brown, and the brothers Theodor and Ben Burrell, readily endorsed Roberts’ call (Daily Gleaner, October 10, 1962). As a result of their experiences in Harlem, they were already familiar with anti-colonial, anti-racist, and democratic political ideas and practices. Their disappointment in black nationalism and socialism was a veritable hotbed for Robert’s nationalist ideas. Soon, the seeds that had been planted began to flourish – the time was right for the different streams of anti-colonial thought to merge into the small but outspoken, persistent and influential Jamaica Progressive League in September 1936 in New York, with a branch in Jamaica in 1937 (cf. New York Amsterdam News, September 19, 1936; Young 1981: 32; JPL 1937: 7). Reaching Out to Jamaica

The preamble of the constitution and by-laws of the JPL defined its aims and goals (1936:7): »Firmly believing that any people that has seen its generations come and go on the same soil is, in fact, a nation, the Jamaica Progressive League pledges itself to work for the attainment of self government for Jamaica, so that the country may take its rightful place as a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations.«

The idea of self-government was guiding principle on which the JPL activities based their activities. Much of the JPL’s educational work proceeded on the assumption that national consciousness was dormant in Jamaica and simply needed to be awakened. From its inception, the JPL called for a Jamaican party to promote this end and thereby inspire a nationalistic mass movement on the island. However, the transfer of ideas was not as easy as the founders of the League had expected. The skepticism and resistance

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they encountered in Jamaica hinted at the persistent influence of psychological indoctrination. Nevertheless, the first pamphlets to reach Jamaica and the letters and articles which appeared in the local press began to attract interest in political circles. The next important step was JPL vice president W.A. Domingo’s trip to the island in February/March (Daily Gleaner, February 8, 1937; March 27, 1937). He distributed pamphlets and started to speak with young, politically minded people about JPL’s vision and goals and urged political action in Jamaica. Domingo’s visit had a significant impact on an up-and-coming journalist from the Daily Gleaner and future political activist, Ken Hill, which resulted in the formation of a new organization, the National Reform Association (NRA). While Domingo was in Jamaica, Hill spoke in favor of self-government for Jamaica, distributed pamphlets of the Progressive League (he mentioned a stack of 50 copies of Roberts’ “Self-Government for Jamaica” and 100 copies of Brown’s “Injustices in the Civil Service” he received from the JPL for distribution), and publicly lauded the work of the League in New York in his Gleaner column: “Things We Need” (Daily Gleaner, March 9, 1937; March 22, 1937). Hill provocatively posed the question to his countrymen: “Now is it not a disgrace that we at home have not a similar movement to represent the needs of the majority of our people?” He further urged: »We shall unite in this movement against economic servitude and social evils that oppress us daily […] Because we must have a truly representative body to speak on our behalf, to express and voice our wants, to better conditions – a body which by force of its character and organisation will command the respect of Government and the attention we need.«

Hill distributed the pamphlets in Jamaica and announced in his March 22, 1937 Gleaner column that readers could obtain their copies directly from him. Despite his strong initial enthusiasm, however, resentment emanating from the local scene soon undermined the strength of all the radical demands for self-government. Evidence of this is found about a month after Hill called for a national movement in his column and attempted to organize a group under the name “Jamaica National Club.” While advertisement for the founding meeting included a statement that it would fight for selfgovernment, this demand was dropped at the first meeting (Post 1978:217). The organization that emerged from Hill’s effort took on the name “National Reform Association” and adopted a rather moderate agenda (Daily Gleaner, March 27, 1937).

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The Progressive League Branch in Kingston

The moderating effect of local opinion became conspicuous once again when W.G. McFarlane attempted to found a local branch of the Progressive League in Kingston. Meetings held in 1937 to get the organization off the ground with a definite demand for self-government were largely unsuccessful. By the time Roberts came to the island at the end of 1937, the efforts to officially launch the League in Jamaica had been a failure. Roberts stayed for several weeks and began to promote the launch of a massive campaign for self-government around Christmas 1937. Roberts stayed for several weeks and began to promote the launch of a massive campaign for selfgovernment around Christmas 1937 (Daily Gleaner, December 22, 1937). The Gleaner gave a detailed report of this effort. Initially, the movement gained strength, but then evaporated slowly after Roberts’ departure. The pronounced skepticism and rejection of radical anti-colonial claims that were expressed by the political and economical elites of the country soon led the local group to adopt a more moderate approach. The League’s strategy was to mobilize an active local core group that would be committed to the pressing demand for self-government. Roberts continued to lobby for the formation of a political party while he was in Jamaica, and toward that end, he actively approached prominent locals like Norman Manley, who would later become the leader of the PNP (Public Opinion, December 24, 1937). In his autobiography, Roberts recalled how he tried to convince Manley to launch a nationalist party with a selfgovernment platform, but Manley felt “that it was premature to try raising it now” and confirmed that he “had no wish to enter politics” (14). Only the island-wide labor strikes and riots in Frome in May and June 1938, which shook the whole country out of its political hibernation, made him reconsider his position. In 1946, the Gleaner reported Manley acknowledging the influence of Roberts on his nationalist outlook (Daily Gleaner, August 9, 1946): »To Mr. Roberts he owed his first serious and deliberate consideration of the subject of a national outlook and life for Jamaica by means of self-government, and from him he had derived his first and most lasting inspirations about it.«

The JPL’s constant nationalist propaganda and urging that a party was needed is often overlooked in historiography, which tends to prioritize Frome as the watershed event. In the aftermath of Frome, the JPL in fact played an essential role when they channeled necessary funds and found a

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lawyer, E.R.D. Evans of the JPL in Kingston, to defend the workers at their trial in Savanna-La-Mar, a move which helped to popularize the Progressive League (McFarlane 1938: 234). However, weeks before the protests around the Frome estate escalated in the spring of 1938, members of the League were already engaging in lively debates about Jamaica’s political future in the pages of the newly founded Public Opinion. Although still limited to a few politically minded intellectuals whose discussions amounted to a testing of the waters, the editors of the new monthly were nevertheless inspired to go on to play instrumental roles in the formation of the political party that was founded a little over a year later in September 1938. Of particular mention are Ken Hill, H.P. Jacobs and O.T. Fairclough, with the latter ultimately succeeding where Roberts had failed, namely, in convincing Norman Manley to become the party’s leader. There were JPL members who were determined to advance the party, such as W.G. McFarlane, founder and secretary of the Kingston branch, as well as Domingo and Roberts. To their merit, the newly founded party included the demand for self-government in their planks, although League members’ expectations were toned-down and the commitment to this aim was not as firm as they had anticipated. It was only because of the presence of Domingo and Roberts and their active intervention at the first party convention in April 1939 that a majority of the PNP was convinced to vote against the more moderate approach of the leading group around Manley, whose stance was to reject overly radical demands for self-government. In his autobiography, Roberts was frank about the League’s impact on the PNP program (4): »The demand would still have been for something less than complete selfgovernment if Domingo and I had not fought for this principle from the floor. Support flocked to us, persuading Manley, who having once taken the advanced standpoint adhered to it firmly. Naturally this seemed to me the most valuable outcome of the convention.«

This influence on the PNP program is rarely acknowledged, though it is reflected in the minutes of the convention. Only a few authors like Alex Zeidenfelt explicitly mention the JPL’s impact on the program of the party (1952: 515). In August 2012, veteran journalist Ken Jones wrote a letter to the editor declaring the following (Jamaica Observer, August 31, 2012): »I have written more than once that the true pioneer of Jamaica's Independence movement is Walter Adolphe Roberts who in September 1936 launched the Jamaica

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Progressive League for the sole purpose of getting self-government for Jamaica. The PNP did not accept self-government until 1939 when, at the insistence of Roberts, WG McFarlane, WA Domingo and Rev Ethelred Brown, that objective was written into the party’s programme.«

Both Roberts and Domingo spent several months in Jamaica, an incredibly important time in which they developed the various party branches and extensively toured the island, together with Manley and other PNP leaders. Manley was greatly influenced by their thought and admired Domingo’s impressive oratory skills, which he had sharpened on the soapboxes of the streets of Harlem. Domingo spoke frequently at PNP meetings (Daily Gleaner, January 21, 23-24, 1939). Despite his residency in the US, he was vice-president of the Metropolitan Group, as well as the Kingston branch of the PNP. The League felt that in order to bring about the changes they envisioned to the country, close cooperation was essential. In fact, in a May 16, 1939 article in the Daily Gleaner, Roberts demanded “the Jamaica Progressive League must identify itself with the P.N.P. […].” Led by the hope that the party would soon become a potent political force fir self-government, the League was willing to cooperate, despite the differences. Nevertheless, the League developed an alternative strategy, namely, to settle on a division of labor with the PNP. This meant that while the PNP campaigned for political development, the League would strive to complement its efforts by preparing the ground for a more deeply rooted nationalism. The emphasis would be on nationalist education, and hence on launching the “Jamaicanizing Jamaicans” (Daily Gleaner, April 27, 1939) campaign. The focus here was on presenting great Jamaicans from the past as motivators and movers and shakers who could galvanize Jamaican nationalism. Accordingly, Roberts realigned himself with the Progressive League in Kingston and the aim of promoting cultural nationalism, although he still supported the party’s work and gave speeches at PNP meetings. However, just when the PNP had adopted a definite anti-colonial nationalist demand, World War II broke out, and Manley immediately decided that the party would refrain from all political agitation (Daily Gleaner, December 23, 1939; Manley to Roberts, September 26, 1939).

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Alternative Strategies during World War II

Naturally, this development was a big blow to Domingo and Roberts, who continued their work from New York. They sought support from fellow activists from the Caribbean like Richard B. Moore from Barbados, a longtime companion from their days on the Harlem radical scene. To pursue their propaganda efforts during the war, they decided to launch an interim organization, the West Indies National Emergency Council (WINEC). Hope Stevens was chairman, Ivy Bailey Essien vice chairman, H.P. Osborne secretary, and Dr. F. Theo Reid treasurer. Other participants included R.B. Moore, Dr. C.A. Petioni, Archbishop Ernest Reginald Pierrepoint, Arthur E. King, as well as League members, Rev. Ethelred Brown and R. Samuel Trew (cf. Domingo to Roberts, July 20, 1940). After his founding role and service as head of the planning committee, Domingo did not aspire to take on any official position. However, when the committee was reorganized into the permanent organization West Indies National Council (WINC) in September 1939, Domingo was elected president. The biggest coup of the WINC was a petition it tabled at the hemispheric 1940 conference in Havana, Cuba. For the first time, the demand for independence in the Anglophone Caribbean attracted international attention and support, principally from the Argentinean delegation (Melo to Domingo, September 28, 1940; Melo to Brown, September 28, 1940). The international recognition, together with the worsening military situation of Great Britain in the summer of 1940, induced Manley to call on Roberts and Domingo and implore them to help revive the political movement in the island. After several letters had been exchanged between Kingston and New York, the PNP decided to pay for Domingo’s ticket to Jamaica and offered him the same salary the local executive earned if he would come and aid the party (Domingo to Roberts, February 14, 1941). Manley officially invited Domingo to work for the party and underlined that his services were urgently needed for party propaganda and trade union work (ibid). Looking back on Domingo’s time in Jamaica in 1939, Manley wrote Domingo saying: “[…] it would give an enormous amount of personal pleasure and satisfaction to myself and to a host of others who so admired the work you did whilst you were in Jamaica (February 24, 1941). Despite the desperate finances of the PNP, he pledged that Domingo’s salary would be guaranteed for at least a year, since a large amount would be paid out of his own pocket (Domingo to Roberts, March 3, 1941). Domingo was pleased to hear this and reflected on the successful influence of the propaganda of the League in a letter to Roberts (January 2, 1941):

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»Unquestionably the self-government pot is boiling and that is more than the English rulers can stomach. Really we did good work in Jamaica when we converted Manley to the need for self-government. The J.P.L. has revolutionized the thinking of our people and cannot be stopped unless Fascism overwhelms us.«

However, Domingo’s return also seemed to be too much “to stomach” on the ground. The authorities were not prepared to simply stand by and allow a reunification between the PNP and the most outspoken advocates for selfgovernment. When Domingo followed Manley’s call in 1941, he was arrested under war regulations before the ship even landed on Jamaican shores and was detained for more than two and half years (Daily Gleaner, June 18, 1941). On the Road to Independence

After the war, new dynamics shaped the course of the road to independence. The Colonial Office in Great Britain proposed a federation of all British possessions in the Caribbean. From the outset, both Jamaican parties, the PNP and the JLP, agreed to this in principle. Roberts and Domingo, however, strongly disapproved of this course and embarked on a last, fierce political campaign to ensure that their long-time goal of Jamaica’s independence would come to fruition. Their opposition demonstrated a coherent development of the nationalist position of the two main leaders of the Progressive League, and was a high-water-mark of their nationalist activities. At the same time, it provoked a break with many former political coworkers and close friends in the PNP. Although the League leaders were not the only opponents of the notion of a federation, which was realized in 1958, they took a strong stance with a dynamic campaign. As early as 1953, they denounced Britain’s plans as an underhanded effort to, among other things, decelerate the movement toward self-government, to satisfy US and local pressure by offering the prospect of eventual dominion status for the federation, and, at the same time, to rid itself of the financial burden of the smaller, less profitable colonies (Daily Gleaner, March 29, 1953.) This is further proof that Jamaican nationalism was stronger outside of the colony than in Jamaica itself. Once again, the move to consider federation appeared to reflect the strong imperial mentality of local leaders and their belief in Great Britain’s unselfish motives. What is more, neither party attempted to actively involve the populace in the decision-making process about the political future of the island, follow-

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ing a long tradition of disenfranchisement and only furthering the political apathy of the masses. Even in the run-up to Jamaica’s independence, neither federal nor insular Jamaican nationalism had taken deep root there. The indifference toward the political destiny of the island was remarkable, and despite the heavy nationalist propaganda of the JPL, Jamaican nationalism was not a influential force. While Manley and the majority of the PNP leaders subscribed to the idea of federal nationalism, Bustamante, for his part, adopted a strong nationalist position when it promised to increase his popularity once it became evident that the federation faced grave difficulties, that there were potential disadvantages for Jamaica, and that the population had developed increasing doubts as to whether federation would be beneficial to their economic situation. As a result of Bustamante’s opposition to the federation, Manley agreed that the Jamaican populace should determine in a referendum whether Jamaica should remain a part of the federation. On September 19, 1961, 61.6 percent of eligible voters cast their ballot; 54.1 percent of these voters decided against remaining in the federation, while 45.9 per cent were in favor of it (Munroe 1972:138). The League leaders’ cherished dream had finally materialized. Despite the absence of a strong, mass-based nationalist movement, Jamaicans had thwarted the British plans. By voting to leave the federation, they opened the way to the ultimate goal of achieving independence in 1962. Trevor Munroe argues that the referendum showed that the “[i]ndifference to Federation was greater than an indifference to Jamaican nationhood […].” (138). In attempting to explain the reasons for the general indifference toward the country’s political fate, Munroe points to the long tradition of non-participation under colonialism. Further democratic involvement, in his view, was also prevented because the middle-class political leadership had done little to increase participation and because the personality-cult eclipsed politics, putting leaders Bustamante and Manley center stage. While this is surely one interpretation, powerful colonial indoctrination also resulted in a deep identification with the Empire, accounting for why neither form of nationalism – federal nor insular – attracted and stimulated a local mass-based movement. Whatever the causes, emigrants still seemed further along in their nationalism than Jamaicans locally, even shortly before independence was achieved. This observation points to the difficulties that can, and did, take place in the transfer of ideas. At the same time, it encourages an acknowledgement of the great importance of the experiences of the migrants who left their homeland and

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made their way to Harlem. Paying due attention to the roots from which this transnational network was built helps us to understand the dialogue between different forms of anti-colonialism and anti-racism in the black diaspora that shaped the thinking of the leaders of the Progressive League. Such a perspective stands in contrast to the master narrative of Jamaica’s political development, which privileges the two political parties and their leaders. Further, it illustrates the lines of connection within the transnational space that the emigrants created and inhabited. In short, this perspective underscores how vital it is to think beyond the boundaries of nation states and empires and to acknowledge the efforts and agency of those individuals who commuted between countries, disseminating their ideas in all directions across an ocean that seemingly separated them from their homelands.

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References

Aarons, John A. (1983): “W. Adolphe Roberts and the Movement for SelfGovernment.” In: Jamaica Journal 16, pp. 58-63. Boyle, Mark (2001): “Towards a (Re)Theorisation of the Historical Geography of Nationalism in Diasporas: the Irish Diaspora as an Exemplar.” In: International Journal of Population Geography7/6, November/December, pp. 429-446. Derrick, Jonathan (2008): Africa’s “Agitators”: Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918-1939, New York: Columbia University Press. Hill, Robert A.: “Racial and Radical: Cyril V. Briggs, the Crusader Magazine, and the African Blood Brotherhood, 1918–1922 (1987).” Introductory Essay to: The Crusader, New York: Garland Publishing. James, Winston (1998): Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America, London/New York: Verso. Kedourie, Elie (1970): Nationalism in Asia and Africa, New York: World Publishing Company. Hall, Stuart (1997): “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” In: Anthony D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System. Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 41-68. Lewis, Gordon K. (2004): Growth of the Modern West Indies, Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers. Locke, Alain (1925): “Enter the New Negro.” In: Harlem Mecca of the New Negro, Survey Graphic 6/6, pp. 631-634. Martin, Tony (1976): Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggle of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, pp. 361-373. Matory, J. Lorand (1999): “Afro-Atlantic Culture: on the Live Dialogue between Africa and the Americas.” In: Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates (eds.) Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American experience, New York: Basic Civitas Books, pp. 36–44. Matory, J. Lorand (2006): “The ‘New World’ Surrounds an Ocean: Theorizing the Live Dialogue between African and African American Cultures.” In: Kevin Yelvington (ed.), Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora, Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research.

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McFarlane, Walter G. (1957): The Birth of Self-Government for Jamaica and the Jamaica Progressive League 1937-1944, Kingston. Moore, Brian/Johnson, Michele (2004): Neither Led Nor Driven, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Moore Turner, Joyce (2005): Caribbean Crusaders in the Harlem Renaissance, Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Munroe, Trevor (1972): The Politics of Constitutional Decolonization: Jamaica 1944-1962, Kingston: ISER, University of the West Indies. Norris, Katrin (1962): Jamaica: The Search for an Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kasinitz, Philip (1992): Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press. Parker, Jason C. (2004): “‘Capital of the Caribbean’: The African American-West Indian ‘Harlem Nexus’ and the Transnational Drive for Black Freedom, 1940-1948.” In: The Journal of African American History 89, pp. 98-117. Post, Ken (1978): Arise Ye Starvelings. The Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and Its Aftermath, The Hague: Martinus Nijoff. Roberts, W. Adolphe (1949): “Great Men of the Caribbean. 1. Toussaint L’Ouverture.” In: Caribbean Quarterly 1/2, pp. 4-8. Roberts, W. Adolphe (1949/50): “Great Men of the Caribbean. 2. Simón Bolívar.” In: Caribbean Quarterly 1/3, pp. 4-8. Roberts, W. Adolphe (1949/50): “Great Men of the Caribbean. 3. José Martí.” In: Caribbean Quarterly 1/4, pp. 4-6. Roberts, W. Adolphe (1933): Sir Henry Morgan. Buccaneer and Governor, New York: Covici-Friede. Sassen, Saskia (2004): “Local actors in global politics.” In: Current sociology 52/4, pp. 649-670. Smith, Richard (2004): Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War. Race, Masculinity and the Development of National Consciousness, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spry Rush, Anne (2011): Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonization, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vincent, Theodore (1972): Black Power and the Garvey Movement, San Francisco: Ramparts Press. Young, John S. (1981): Lest We Forget, New York: Isidor Books. Zeidenfelt, Alex (1952): “Political and Constitutional Developments in Jamaica.” In: Journal of Politics 14, pp. 512-540.

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Newspapers Jamaica Observer Public Opinion The Daily Gleaner The New York Amsterdam News/New York Amsterdam Star News Archival Material/Pamphlets Brown, Ethelred: Injustices in the Civil Service of Jamaica. New York: Jamaica Progressive League, 1937. Domingo to Roberts, February 14, 1941, National Library of Jamaica (NLJ), Walter Adolphe Roberts Papers (WAR), MS 353, Box 2b. Domingo to Roberts, February 2, 1941, NLJ, WAR, MS 353, Box 2b. Domingo to Roberts, July 20, 1940, NLJ, WAR, MS 353, Box 2b. Domingo to Roberts, March 3, 1941, NLJ, WAR, MS 353, Box 2b. Jamaica Progressive League: Constitution and By-Laws, September 1, 1936, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (SCRBC), Egbert Ethelred Brown Papers, MG 87, Box 4, Fo. 7. Jamaica Progressive League New York: Onward, Jamaica! New York 1937. Manley to Domingo, February 24, 1941, National Archives, Jamaica Archives and Records Department, Spanish Town (JARD), Norman Manley Papers (NMP), 4/60/2A/2. Melo to Brown, September 28, 1940, Library of Congress (LOC), Manuscript Division, The Records of the NAACP, Group 2, Box A332, Folder 9, Labour British West Indies, 1940-1949. Melo to Domingo, September 28, 1940, NLJ, WAR, MS 353, Box 2b. Roberts, W. Adolphe: “Autobiography,” NLJ, WAR, MS 353, Box 2b. WINEC, “Declaration of Rights of the Caribbean Peoples to SelfDetermination and Self-Government,” 1940, NLJ, MS 353, WAR Box 9.

Transient Histories: Memory and Movements within the 19th Century Caribbean M ATTHEW J. S MITH

On Memory and Caribbean Migration

Which aspects of the history of a country are committed to social memory? This question has captivated scholars for generations – even more intensely over the past two decades with the explosion in memory studies – and is an important one to contemplate in this volume’s inquiries into the Caribbean as a “crossroads” connected by history and geography to other regions (Klein 2000). Since the pioneering work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992) scholars have acknowledged that it is not professional historians who define collective memory but the accumulated recollections of a society at a given point in time. In Germany, for example, where the study of collective memory developed strongly, public sites of memory abound, each treating with episodes of the German past and each carrying different meanings (Young 1994). The “Topography of Terrors” museum in Berlin, for instance, offers a public catalogue of the brutal years from the Second World War to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and reflects how that difficult past is processed in the collective consciousness of Germany after the reunification. Jan Assmann (1995: 133), the German pioneer in the study of collective memory has asserted that, “through its cultural heritage a society becomes visible to itself and to others. Which past becomes evident in that heritage and which values emerge in its identificatory appropriation tells us much about the constitution and tendencies of society.”

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This view suggests that memorialization does not necessarily indicate how social attitudes and responsibilities to the past have changed. Indeed the politics involved in the creation of memorials involve many concerns other than public response. Since memorials cannot completely represent the views of all social groups, they quite often become sources of controversy. Furthermore, remembrances, commemorative rituals, and memorials do not always indicate a public reckoning with history. Like the Caribbean, United States history is marked by a traumatic past associated with slavery and race that is remembered differently in social memory. Fitz Brundage (2009: 9) in an insightful essay on historical memory and the United States south argued that monuments and festivities related to the US Civil War, such as the Confederate Memorial Day or the statues of Confederate generals, are conscious attempts to represent the past so that “participants became, if only temporarily and symbolically, contemporaries with mythical events.” Collective memory is thus purposeful; its narratives of the past are shaped by the social groups of the present into usable blocs. As US historian, Michael Kammen (1993: 1), noted in his own work on memory and traditions in the United States: “societies in fact reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them, and this they do with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind – manipulating the past in order to mold the present.” Collective memory therefore – like individual memory – is fallible; what we choose to recollect at any given moment is often mediated by other conditions and our recollection of our own past changes constantly. To reference British novelist Julian Barnes (2012: 104), “our life is not our life, [it is] merely the story we have told about our life.” In these examples it is clear that there is a conscious attempt to link a certain memory to the past. This memory transmits to future generations the place of an event in national history and importantly the emotional responses to, or interactions with, that event that are considered appropriate. Although alternative renderings in professional historical writing might add nuance, their effects on public memory are more limited. For example, in the North American context, as Brundage’s study, The Southern Past (2005) emphasized, despite a rich historiography on race relations in the south, the contested remembrances of black and white southerners over their common history unveils the multiple uses of collective memory that exist in the present. White southerners have defended the antebellum heritage of the region as central to southern identity whereas black southerners have struggled for commemorations of the civil rights movement to occupy more space in the southern landscape (Brundage 2005: 3-5).

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In the Caribbean a tension of a different kind exists in collective remembrances of the past. Centuries of colonial rule tied the Caribbean past to Africa and Europe. By virtue of this colonial heritage Caribbean countries included European events in their memorializations. In the British West Indies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lavish annual public celebrations in honor of British imperialism linked the islands to their metropolitan rulers. In particular Empire Day celebrations established shared myths of empire and maintained monarchical traditions in the West Indian collective memory (Moore/Johnson 2004: 294-297). Today memorializations in the Caribbean – such as emancipation statues, independence holidays and festivals – typically reflect island struggles against colonialism and slavery. Important as these themes are to the enduring memories of the islands, their dominance can mask other events in Caribbean history that are also connected to freedom and decolonization, yet silent in the national history. Given this fact investigators of the past are expected to explain events that have been consigned to national memory and simultaneously reveal the connective webbing that lays beneath them. Local archives play a powerful role in the recuperation of historical silences. This is most fully understood in places where records and national archives do not exist. In the former Danish Virgin islands (now the United States Virgin Islands, USVI), for example, the sale of the territory to the United States in 1917 resulted in the removal of the colonial archives to the Netherlands. In her study of the consequences of this Jeannette Bastian (2003: ix) argues that the loss of archival memory put greater importance on collective memory to reconstruct the narrative of the past. “The ownership of history (and therefore memory),” Bastian tells us, “is often obtained through hard-fought battles with uncertain outcomes for small disenfranchised societies or groups.” In the USVI, the 150th anniversary of emancipation from slavery in 1998 was a grand celebration by Virgin Islanders who reassessed their history through memory rather than records (ibid: 6164). The lack of textual sources in the USVI forced the population to create its own memorizations to fill the silence created by archival absences. Still, even in islands where there are strong archives, several areas of national history go unnoticed and understudied. A preoccupation with the Caribbean’s links to places beyond the region can unintentionally diminish the importance of other aspects of national history. Caribbean historiography contains many silences and the choices on which ones are studied often have much to do with scholarly prejudices. The esteemed Haitian intellectual Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995: 27) in his influential book, Silencing the

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Past, reminds us that, “not all silences are equal…any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences.” Trouillot’s astute comment suggests that the areas scholars deem important topics of investigation often reflect the way those events are recorded in the social memory of the nation. The national histories of the islands of the Caribbean build a repository of landmark episodes that are accepted, remembered, and represented as unshakeable markers of national identity. Years of country-specific events become signposts in mapping national identities. For example, 1804, 1915, 1946, 1957, 1986, 2010 for Haiti; 1896, 1933, 1959, 1990 for Cuba; 1953 and 1966 for Guyana; 1962 and 1970 for Trinidad; and 1865, 1938, 1944, 1962 for Jamaica. National memories and indeed historiographies are shaped around these milestones. While the events of these years do signal important points in the histories of Caribbean nations, they are not exhaustive indicators of significant happenings and evolutions in the making of these nation states. Indeed, quite likely they fail to capture the breadth of other, less documented events that shaped the lives and experiences of the people in those contexts during those periods. This over-reliance on traditional milestones in Caribbean histories masks the likely variation in the importance that such events had for the people who experienced them, or the ways in which the event was experienced. These are likely blind spots in recorded historical recollection. They beg the question of the extent to which national memory obscures individual memory. On the 300th anniversary of British rule in Jamaica, for example, the island’s leading newspaper the “Daily Gleaner” issued an essay competition in which the general public was invited to write recollections of life in Jamaica over the previous half-century. Participants wrote most frequently about natural disasters, in particular the devastating earthquake of 1907, and less about watershed moments in Jamaican political history such as the labor rebellions of 1938 or universal adult suffrage in 1944. For most participants, it was the more upsetting episodes that were the defining moments in the country’s past. Their memories stand in stark contrast to the selective memories promoted by the state and local elites. Indeed the winning entries in the competition reflected more positive images of the island’s past and were wholly silent on the earthquake. Such historical renderings speak to the paradox inherent in the creation of national memories: that the process of building permanent remembrances involves some form of amnesia and the creation of a hierarchy of memories that narrows over time. In today’s Jamaica, for example, there are no commemorations to the 1907 earthquake. Although it was part of the

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memory narrative of many who experienced it, the event has been subordinated in the collective memory of the present. Though some argue that “states do not remember; [it is] individuals [who] do, in association with other people” (Winter 2006: 4), the tropes of the Jamaican historical narrative present a story of the Jamaican experience replete with “bundles of silences” (Trouillot 1995: 27), failing to lay bare events and processes that likely occupied a central place in the collective memory of Jamaican societies of the past. One response to addressing these silences is for scholars to draw on Foucault’s concept of counter-memories, the unofficial recollections of the past, and study the “counter-memories of the marginalized” which challenge the dominant memories that have evolved in the post-independence Caribbean (Foucault 1980; Brundage 2000: 23). Counter-memories reconfigure our imaginings of the region, force us to see beyond discrete national histories and, most importantly, urge us to explore Caribbean interrelations. The development of alternative perspectives on Caribbean movement and the region’s crucial relationship with the Atlantic World, involves the construction of a collective countermemory of the Caribbean. Such work is crucial as there is much that remains concealed. An example is the important intersections between Germany and the Caribbean. In the half century before the First World War, Germany had a dominant impact on the region particularly through the massive shipping lines that ran from Hamburg down through Latin America and into the Caribbean. Germans had established colonies in Haiti and Jamaica and occupied an important segment of the foreign mercantile and financial community (Plummer 1984). In Haiti’s case especially, Germans were shapers of the political direction of the country. This lesser-known history of the activities of German migrants in the northern Caribbean raises another point relative to memory and migration: as scholars, epochal movements in the Atlantic shape our approach to the past as much as they influence national constructions of public memory. One key example of this is the First World War. The war – coincident with the full thrust of United States imperialism in the Americas – and the global and local shifts that followed in the two decades after it, repositioned prewar events in social memory. This transformative moment in world history also affected Caribbean history and historical recollections. Tens of thousands of British Caribbeans traveled across the ocean to fight on the frontlines of Europe. They not only helped win the war, they were also among the first generation whose notions of race, empire, and “civilization” were shaken by what they experienced. The Caribbean’s ‘long 19th centu-

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ry’, which began with Haitian independence in 1804, was brought to a conclusion in the second decade of the 20th century. This critical point is profoundly exemplified in the study of Caribbean migrations. If we appreciate that Caribbean history has as one of its bases the constant movement of people across the Atlantic, what place does this movement itself – as opposed to its effects on the shaping of societies, nations, empires – hold in the collective memories of Caribbean societies? The histories of movements of peoples between the Atlantic and the Caribbean contain many silences. Scholarly perspectives draw on largescale migratory patterns during the era of New World slavery and 20th century labor migration to North America and Europe. Other circuits of movement, particularly those across the archipelago, are given less attention in the historiography and in the social memory. Yet long before the large-scale migration of Caribbean people to the metropolises in North America and the U.K., there was a significant migration within the region. This migration is too often overlooked. Between 1835-1846 approximately 19,000 people moved from the Eastern Caribbean to Trinidad and the British Caribbean; more than 7000 people moved from Dominica to Venezuela in 1894; 50,000 Barbadians went to British Guiana and Trinidad; between 1885-1920 there were more than 130,000 migrants who left their native lands in the British West Indies (Knight 2012). Much of this was prior to the mass migration to the United States. Such a universe of movement within the Caribbean likely affected the lives of people who migrated. Similarly, the context of that movement likely influenced the memories they created. Careful study of the border crossings that defined the lives of hundreds of thousands of Caribbean people in the 19th century is therefore essential to capture in a more comprehensive manner collective memories and Caribbean histories in which this has been a blind spot. The remainder of this chapter draws on elements of original research on movements along the Haitian-Jamaican migratory circuit in the 19th century to suggest a countermemory to the conventional reading of the Haitian diaspora.

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History, Memory, and the Haitian Diaspora

Attention to the many movements of millions of Haitians from their native land to locations across the globe has increased significantly since the 1980s. This heightened attention of course parallels the spread of Haitians themselves and the emergence of prominent Haitian communities, secondgeneration Haitians, and people of Haitian descent, as a vibrant voice particularly among non-Hispanic Caribbeans in North America (Laguerre 1998; Jackson 2011). It also has much to do with concurrent developments in Haiti itself over the course of this period of heightened outmigration: dictatorships, military overthrows, coups, embargos, and most tragically, the earthquake of 2010. The few years since that catastrophe, have witnessed yet another assertion of the Haitian communities that are collectively referred to as the Haitian diaspora, as an important element in discussions of recovery and rebuilding efforts. Haiti’s history is significantly marked by exile and outmigration. In the 19th century, Haitians of various social classes, who held positions of power, were frequently exiled or banished from their native land. These and other types of Haitian migrations, each with its own profiles, characteristics and consequences suggest different histories. A focus on the early migrations helps us to move beyond assumptions of Haitian migrants and their processes of developing communities. For people concerned with contemporary Haitian migration to larger metropolitan sites, understanding the longer history of migration reveals the changes in the impulses and circumstances that have shaped the phenomenon of Haitian migration. These principal features have a bearing on how we treat and study the Haitian diaspora. They influence how migration researchers approach the study of Haitian communities and account for their differences. But there is a danger here. Scholars guided by larger numbers, higher concentrations in certain locations, and the more recent history of Haitian migration primarily to North America since the Duvalier dictatorship of the late 1950s to mid 1980s, obscure the importance of other experiences of Haitian migration. The result can be a perspective that does not fully consider the depth of the Haitian migratory experience over time. It can also minimize the importance of smaller migrations (Puri 2003). If we shift our lens to a different location, smaller numbers of Haitian migrants, and an earlier unremembered history of migration, what may we learn about the complexity of the patterns of Haitian migration? By considering the migrations of Haitians to other Caribbean countries we can broaden our conceptualization of the Haitian diaspora.

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The Caribbean, especially the adjoining Dominican Republic, the islands of Cuba, Jamaica, Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, St. Thomas, St. Croix, Curaçao, and Martinique and Guadeloupe, have been early receivers of Haitian migrants since the 19th century. The imprint of these early migrations is more pronounced on some islands, though all were part of Haitian circuits of migration. Moving around in this time period was not easy. In the Haitian Revolutionary era the earliest migrants of the late eighteenth and early 19th century were French planters who carried with them enslaved peoples to their destinations. Planters, by virtue of their French citizenship had greater access and freedom to move. Hence we find several cases of near constant crossings and recrossings of French families across the Caribbean archipelago and moving to Cuba and northward to Louisiana and back to France itself. But migrants that came in the mid-19th century, after the former French Saint-Domingue had become Haiti, had a different experience. Not only did they not hold French citizenship, they were also faced with limited space to move. Up until 1834 Haiti’s closest neighbors were still slave colonies. Full freedom did not arrive in the British West Indies until 1838, the United States during the Civil War, and for Cuba not until 1886. It is not surprising then that some of the first post-independence migration was internal. But even internally, there were challenges as internal movements were restricted because the Haitian state required passports for movement between provinces up until the 1840s. The availability of destinations, was therefore far more circumscribed in this period and this limited the availability of migration destinations and circuits. In addition, up until the mid-1840s Haiti had achieved a certain degree of political stability. There was authoritarian rule, but between 1818 and 1843 President, Jean Pierre Boyer successfully managed to protect his presidency until he was unable to do so anymore in the wake of a major uprising against his rule. The overthrow of Boyer, a year after a devastating earthquake in the northern department of Haiti, was the beginning of a long and complicated series of political coups that would last for the next five years. The shift in Haitian political stability was coincident with the full abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. At roughly the same time, a new set of circumstances prevailing in Haiti encouraged migration, while a new space for Haitian migration was opening up: the British colonies, and particularly Haiti’s closest island neighbor, Jamaica (Smith 2011).

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Crossing the Marine Border: Jamaica and 19th Century Haitian Circuits of Movement

The events of the 1830s-1840s deepened this relationship between the two countries. When President Boyer was overthrown in 1843 he left Haiti, as an exile, with his family and closest advisors for Jamaica. The exile of Boyer was the beginning of a long period of political instability in Haiti; it also set a precedent for further presidential exile. When his successors were overthrown they too traveled to Jamaica. In fact political exile to Jamaica became commonplace for all Haitian presidents. Between 1818 and 1902 Haiti had sixteen heads of state, eleven of who spent years in Jamaica as exiles. At least three of them died in Jamaica. Of the remaining five who were not exiled to Jamaica, three died in office, one was executed, and the other retired after serving his term in office. Most of Haiti’s would-be presidents of the period also spent years living in Jamaica (Smith 2006). This is a remarkable fact and one that highlights the importance of Jamaica in the world of 19th century Haitian politics. The exile of Haitian presidents was accompanied by the exile of political dissidents and supporters to Jamaica during the same period. Jamaica became a hub for many Haitian political exiles and their presence in the colony upset their opponents in Haiti. In mid-19th century Haiti, official exile was given to opponents so they could immediately leave. With the liberalism of British asylum laws and the creation of important social networks in Jamaica (discussed below), exiles invariably found themselves in the British Consulate requesting quick passage to Jamaica. The scenes of departure could be dramatic. The more tragic cases included women and children, without proper clothes and with their belongings destroyed by fire and pillage, wailing as they took the gang plank to a waiting ship in port. In 1844 and 1848 Jamaica received nearly three hundred such persons. In 1868 and again in the 1880s large numbers of Haiti’s southern inhabitants took flight to the neighboring island in the wake of violent clashes (Smith 2011). It was not only opponents who were sent away. Movements against a Head of State sometimes started in his own chambers. In order to prevent this, presidents would offer potential government rivals diplomatic posts as a means of keeping them out of the country where they could stir up trouble. In the early 20th century, for example, Callisthènes Fouchard a Haitian Minister of Finance and presidential hopeful migrated to Jamaica where he would spend six years. He then went back to Haiti to contest the presidency

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in 1908, was defeated, and then sent to Berlin as Haitian Minister to Germany; evidently his rivals felt more secure having him in Berlin than in Kingston (Smith 2011). Refugees in the 19th century, unlike political exiles, were not offered a choice to quit the country. They chose to do so because the political and economic had become so untenable that they could not remain in Haiti. For some their lives and those of their family members were in imminent danger. At various moments political battles took on harsh personal class and color overtones and led to the destruction of property in fires and battles, which encouraged people to flee. The foreign consulates in the major cities and towns – St. Marc, Jacmel, Jeremie, Port-au-Prince, and Cap Haitian – became havens for refugees desperately seeking admittance on a foreign ship heading out of Haiti. Independent travel on small ships did occur then as it does in more contemporary Haitian migration. However, the cost of travel and physical safety were often important considerations for refugees. At times of great upheaval it was not unusual for a foreign consul to have dozens of people living in the Consulate and his own private home for several days waiting on the next passenger ship for Jamaica to come into harbor. Foreign consulates provided international protection and were sometimes easier to get to than the port. In addition, some refugees whose lives were in very real danger but who were destitute could obtain funds from the Consul General for a second-class ticket. Cost was an important factor. It would be cheaper to travel to Jamaica than it would be to the United States or South America (Smith 2011). Getting a sense of how many Haitians migrated to Jamaica at a particular point in time is a slippery task. Few surviving records of intra-Caribbean migration of 19th-century Haitians exist. There was, as always, some degree of Haitian labor migration in the Caribbean in the 19th century. But not a great deal of this was agricultural labor. Domestic laborers from Haiti circulated around the Caribbean and were found in elite homes as far away as St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. But the large numbers of Haitian laborers in the sugar industries of Cuba and the Dominican Republic did not really take off until the 20th century. Haitian migrants were deemed to be transient and did not come to work as laborers. Wealthier migrants were able to buy small plots of land, coffee estates mostly. We therefore have to look elsewhere to determine the size of the Haitian diaspora in Jamaica. The Jamaican census data recorded Haitians in the island. But the figures they provide are highly unreliable and poor indicators of the numbers. In the 1844 census, of a foreign-born population of

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44.511 only twelve were registered as Haitians. In 1861, there were 206 and in 1911, there were 170 (Smith 2011: 19). All were recorded as being resident in Kingston. Kingston and its neighboring parish of St. Andrew was indeed the center of Haitian migrants in Jamaica as it was close to commercial activity and offered opportunities to get involved in merchant activities, not to mention receive the latest news and visitors from Haiti arriving weekly in Kingston harbor or nearby Port Royal. The official numbers are misleading. Newspaper reports note that hundreds of Haitians would arrive in Kingston during moments of great political upheaval. When a repressive president would be overthrown, most of these people would return to Haiti. They would also encourage some Jamaicans to return with them, and between the 1850s and 1880s a Jamaican colony developed in Port-au-Prince. The opening of Kingston as a center for Haitian migrants and the proximity of the Jamaican capital to Port-au-Prince, also meant that there was a great deal of commercial trade between the two islands. Jamaican women sellers would travel to Haiti for goods, and Haitians would import Jamaican products. This is a conduit of trade facilitated by the migration of Haitians to Jamaica. Each crossing deepened the contact and as the century progressed, this migration was not only encouraged by politics. There were opportunities to be found in both islands. What this tells us is that there is an entire universe of Haitian migration that is not captured in the records. To be sure, the size of the Haitian diaspora in 19th century Jamaica was not as large as 20th century migration elsewhere. But when considering this we have to be sensitive to the demographic distance between the nineteenth and 20th century. At the end of the century the population of Jamaica was roughly 650,000 (today it is almost three million). It is extraordinarily difficult to state accurately what the Haitian population was for the same period since there was no Haitian census until the 1940s, but estimates suggest somewhere between one and two and a half million (today it is ten million). The population expansion in the 20th century and the demand for new labor, led to the larger more familiar migration of Haitians and Jamaicans in the 20th century. 19th century Haitian migrants to Kingston were too few in number and fluid in movement to effect noticeable changes on Jamaican society. But their presence was important enough to become part of Jamaican society by the early 20th century. As the years progressed, Haitians had to consider various means by which they could develop stronger connections with Jamaica given the frequency of Haitian residency there. For some this meant establishing firm

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roots in Kingston by living there permanently. It is not clear how many Haitians applied for British citizenship in Jamaica, though there were likely few who chose this path. Haitian nationality and naturalization laws were very restrictive in the 19th century. Since many Haitian exiles left Haiti at times of political turmoil, leaving behind their families, businesses and personal interests, this stipulation was probably a deterrent against seeking citizenship elsewhere. Moreover, given the generally low state of the Jamaican economy after the decline in sugar production in the 1840s Jamaica was not always viewed as a favorable place to settle down. Kingston, for much of the post-slavery period, was underdeveloped with pockets of great poverty. In 1850-52 and briefly in 1854 Jamaica was ravaged by a pernicious cholera epidemic, possibly the worst outbreak in the Caribbean up to that point in time. Apart from the economic challenges, natural and epidemiological disasters, Jamaica was a colony of the British empire while Haiti remained free and independent. Haitian exiles considered all these realities when adjusting to their new residence. Jamaica was a convenient place of refuge given its proximity to Haiti, but it may not have been ultimately attractive as a place to settle down. Haitian migration to Jamaica, then, was defined by a large degree of mobility between the two islands, and psychological connection with Haiti. What was most sought after by Haitian exiles was not necessarily permanent settlement but the building of strong and reliable networks with Jamaica that could become useful during times of political and social crisis back home. These were largely around business and family ties. Networks served a dual purpose: 1) they connected Haiti and Jamaica more closely through commercial linkages between members of the mercantile elite in both countries and 2) they could be relied upon during periods of political unrest. At times, when the revolutions in Haiti became more frequent, some Jamaican businessmen joined German merchants in Port-au-Prince in providing arms and supplies for rebel forces. Haitian political leaders aware of this illicit trade, often implored Jamaican officials to keep careful watch on the Haitian refugees in Kingston and their associations. The Jamaican government could do little to stop these alliances or the trade. Some would also get themselves involved in the same activities they railed against while in office (Smith 2011: 25-28; Sheller 2000: 227-246; Heuman 1994: 158). These networks were deepened by family ties. Marriages between Haitians and Jamaicans were an outcome of Haitian migration to Jamaica. This was especially so among the second generation Haitians. Haitians who decided to stay in Jamaica were often children of first arrivers, and the

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longer they stayed the greater the likelihood that they would marry Jamaicans. This was a practice of the French émigrés who came to Jamaica in the late 18th century and explains the presence of French surnames among some Jamaican families today (Smith 2011; Debien 1975; Bryan 1972). In Haiti, similarly, this connection resulted in English surnames that can be traced to Jamaica. Jamaicans formed the largest number of Englishspeaking people in Haiti in the 19th century and intermarriage with Haitians was frequent. The presence of a community of Jamaicans in Haiti provided critical opportunities for elite Haitians in particular to form transnational networks especially through marriage and business connections (Burnham 2006; Plummer 1984). This would prove important during moments of political disturbance. Haitians with Jamaican family connections had a greater chance to seek political asylum with the British legation in Port-au-Prince and relocate to Jamaica when necessary. Over the course of several decades, complex networks of family and business relations were created between Jamaica and Haiti. So important was this bond that a Jamaican traveler to Haiti in 1902 could comment that in Port-au-Prince “there are many whose family connections have linked Haiti with Jamaica” (Simpson 1905: 25). Family ties held great importance for business connections during periods of political uprising in Haiti. Through marriage to Jamaicans Haitians could claim British protection. Haitian law of the times stated clearly that on marriage to a foreigner a Haitian woman lost her nationality and assumed that of her husband. In the chaos and panic that followed political upheaval the British consulates would be packed with Haitians claiming that they were descendants of Jamaicans or married to British subjects, and therefore entitled to protection. In the confusion, British officials could not always verify the claims. False claims of marriage were also apparently common. Officials by the late 19th century complained bitterly to the Foreign Office about the lack of regulations which made it challenging for them when presented with claims of British citizenship from people who demanded compensation for losses suffered during revolutions, or passage to Jamaica (Smith 2011). Family ties also strengthened business connections between the two islands. Some Jamaican merchants opened businesses in Port-au-Prince that were linked through families that resided in both islands. Marriage, therefore, allowed families to exist with one foot in Jamaica and another in Haiti.

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Concluding Thoughts

The history sketched in this chapter is quite different from that of the more familiar mid-20th century migration from Haiti. In the 19th century, although economic factors motivated migration, the reasons people moved were largely political: dictatorships and authoritarian military governments. Although political instability may have prompted Haitians to leave, it did not offer any guarantees for the succeeding administrations. With the exception of Boyer’s long rule and that of Faustin Soulouque from 18471859, none of Haiti’s administrations had anything close to the longevity of the Duvalier dynasty. Nor did they have Duvalierism’s reputation for terror and repression. When the political instability and unrest that provoked exodus settled therefore, and, for example, a leader was overthrown, scores of Haitians would return home, and new migrants would replace them overseas. Such patterns suggested an incredible mobility on the part of Haitian migrants in the 19th century. Intra-Caribbean movement was an important feature of Haitian migration in the period before the US Occupation of Haiti. It was easier to travel to neighboring islands and the proximity to Haiti allowed migrants to keep abreast of events back home. Hispanophone islands attracted a great deal of attention, but the demand for a large labor migration to Cuba and the Dominican Republic arose later on. Earlier, non-labor movements of exiles and refugees, dominated. While the Spanish, French, Dutch, and Danish Caribbean welcomed several Haitian exiles and domestic workers, the British Caribbean was more attractive. The abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean in the late 1830s, which coincided with renewed Haitian exile in the early 1840s, made neighboring Jamaica appealing for Haitian migrants. Liberal asylum laws and a supportive immigration policy were inducements for Haitians to migrate to Jamaica. This migratory history, which spanned some 80 years, began to decline in the 20th century when the United States entered the Caribbean as a major power. US Occupation of Haiti in 1915, which coincided with a drastic revision of British asylum laws during World War I, and new demands for Haitian (and Jamaican) labor in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, together reconfigured the Haitian space both within Haiti and between the islands. Connections with Jamaica remained. But for Haitians as well as Jamaicans, North America became a favored destination. The Duvalier dictatorship of the 1960s presented Haiti with its most repressive era since 1915. Much had changed between 1915 and 1957 when

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Duvalier rose to power, not the least of which were the circuits of Haitian movement. An appreciation of these historical realities suggests that a focused study of multiple migrations can render a more fulsome understanding of patterns of movement and when they occurred. To quote Lara Putnam (2013: 11), “the conclusion that emerges from a research strategy delimited by circuits of movement rather than national or imperial boundaries…turns out to offer new insights into the nature and weight of the boundaries themselves.” These thoughts have relevance for how we remember the Caribbean past. Jamaican writer Herbert G. DeLisser (1910: 87), commenting on Kingston three years after the earthquake of 1907 noted that the earthquake itself would be remembered only by the generation that lived through it: “The present generation will pass away and perhaps another and another […] meanwhile the silent open spaces speak […] Only the stranger looks upon these walls and mounds and remembers.” However, even if only selective memories are bequeathed to succeeding generations, it is the duty of scholars of Caribbean history to maintain the memories of those who lived before us. Scholars search now more than ever for traces of connections between the Caribbean and other places across time and space. But if, as DeLisser observed, past events in the Caribbean are most important to the people who lived through them, present and future Caribbean societies need to be more sensitive to the “silent open spaces” that inhabit the margins of our collective memory. Any effort to do this must keep in balance individual and national experiences. In a region so completely and profoundly shaped by movements of people beyond – and across – its borders, it is the people who transport the history. In his famous novel about Caribbean migration, The Emigrants, George Lamming (1994: 52) observed that “whatever the island each [person] may have come from […] everyone is in flight and no one knows what he’s fleeing to.” Memory is also in flight, as are histories. Caribbean people in movement lie at the center of island narratives. They move as their national histories move on. As scholars we have to follow our subjects and travel with them. We must also be mindful that the countries from which they come are subjects themselves. We must appreciate that, like their peoples, the countries have their own stories and memories which also cross borders.

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References

Assmann, Jan (1995): “Collective Memory and Cultural Memory.” In: New German Critique 65/Spring-Summer, pp.125-33. Barnes, Julian (2012): The Sense of an Ending, London: Vintage. Bastian, Jeannette Allis (2003): Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History, Westport, CT: Greenwood. Brundage, W. Fitzhugh (2000): “No Deed but Memory.” In: W. Fitzhugh Brundage (ed.), Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 1-28. Brundage, W. Fitzhugh (2005): The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bryan, Patrick E. (1972): “Conflict and Reconciliation: The French Émigrés in Nineteenth Century Jamaica.” In: Jamaica Journal September, pp. 13-19. Burnham, Thorald M (2006): Immigration and Marriage in the Making of Post-Independence Haiti. PhD thesis, York University. Debien, Gabriel/Wrigt, Philip (1975): “Les Colons De Saint-Domingue Passes a La Jamaïque.” In: Bulletin de la Societie d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 4/26, pp. 3-216. DeLisser, Herbert George (1910): In Jamaica and Cuba, Kingston: The Gleaner Co. Foucault, Michel (1980): Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Translated and edited by Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice (1992): On Collective Memory, Translated by Lewis A. Coser, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heuman, Gad (1994): ‘the Killing Time’: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, London: MacMillan Publishers. Jackson, Regine O (2011): “Introduction: Les Espaces Haïtiens: Remapping the Geography of the Haitian Diaspora.” In: Regine O. Jackson (ed.), Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora, London: Routledge, pp. 1-13. Klein, Kerwin Lee (2000): “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse.” In: Representations 69/Winter, pp. 127-50. Knight, Franklin (2012): “A Page of Jamaican Migration History.” In: The Jamaica Observer June 4, p. 5.

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Laguerre, Michel S (1998): Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lamming, George (1994 [1954]): The Emigrants, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Moore, Brian L./Johnson, Michele A. (2004): Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865-1920, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Plummer, Brenda Gayle (1984): “The Metropolitan Connection: Foreign and Semiforeign Elites in Haiti, 1900-1915.” In: Latin American Research Review 19/2, pp.119-42. Puri, Shalini (ed.) (2003): Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures within the Caribbean, London: Macmillan Caribbean. Putnam, Lara (2013): Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Sheller, Mimi (2001): Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica, Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Sheller, Mimi (2007): “Jamaican-Haitian Relations in the Nineteenth Century: The Origins of Trans-Caribbean Black Radicalism.” In: The Jamaican Historical Review 23, pp. 47-49. Simpson, J. Montaque (1905): Six Months in Port-Au-Prince and My Experience, Philadelphia: G.S. Ferguson Co. Smith, Matthew J. (2006): “Emperor, Exiles, and Intrigues: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Haitian Heads of State in Jamaica.” In: Mark Clifford/Annette Insanally/Sean Sheriff (eds.), Regional Footprints: The Travels and Travails of Early Caribbean Migrants, Kingston: Latin American and Caribbean Centre, pp.341-54. Smith, Matthew J. (2011): “From the Port of Princes to the City of Kings: Jamaica and the Roots of the Haitian Diaspora.” In: Regine O. Jackson (ed.), Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora, London: Routledge, pp. 17-33. Winter, Jay (2006): Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century, New Haven: Yale University Press. Young, James E. (1994): The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Contributors

Felix Ayoh'Omidire, PhD, teaches Afro-Brazilian literary, ethnic, and cultural studies at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, where he currently heads the Department of Foreign Languages. His research interests cover the Yoruba Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. Between 2002 and 2006, he was a Visiting Lecturer and coordinator of Yoruba language, culture, and civilization at the Centre for Afro-Oriental Studies of the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil. He is the author of six books and numerous scientific articles on the Yoruba worldview and the construction of cultural identities in Latin America and the Caribbean. From 2011 to 2012, he was a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Hauke Dorsch, PhD, is director of the African Music Archives Germany and teaches in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in Germany. His research and teaching interests include diaspora, trans-nationalism and migration, postcolonialism, the anthropology of globalization, African and World Music. Among his publications are Afrikanische Diaspora und “Black Atlantic” (2000), Globale Griots – Performanz in der afrikanischen Diaspora (2006), “Indépendance Cha Cha” – African Pop Music since the Independence Era (2010). Katrin Hansing, PhD, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York (CUNY). Prior to her tenure at CUNY, she was the Associate Director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. She has spent the last eighteen years conducting research in the Caribbean (especially Cuba) and Southern Africa and on its diaspo-

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ras. Her main areas of interest include “race”/ethnicity, migration, transnational relations, remittances, social inequality, and South-South relations. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford and is the author of numerous publications, including the book Rasta, Race, and Revolution: The Emergence and Development of the Rastafari Movement in Socialist Cuba (2006). Maja Horn, PhD, is an associate professor at Barnard College (New York) in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures. In 2005-2006, she was a research associate at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She writes and teaches about contemporary Hispanophone Caribbean literature, visual and performance art, gender and sexuality, and political culture. She recently published her book Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature (2014) and is currently completing a study on queer Dominican cultures. Ingrid Kummels is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She has conducted long-term field research in Mexico and the US-Mexican borderlands, and the transnational space between Cuba and the United States, focusing on migration, transnational community building, gender relations, tranculturality, and visual anthropology. Among her publications are Love in the Time of Diaspora. Global Markets and Local Meanings in Prostitution, Marriage and Womanhood in Cuba (2005), Queens of Havana (with Alicia Castro and Manfred Schäfer, 2007), and Espacios mediáticos: cultura y representación en México (ed. 2012). J. Lorand Matory is the Director of the Center for African and African American Research and the Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. As a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Prize, he is currently a guest researcher at Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. He has conducted extensive field research in Brazil, Nigeria, the Benin Republic, Trinidad, Jamaica and the US, with a focus on the diversity of and interaction among African, African American, and Latin American cultures. In his work, Yorubainspired religions and their circulation in the Atlantic world are used to illustrate how what he calls the “Afro-Atlantic dialogue” shapes various geographically separated peoples understanding of gender, sexuality, class, race, and national identity. Matory’s major publications include Sex and the

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Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion (1994), Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (2005), the forthcoming Stigma and Culture: Ethnological Schadenfreude in Black America (University of Chicago Press), and numerous articles on African and African-American cultural history. Gesine Müller is Professor of Roman Philology at Universität zu Köln and head of the Emmy Noether Research Group “Transcolonial Caribbean” at the Universität Potsdam. She has published numerous books, including Die Boom-Autoren heute: García Márquez, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Donoso und ihr Abschied von den “großen identitätsstiftenden Entwürfen” (2004), Die koloniale Karibik. Transferprozesse in frankophonen und hispanophonen Literaturen (2012), and Caleidoscopios coloniales. Transferencias culturales en el Caribe del siglo XIX / Kaléidoscopes coloniaux. Transferts culturels dans les Caraïbes au XIXe siècle (ed. with Ottmar Ette, 2010). She teaches and conducts research on French and Spanish literature of the Romantic era, contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literature, and transculturality. Stephan Palmié is Professor and Chair in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He received his doctorate from the LudwigMaximillians-Universität München in 1989. His publications include Das Exil der Götter: Geschichte und Vorstellungswelt einer afrokubanischen Religion (1991), Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002) and The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion (2013), as well as several edited volumes on the anthropology and history of the Caribbean and the wider Afro-Atlantic world. His further research interests include practices of historical representation and knowledge production, systems of slavery and unfree labor, constructions of race and ethnicity, conceptions of embodiment and moral personhood, medical anthropology, and the anthropology of food and cuisine. Claudia Rauhut, PhD, is an associate professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She completed her PhD at the Universität Leipzig as a member of the International Research Training Group “Critical Junctures of Globalization.” Her research interests include Afro-Atlantic traditions, religion, “race” and ethnicity, and political activism on the issue of reparations for

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slavery in the Caribbean. She has published the book Santería und ihre Globalisierung in Kuba (2012) and numerous articles such as La transnacionalización de la Santería y su re-negociación religiosa en Cuba (2013) and Santería-Religion und die sozialistische Partei- und Regierungspolitik in Kuba (2009). Stefan Rinke is Professor of Latin American History at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. He is Einstein Research Fellow, president of Asociación de Historiadores Latinoamericanistas Europeos (AHILA), and speaker of the German-Mexican Graduate School “Between Spaces,” a cooperative doctoral program with El Colegio de México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and CIESAS. His publications include Kolumbus und der Tag von Guanahani 1492: Ein Wendepunkt der Geschichte (2013) and Lateinamerika und die USA: Eine Geschichte zwischen Räumen - von der Kolonialzeit bis heute (2012). His research interests include Latin American history from the 16th to the 21st century, Latin America in a global context, and the comparative history of the Americas. Lioba Rossbach de Olmos received her PhD in anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz as an anthropologist. She has completed studies on the Nicaraguan Atlantic coast and the Colombian Chocó. She was a project manager for the “Climate Alliance of European Cities with Indigenous Peoples of the Tropical Forests.” Since 2004, she teaches at the Institute for Comparative Cultural Research - Cultural and Social Anthropology at the Philipps-Universität Marburg. Her research focuses on AfroLatin American cultures and religions, indigenous people’s rights, and environmental anthropology, especially the cultural implications of climate change. Her publications include Entgrenzte Religiosität. Die afrokubanische Santería-Religion in Europa zwischen Kult, Kunst und Kultur (2013), Religious Perspectives on Climate Change Among Indigenous Communities: Questions and Challenges for Ethnological Research (2011). Matthew J. Smith, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in History, Department of History and Archaeology, The University of the West Indies, Mona. He completed his doctoral studies in Latin American History with a minor concentration in Modern US History at the University of Florida. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship for graduate studies at the University of Florida, an Andrew Mellon Visiting Professorship at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Duke University, and a

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Dubois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His main area of research is Haitian politics and society after the US occupation and Haitian regional migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. He is the author of Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 (2009), and several articles on Haitian social and political history. Kristen Stromberg Childers received her PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently Director of Academic Affairs at the Templeton Honors College and Associate Professor of History at Eastern University. She has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Schomburg Center for Black Culture at the New York Public Library. Her research interests include modern French history and decolonization and she is the author of Fathers, Families, and the State in France, 1914-1945 (2003) and Seeking Imperialism’s Embrace: National Identity, Decolonization and Assimilation in the French Caribbean (forthcoming). Birte Timm is a Marie Curie Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation in the Department of History and Archaeology, The University of the West Indies, Mona. From 2012 to 2013, she was a visiting post-doctoral fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Studies, also at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona. She earned her Dr. phil. degree in History at the Institute of Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her book Nationalists Abroad. The Jamaica Progressive League and the Foundations of Jamaican Independence is forthcoming. Her research interests include Caribbean history, African American history and in particular the history of decolonization, migration, transnationalism, and nation-building processes in the Caribbean.