Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean - Temple University

Introduction 35
which diverse music and dance elements as well as actual musicians and dancers
could move and interact.
Particularly important in this process were people of color. In a nineteenth-century
Caribbean milieu where whites did not regard the job of professional
musician as prestigious, ensembles, whether playing for whites or
blacks, tended to be staffed mostly by blacks and mulattos, leading one dismayed
Cuban to lament with alarm in 1832, “The arts are in the hands of people
of color.” And while one mulatto clarinetist might take pride in socially
distancing himself from the neo-African ways of the bozal (the fresh-off-theboat
slave), another might move easily and often between the two milieus. For
their part, mulatto dancers—including the more or less public women at the
bailes de cuna—might well dance in and help popularize a sensual style distinguished
by the pendular hip movements so typical of much African dancing.
Creolization may in some contexts occur from the more or less natural collaboration
of two communities that interact on neutral territory while remaining
familiar with their own ancestral cultures. Most Caribbean white people,
for example, presumably enjoyed a degree of at least potential access to European
music and dance traditions, whether in the form of classical arts, jigs
and reels, or neo-Hispanic zapateos. Colonial-era blacks, however, were more
severely cut off from their ancestral traditions, especially as neo-African music,
dance, and religion came to be energetically suppressed in the British West
Indies and elsewhere.
In such a situation, creolization could be precipitated and intensified by a
process of deculturation, in which one or more of the communities in question
loses touch with its traditional culture. From the 1930s, E. Franklin Frazier
(1932a, 1932b, 1939, 1957) argued that such was the case with Afro-Americans,
who had been thoroughly stripped of their ancestral cultural traditions
by the traumatic experience of slavery. Hence, Frazier argued, Afro-American
culture, for all its vitality, had developed primarily as a derivative imitation of
Euro-American culture—indeed, one could add, just as the emergence of Haitian
Creole was accompanied by the forgetting of ancestral African languages.
In the Caribbean, where most African musical traditions dwindled over the
generations or were discouraged or actively repressed by white masters, the cultivation
of creolized forms, such as the contradance and quadrille, may have
constituted an obvious option for many black people. A Haitian Vodou chant
pithily portrayed the dilemma of the slave alienated from African ancestry:
“Se Kreyol no ye, pa genyen Ginen anko” (“We are creoles, who no longer have
Africa”). What replaced inherited African tradition among Afro-Caribbeans
was a shared experience of alienation and oppression.
In 1941 Herskovits’s The Myth of the Negro Past challenged Frazier’s
portrayal of Afro-American deculturation, positing significant continuities
between New World and African cultures and initiating a scholarly debate that
continues, in various forms, to the present. In Herskovits’s wake, many academics
have exerted themselves in finding or hypothesizing African roots of