Inventing the New Negro by Lamothe Daphne;

Author:Lamothe, Daphne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

This image reverses the stereotypical notion of a feminized island, open to foreign intervention, signified by the mambo’s open legs. It offers instead a counter-narrative in which the island has something to offer to, and therefore some power over, the “unfortunates to the north” instead. Nonetheless, the memoir is more concerned than the ethnography with the reincorporation of the diasporic subject into the collective “African” body.

“Dances of Haiti” offers a brief history of the island, a description of Vodou ritual, and then an extensive discussion of the forms that Haitian sacred and secular dances take, as well as their functions. This discussion elucidates the ritual purposes for dance (to summon the lwa, or spirits, for instance), as well as psychological functions (for purposes of auto-intoxication, among others). She emphasized the centrality of dance to communal life and cultural identity, a foundational assumption in the field of dance anthropology. In “Dances of Haiti,” the emphasis is always on the cultural aspect, the part—in this case the dance—that conveys something essentially true about the values, beliefs, and/or identity of the communal whole. To meet this goal, Dunham minimizes those experiences that troubled her attempts at narrative control, and positions the Caribbean as a site suitably isolated to allow for proper scientific study. For example, she depicts Haiti in “Dances of Haiti” as an appropriately primitive site of culture untouched by encounters with the outside world or by the corrupting engine of industrialization: “Excepting for differences of name and perhaps slight alterations in ritual significance, the dances of peasant Haiti today might well be those of slave Haiti in the 17th century” (5).

In contrast, in Island Possessed, Dunham’s examines the limits and possibilities of African Diasporic connection in conjunction with exploring the culture shock she experienced as an outsider traveling to an unfamiliar society. Roy Wagner defines culture shock in such a way as to underscore not only the disorientation of encountering the other, but more importantly to highlight the invention of culture that such encounters enable: “In [culture shock] the local ‘culture’ first manifests itself to the anthropologist through his own inadequacy; against the backdrop of his new surroundings it is he who has become visible.”17 Dunham’s work makes visible experiences of encounter and inadequate adaptation, and identifies communal and social differences as unique cultural phenomena. Wagner argues that the anthropologist is trained to manage feelings of disorientation and alienation by labeling differences cultural: “We might actually say that an anthropologist ‘invents’ the culture he believes himself to be studying, that the relation is more ‘real’ for being his particular acts and experiences than the things it ‘relates’ ” (4).

Fieldwork required that Dunham inhabit liminal zones between cultures. Her discussions of that liminality suggest that the paradoxical experience of the participant-observer resides in the fact that her exceptional status as a privileged American in an impoverished, “third world” nation facilitated her attempts to gain access to communal settings and interactions typically closed to outsiders. In other words, being an outsider (the category

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