From the Sacred Sound of the Conch Shell to the Cemetery Dance: Reimagining an Africana Festival Created in a Southern Appalachian City
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. On Method and Terminology
Hooks’ comments give eloquent expression to a paramount issue in this article: the indivisible relationship between memory and cultural identity. This takes on singular urgency within the context of African American experience, especially upon considering the centuries-long genocidal assault waged by the institution of North American slavery and its Christian missionary foot soldiers on the cultural memory of enslaved African and African American laborers. Moreover, while not ignoring hooks’ question of place (or emplacement) and belonging, the failure—until the mid-1980s—of southern Appalachian historiography to address the long-standing presence of African Americans compels an approach that, at least for the purposes of this study, affords priority to historical, mnemonic, cross-cultural, and epistemological considerations as they relate to the problem of cultural identity formation. Although important, in-depth analysis of southern Appalachia as politicized cultural construction and place will therefore not be central.4We are born and have our being in a place of memory. We chart our lives by everything we remember from the mundane moment to the majestic. We know ourselves through the art and act of remembering. Memories offer us a world where…we are sustained by rituals of regard and recollection…I pay tribute to the past as a resource that can serve as a foundation for us to revision and renew our commitment to the present…
We distinguish transdisciplinary from unidisciplinary research in several respects. The transdisciplinary scholar transgresses all relevant disciplinary boundaries to interlace varied tools, methods, frameworks, and datasets in pursuit of a research problem. She responds to the problem-based questions driving her research as opposed to unidisciplinary questions and predispositions that impose limits upon her conceptual options based upon her principal discipline’s preferred methods, theories, and tools. Inter/multidisciplinary scholarship leans toward transdisciplinarity but does not necessarily proceed from problem-driven inquiries that demand consolidated research methods in the pursuit of comprehensive proposals
3. Southern Appalachia, Western North Carolina, and Affrilachian Identity
4. Inside a Cultural “Crisis”
Many of those who criticize the Negro for selecting certain values out of American life overlook the fact that the primary struggle on his part has been to acquire a culture. In spite of the efforts of those who would have him dig up his African past, the Negro is a stranger to African culture. The manner in which he has taken over the American culture has never been studied in intimate enough detail to make it comprehensible. The educated class among Negroes has been the forerunner in this process
Calverton’s analysis implies that the production of interpretive social scientific knowledge is fundamentally motivated by cultural rather than objective factors. In general terms, social scientific knowledge is ultimately a cultural artifact serving the agendas of discrete ethnocultural groups that enjoy degrees of class privilege. This view, of course, brings with it the presumed existence of a shared, actionable sense of sociocultural identity on the part of any particular group. Still, the language of “cultural compulsives” makes possible a restatement of Frazier’s thesis regarding the black bourgeoisie: The social isolation of the black bourgeois class signifies the absence of internally developed, identity-based cultural compulsives within this group not tied on the most basic level to white American bourgeois capitalist values and attendant interests.The existence of cultural compulsives makes objectivity in the social sciences impossible. One can be objective only in the observation of detail or the collection of facts – but one cannot be objective in their interpretation. Interpretation necessitates a mind-set, a purpose, an end. Such mind-sets, such purposes, such ends, are controlled by cultural compulsives
Cruse’s central point is that the first six decades of the twentieth century witnessed an African American society essentially devoid of a sense of ethnic identity stable enough to cultivate values uniquely reflective of African American ethnic experience and social positionality. Also missing were clearly articulated critical values that could support a distinct cultural agenda encompassing philosophical, economic, and political concerns. Cruse names A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, Paul Robeson, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and many others as examples of African American social elites who fell short of delivering a practical, “synthetic” philosophical “foundation” for the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement (Cruse 1967, pp. 41–42, 174, 194, 281, 291). Such was the context for the “theoretical and intellectual vacuum” Cruse perceived so keenly in the 1960s, long after the first Great Migration (but during the subsequent two), the Great Depression, and the Chicago Black Renaissance. Curiously, Cruse’s analysis emerges despite the ten-year growth of the nationalist Black Arts Movement starting in 1965, the inaugural American Festival of Negro Arts, held at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, New Jersey the same year, and the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966.The Negro intellectuals and radical theorists of the 1920’s and 1930’s did not, themselves, fight for intellectual clarity. They were unable to create a new black revolutionary synthesis of what was applicable from Garveyism (especially economic nationalism), and what they had learned from Marxism that was valid. Yet with such a theoretical synthesis, Negroes would not really have needed the Communist Party. They could have laid down the foundation for a new school of revolutionary ideas, which, if developed, could have maintained a programmatic continuity between the issues and events of the 1920’s and the Negro movements of the 1950’s and 1960’s. And the young Negro intellectuals of today would probably not be facing a theoretical and intellectual vacuum
Cruse doubtless had many contemporaneous critics, some of whom, like writer-activist Michael Thelwell, questioned Cruse’s sharp critique of black integrationism (Thelwell 1968). However, in a later essay, Hortense Spillers assesses Cruse a bit more favorably. Incorporating W. E. B. DuBois into her analysis, Spillers states that “If we concede to DuBois and Cruse that there is an African American culture, distinct within the framework of American culture, then we will also concede that its subjects can reflect on its status, as DuBois and Cruse are representative instances of just such reflective powers” (Spillers 1994, p. 106). Cruse is not postulating the non-existence of African American cultural idioms.18 Rather, what’s missing, he contends, is a concentrated effort by African American intellectuals to critically engage these idioms such that they can be leveraged in service to an African American sociopolitical program with clear philosophical moorings. Spillers helps us to recognize that the work of DuBois, Cruse, and others prefigures this type of engagement.The Negro intellectual has been bereft of the means of solving his own problems because his class has traditionally been maneuvered into the position where his problems are solved by others. Instead of being able to essay his own solutions, the Negro intellectual has been transformed into a problem by the white liberal, who prefers to keep him in that position. The white liberal problem-solver … is the emasculator of the creative and intellectual potential of the Negro intelligentsia. Negro intellectuals cannot effectively interpret themselves in the arts, in social criticism, in the social sciences, in research fields, etc.; nor can they make objective interpretations of their own relation to the American scene that have any impact on American affairs
5. On African American Cultural Identity in Asheville: A Historical Inquiry
Warner’s commentary documents the presence of African American minstrelsy in postbellum Asheville. His commentary additionally documents the willingness of some of the city’s emancipated African Americans to consume this form of minstrelsy within the context of late nineteenth-century American popular culture. Such consumption, coupled with that of whites and with Happy John’s “burlesque” performances, establishes a precedent in Asheville for framing the memory of slavery and the quandary of African American cultural identity in terms of “light-hearted,” festive rendition for all to partake in and enjoy.Happy John, who occupied the platform with Mary, a “bright” yellow [mulatto] girl, took the comical view of his race, which was greatly enjoyed by his audience. His face was blackened to the proper color of the stage-darky, and he wore a flaming suit of calico, the trousers and coat striped longitudinally according to Punch’s idea of “Uncle Sam,” the coat a swallow-tail bound and faced with scarlet, and a bell-crowned white hat. This conceit of a colored Yankee seemed to tickle all colors in the audience amazingly …“Oh, yes,” exclaimed a bright woman in the crowd, “Happy John was sure enough one of Wade Hampton’s slaves, and he’s right good looking when he’s not blackened up” … What most impressed us, however, was the taming to account by Happy John of the “nigger” side of the black man as a means of low comedy, and the enjoyment of it by all the people of color. They appeared to appreciate as highly as anybody the comic element in themselves, and Happy John had emphasized it by deepening his natural color and exaggerating the “nigger” peculiarities. I presume none of them analyzed the nature of his infectious gayety, nor thought of the pathos that lay so close to it, in the fact of his recent slavery, and the distinction of being one of Wade Hampton’s niggers, and the melancholy mirth of this light-hearted race’s burlesque of itself
This gentleman’s conclusions indicate nuanced, class-conscious analysis within the African American community of the social inequality issues posed by the community itself and by the emerging Jim Crow south. His conclusions also evince concern for economic independence and general “racial improvement,” concern that is all the more meaningful when placed in a broader context.Social equality is a humbug. We do not expect it, we do not want it. It does not exist among the blacks themselves. We have our own social degrees, and choose our own associates. We simply want the ordinary civil rights, under which we can live and make our way in peace and amity. This is necessary to our self-respect, and if we have not self-respect, it is not to be supposed that the race can improve
6. Asheville’s Goombay Festival
goes back to walking through that area of town [the block] and looking at the businesses that were there, the shoe shine parlors and all that and to realize that in that particular area, if something like this happened, how differently we might feel, having ownership of something that would impact this community. And it [Goombay] has impacted my community(Worthen 2015).
The Negro Buildings and Emancipation expositions, Wilson argues, were curated with the aim of propagating a historically grounded yet adaptable self-defining narrative of hard-won liberation from chattel bondage into steady, humanizing “progress,” a narrative that speaks to the concerns later raised by Cruse in his analysis of the cultural crisis facing African Americans. Though spectacles of a sort to be certain, these exhibitions nonetheless evinced a degree of intentionality around memory and identity not found in Asheville’s Goombay Festival. That being the case, it becomes possible to interpret Goombay largely as an “othering” spectacle of Africana exotica unwittingly rooted both in the festive nineteenth-century minstrelsy of Happy John and in the early modern European pastime of gazing upon objects and bodies of non-European origin with a pricking, prodding, voyeuristic eye.Through a unique curatorial ethic that governed the content of these mainstream and segregated events, black men and women created and circulated public narratives of who they were and wanted to become—ideologies of history and progress that transformed over time in relation to changing economic, social, and political forces
Especially during their most intense period of geographic production … the final decades of the seventeenth century and the first few of the eighteenth…. Europeans were invited, in an impressive array of forms and venues, to observe an expressly “exotic” body: a body located explicitly beyond the borders of Europe, and a body meant to remain outside of Europe. This exotic corporality had distinctive qualities, several of which recur often enough to suggest an exotic archetype. Europe’s exotic body was a site of sexual “perversion”: of titillating sexual practices, typically characterized as “lewd” and obscene, and registering with the narrator of these descriptions…equal measure of abhorrence and fascination…. And the exotic body was elaborately staged. It was meant to be seen by its European audience, indubitably enticed by what they saw, and its presentation was predicated on a presumed voyeurism on the part of this European audience. The latter was encouraged to look at, and simultaneously warned of, the dreadfulness and perversity of that which was witnessed on the exotic stage
Unfortunately, the institution of slavery required censorship, destabilization, and dehumanization of Africans and their cultures in order to flourish. Enslaved Africans had limited clandestine space to produce and institutionalize social customs, not to mention religious rituals. Thus Europeans glimpsed a fraction of African culture and religion in what they observed as antipathetic outsiders. The European gaze was intrusive and untrustworthy, and Africans knew it. Much of what Africans thought and did as religious beings was safeguarded within the boundaries of African communal life
From this abbreviated explanation, one can deduce that Gumbay Play, by virtue of it being a non-Christian ritual institution linked to other non-Christian ritual institutions with pronounced cultural ties to West—and probably Central—Africa, was in sundry ways a target of suppression in post-emancipation Jamaica. Hence its lesser known presence relative to the Native Baptist (ca. 1830s), Revival Zion (ca. 1860–1861), and Rastafari (ca. 1930s) traditions, all of which have impacted each other and Jamaican society (Stewart 2005, p. 101). The preceding details provide some historical context for a discussion of Gumbay Play, to which we presently direct our attention.Becoming a Christian, in many cases, meant having the opportunity to learn how to read and write along with the opportunity to receive standard theological training. This offered converts more potential for upward mobility than the ancestral religions of Africa. For example, in honor of African emancipation from enslavement, the Bible Society of England granted ‘a copy of the Testament and Psalter to those of the emancipated who possessed the ability to read on the first of August 1834’
7. Gumbay Play
…the weight of testimony contests characterizations of Obeah as evil and Myal as good and suggests that the most striking distinction between Obeah and Myal is not moral but possibly structural. While Obeah is often described as a practice for individuals as well as groups, Myal is only described as a religious ceremony, an association based upon corporate duty, which featured charismatic leaders with identifiable groups and adherents
At the centre of Gumbay Play is the religious specialist known as the myal-man or myal-uman…. When spiritual assistance is needed, the myal-man calls a Gumbay Play ceremony, which is announced by the blowing of a conch shell…the notes blown on the shell invite both the living and the spirits of local ancestors to the ceremony. Although a wide range of problems can be handled by the myal-man, ceremonies are most often held for the purpose of healing… Once the myal-man achieves the desired state of myal [ancestral spirit manifestation]…he is usually directed by the spirit to make his way down to one of the family cemeteries….where he is expected to dance in the presence of the ancestors, and to receive additional spiritual counsel from them(Bilby 1999).
8. Ancestral Memory, Cultural Identity, and a Reimagining of Asheville’s Goombay Festival
9. Conclusions
Conflicts of Interest
References and Notes
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1 | I find more useful the pluralistic, processual conception of dynamically constructed “African diasporas,” which stresses—among other things—nuances ensuing from regionally shaped experiences. For more on the historical and theoretical basis of this preference, see Colin A. Palmer. “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora” (Palmer 2000, pp. 27–32); Tiffany R. Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley. “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World” (Patterson and Kelley 2000, pp. 11–45). |
2 | Initial research for this article was first presented in 2015 at UNC Asheville’s African Americans in Western North Carolina Conference under the title “Ears to the Conch Shell, Feet to the Ancestors: Reimagining Asheville’s Goombay Festival.” |
3 | The term “lifeworld” is associated with nineteenth/twentieth-century Moravian philosopher Edmund Husserl, and has gained a measure of traction in some later philosophical and social scientific circles. Husserl delineates two types of knowledge that elucidate the meaning of the term:
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4 | Research converging on this topic is abundant. See Henry Shapiro. Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Shapiro 1978); David Whisnant. All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Whisnant 1983); Allen Batteau. The Invention of Appalachia (Batteau 1990); Lucy R. Lippard. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (Lippard 1997); Jane S. Becker. Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930–1940 (Becker 1998); and Bill Hardwig. Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900 (Hardwig 2013). |
5 | See John L. Jackson, Jr. Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Jackson 2013). |
6 | See also Matthew Causey and Fintan Walsh. Performance, Identity, and the Neo-Political Subject (Causey and Walsh 2013). |
7 | My use of the term “African diasporic spiritual technologies” is the result of extensive conversations with Dianne Stewart during which she described African diasporic religions as “mystical technologies.” See Dianne M. Stewart. Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Stewart 2005, pp. 36, 41, 183). In her study of New World iterations of Yorùbá religion and African American religious nationalism, Tracey Hucks transmutes the noun “diaspora” into the verb form “diasporaed” to underscore the “Atlanticized” experience of African-descended communities wrought both by enslavement and by their efforts to constructively negotiate the many colonial perils of the “New World.” Tracey E. Hucks. Yorùbá Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism (Hucks 2012, pp. xxvi–xxvii). |
8 | After the American Civil War, the term “Appalachia” assumed an added cultural meaning associated with the people of the Appalachian Mountains, particularly white mountaineers. Following the geographic divisions of geographers Guyot (1861) and 1895 (1895), if Appalachia is separated into northern and southern corridors, then we can say that the southern corridor, commonly referred to as southern Appalachia, has its own unique cultural profile that since the local color movement of the mid-1870s has summoned increasing but inexhaustive attention from novelists, writers, historians and researchers. Carvel Collins finds that between 1875 and 1900 in excess of two hundred novels and stories were published describing the “quaint,” “isolated,” and “peculiar” lives of “the hill people” who lived “in the shadow of awe-inspiring peaks.” Carvel Collins. “Nineteenth Century Fiction of the Southern Appalachians” (Collins 1942–1943, pp. 186–90, 215–18). |
9 | The mythic idea of the sui generis white mountaineer also has roots in the American Missionary Association (AMA), which was established in the 1840s. After abortive attempts to integrate churches in the post-Reconstruction south, the AMA refocused much of its ministerial work on Appalachia. However, the organization’s by-laws required that the focal population of the work be unique in some significant sense. This stipulation hastened use of the term “mountain whites” while encouraging a particular disregard for ethno-racial diversity in southern Appalachia. More on the AMA’s history can be found in chapter one of Chris Green. The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism (Green 2009). |
10 | Two famous examples of fictional works that fall within the local color tradition include Mary Noailles Murfree. In the Tennessee Mountains (Murfree 1884); and John Fox, Jr. The Trail of Lonesome Pine (Fox 1908). Some important secondary sources include John C. Campbell. The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (Campbell 1921); James W. Raine. The Land of Saddle-Bags: A Study of the Mountain People of Appalachia (Raine 1924); Horace Kephart. Our Southern Highlanders (Kephart 1926); Henry Shapiro. Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Shapiro 1978); Mary Beth Pudup and Dwight Billings, eds. Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century (Pudup and Billings 1995). See also Emily M. Satterwhite. Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878 (Satterwhite 2011). The theories of Myrdal (1944) and Park (1950) lean toward the eventual assimilation of African Americans into mainstream American society. |
11 | Turner’s claim is substantiated by the work of Roethler (1964), Nash (1974), and Perdue (1979). Their work illustrates that African Americans were impactfully present in western North Carolina, South Carolina, and elsewhere throughout southern Appalachia long before the southward migration during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of Mennonite, Lutheran, and Moravian Germans as well as Scottish and Irish Reformists down through the Shenandoah Valley “into the uplands and mountains of the Carolinas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.” Carter G. Woodson. “Freedom and Slavery in Appalachian America” (Woodson 1916, p. 134). |
12 | Much like “Appalachia” and “southern Appalachia,” the category “folk” is a discursive fabrication riddled with problems. Though beyond the scope of this article, questions raised by Jane Becker are important for readers to hold in mind: “How are tradition and the folk defined, and by whom? What is the relationship between the folk, tradition, and the marketplace? What consequences do interpretations of the folk and traditional culture have for those named as its bearer?” Jane S. Becker. Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930–1940 (Becker 1998, p. 3). See also Benjamin Filene. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Filene 2000). |
13 | Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr consider the Malian ngoni (a stringed instrument) to be the West African predecessor of the American banjo. Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr. Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia (Ritchie and Orr 2014, p. 296). |
14 | A newer undertaking known as the Affrilachian Artist Project takes inspiration from the Appalachian Poets and from the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a Grammy award-winning black string band based in Durham, North Carolina. See The Affrilachian Artist Project (The Affrilachian Artist Project 2011). |
15 | For an illuminating philosophical explanation of the idea of “Affrilachia,” see Paul C. Taylor. “Call Me out of My Name: Inventing Affrilachia” (Taylor 2011b). An excellent study proceeding from the perspective of rhetorical theory is found in Kathryn Trauth Taylor. “Naming Affrilachia: Toward Rhetorical Ecologies of Identity Performance in Appalachia” ( Taylor 2011a). |
16 | Walker’s effort to poetically wrestle with the meanings of Affrilachian identity prompts a groping for Africa, as seen in his poem “Healer,” which parallels the role of the African American “church mother” to that of the “Yoruba high priestess.” Frank X Walker. Affrilachia: Poems by Frank X Walker (Walker 2000, pp. 53–55). |
17 | Countering Melville Herskovits’ argument demonstrating African cultural survivals in multiple African diasporas, Frazier insisted that North American enslavement effected an irremediable alienation between black bondpersons and their respective African cultural legacies, leaving them little choice but to embrace Christianity as a “new basis for social cohesion” and “take over the American culture.” See the first chapter of E. Franklin Frazier. The Negro Church in America (Frazier 1963). See also Melville J. Herskovits. The Myth of the Negro Past (Herskovits 1941). |
18 | Some important studies addressing African American culture that have appeared over the last five decades include Albert Murray. The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy (Murray 1970); Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally. History and Memory in African-American Culture (Fabre and O’Meally 1994); James C. Hall. Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties (Hall 2001); Hortense J. Spillers. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Spillers 2003); Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein. Early African American Print Culture (Langer Cohen and Stein 2012). |
19 | Theda Perdue’s research indicates that by the second half of the eighteenth century, the Cherokee of North Carolina were actively involved in the kidnapping and enslavement of African Americans. Her research also shows that when the Cherokee republic was founded in 1827, three years before the authorization of the federal Indian Removal Act, blacks were “excluded from participation in the government.” Referencing the February 21, 1828 and April 13, 1828 editions of the Cherokee Phoenix and Indians’ Advocate, Perdue further expounds,
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20 | Until 2013, the Goombay Festival was held in “the block.” Local redevelopment construction near South Market Street led to the controversial relocation of the festival to Pack Square Park, a move that initially generated an increase in the festival’s revenue. |
21 | My choice of the qualifier “African diasporic” is informed by the rationale adduced by Tracey Hucks in her recent landmark book on Yorùbá American religious nationalism. She contends that “African diasporic religions make the category of African much more fluid and receptive to flexible interpretations and point the reader to historical processes without the weighty conclusions and assertions of African-derived, African-inspired, and African-based.” Tracey E. Hucks. Yorùbá Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism (Hucks 2012, pp. 5–6). More in-depth information on Obeah, Myal, and Jonkonnu can be found in Martha Beckwith. Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (Beckwith 1929); Sylvia Wynter. “Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Towards the Interpretation of Folk Dance as a Cultural Process” (Wynter 1970); Judith Bettelheim. “The Afro-Jamaican Jonkonnu Festival: Playing the Forces and Operating the Cloth” (Bettelheim 1979); Kenneth M. Bilby. “Gumbay, Myal, and the Great House: New Evidence of the Religious Background of Jonkonnu in Jamaica” (Bilby 1999); Dianne M. Stewart. Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Stewart 2005, pp. 12, 51–52, 54, 59, 61–65, 151, 154–55, 157–68, 221, 279); Diana Paton and Maarit Forde. Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (Paton and Forde 2012); Jerome S. Handler and Kenneth M. Bilby. Enacting Power: The Criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1760–2011 (Handler and Bilby 2012). |
22 | The names of some of these festivals are as follows: Antigua Carnival, Batabano (Cayman Islands), Crucian Christmas Carnival (St. Croix), Carifiesta (Montreal, Quebec), Cariwest (Edmonton, Alberta), Carnaval Tropical de Paris, Zomercarnaval (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), Leeds West Indian Carnival (United Kingdom), Caribbean Carnival of Manchester (United Kingdom), CaribMask Carnival (Raleigh, North Carolina), Baltimore/Washington One Caribbean Carnival (Baltimore, Maryland), Bayou Bacchanal (New Orleans, Louisiana), and Caribbean American Carnival (Worcester, Massachusetts). |
23 | Historian Darin Waters argues for the “democratization” of America’s “collective historical memory,” an argument that comports fairly well with the sociomnemonic strategy of the Negro Buildings and Emancipation expositions. See Darin Waters. “Whose Story? Democratizing America’s Collective Historical Memory” (Waters 2014). |
24 | Recall the early appearance of the idealized “noble savage” concept in Englishman John Dryden’s 1672 stage play The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards: In Two Parts, Acted at the Theater-Royall. This concept was seized upon by late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Romanticism. |
25 | Adding to the existing body of literature on ancestral spiritualities of the Caribbean, a recent article by Harcourt Fuller notes the centrality of ancestral veneration in the sacred musical traditions of Jamaica’s Windward Maroons. These traditions are anchored in the memory of the great eighteenth-century Maroon chieftainness Queen Nanny (Granny Nanny). See Harcourt Fuller. “Maroon History, Music, and Sacred Sounds in the Americas: A Jamaican Case” (Fuller 2017). |
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Harvey, M.L. From the Sacred Sound of the Conch Shell to the Cemetery Dance: Reimagining an Africana Festival Created in a Southern Appalachian City. Religions 2017, 8, 149. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8080149
Harvey ML. From the Sacred Sound of the Conch Shell to the Cemetery Dance: Reimagining an Africana Festival Created in a Southern Appalachian City. Religions. 2017; 8(8):149. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8080149
Chicago/Turabian StyleHarvey, Marcus L. 2017. "From the Sacred Sound of the Conch Shell to the Cemetery Dance: Reimagining an Africana Festival Created in a Southern Appalachian City" Religions 8, no. 8: 149. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8080149