CARNIVAL: TRANSFORMATION, PERFORMANCE and PLAY in CARIBBEAN FESTIVALS by Justin Haynes Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty Of
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ETD - Electronic Theses & Dissertations CARNIVAL: TRANSFORMATION, PERFORMANCE AND PLAY IN CARIBBEAN FESTIVALS By Justin Haynes Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2010 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Vera M. Kutzinski Professor Houston Baker Professor William Luis Professor Cecelia Tichi Professor Jane Landers TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................3 Chapter I. INTRODUCTION—RESISTANCE, PLAY AND PERFORMANCE IN CARIBBEAN CARNIVAL ...............................................................................4 II. CARIBBEAN CARNIVAL: FROM SOCIAL EUROPEAN FESTIVAL TO POSTSLAVERY CULTURAL EVENT .........................................................26 III. JAIL, CARNIVAL AND COLONIALISM: REALIGNING THE AUDIENCE AND SUBVERTING THEATRICAL EXPECTATIONS IN CARIBBEAN THEATER ...............................................................................79 IV. CARNIVAL AS PROSTHESIS—REGAINING HUMANNESS THROUGH CREATIVITY AND MYTH .........................................................................133 V. SEEING WHAT YOU SAW AND HEARING WHAT YOU HEARD: MISDIRECTION AND VENTRILOQUISM IN PAULINE MELVILLE‘S THE VENTRILOQUIS‟S TALE, PAULE MARSHALL‘S THE CHOSEN PLACE, THE TIMELESS PEOPLE, AND WILSON HARRIS‘ CARNIVAL ........................................................................................................................172 VI. CONCLUSION—MOVING PAST POSSESSION ......................................219 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................228 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Peter Minshall‘s carnival King Mancrab (1983)…………………………………………………………………………………..149 2. Mancrab Stands Before Washerwoman and white-clad villagers on the Stage of the Queen‘s Park Savannah……………………………………………………………………………….155 iii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: RESISTANCE, PLAY AND PERFORMANCE IN CARIBBEAN CARNIVAL The carnival is the people‟s second life, organized on the basis of laughter. —Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World 1 This dissertation‘s initial point of reference is, as is often the case with studies of the Caribbean, the presence and production of sugar in the establishment of Caribbean plantation economies. As Kathleen Balutansky notes, such plantation economies developed and thrived from the seventeenth century and ―created patterns of development that were similar in Brazil, the Guyana coast, the Caribbean islands and the Caribbean coasts of Central America, Mexico, and Louisiana‖ (2). Sugar, as Balutanksy points out, was not just omnipresent in the region, but sought agricultural homogeneity and similar ―patterns of development‖ although geographical and cultural homogeneity was impossible. Sugar plantation owners of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries capitalized on the tremendous worldwide demand for their product such that sugar-producing Caribbean islands became the financial epicenter of Europe‘s wealth.2 At the time, sugar needed to be harvested intensively, and required a tremendous amount 1 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (1941). 2 Eric Williams notes in Capitalism & Slavery that ―Britain‘s total trade at the end of the seventeenth century brought in a profit of £2,000,000. The plantation trade accounted for £600,000; re-export of plantation goods 120,000; European, African and Levant trade £600,000; East India trade £500,000; re-export of East India goods £180,000‖ (53). See also Alejandro de la Fuente: ―Sugar and Slavery in Early Colonial Cuba,‖ in Tropical Babylons. Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680 (2004). 4 of labor, mainly through the importation of enslaved Africans.3 Sugar thus became synonymous with slavery and it is impossible to examine the Caribbean sugar trade without a focus upon its relationship to human bondage. Although sugar became a centralizing economic force in the world, its repressive nature, established by demanding plantation owners, meant that sugar‘s African slaves often resisted sugar‘s clutch by way of revolts, marronage and suicide. Any reactions or resistance to slavery became a de facto resistance to sugar.4 While the eighteenth-century Caribbean was the center of Europe‘s finances, the Caribbean did not have a direct cultural connection with its colonizing powers. Although Balutanksy notes that Caribbean islands were ―at the center of intense cultural exchanges,‖ (2) such exchanges were ultimately between sugar‘s European-descended owners and their slaves and such relationships were, as one might expect, contentious. Further, the forced African diaspora that provided sugar‘s slaves was not a homogenous community that spoke the same language, but one that consisted of different tribes 3 Williams notes that ―[s]lavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro….The first instance of slave trading and slave labor developed in the New World involved, racially, not the Negro but the Indian. The Indians rapidly succumbed to the excessive labor demanded of them, the insufficient diet, the white man‘s diseases, and their inability to adjust themselves to the new way of life‖ (7, 8). Williams adds that ―[i]n the New England colonies Indian slavery was unprofitable…because it was unsuited to the diversified agriculture of these colonies….The Spaniards discovered that one Negro was worth four Indians‖ (Capitalism & Slavery 9). See also Herbert Klein: ―The Atlantic Slave Trade‖ in Tropical Babylons. Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450- 1680 (2004). 4 Richard Burton makes a distinction between ―‗resistance‘—those forms of contestation of a given system that are conducted from outside that system, using weapons and concepts derived from a source or sources other than the system in question—and ‗opposition‘…those forms of contestations of a given system that are conducted from within that system, using weapons and concepts derived from the system itself‖ (6, emphases original). I will use these as default definitions in this introduction. 5 extracted from different locations on the African continent (see chapter one). Therein lies just one paradox of sugar‘s quest for homogenous production, one that arises whenever one attempts to establish cultural commonality in the Caribbean: the plantocracy who used African slave labor to produce sugar ultimately considered all labor interchangeable, whether the labor involved poor European whites, Africans, or later, indentured Asians, as was the case in Cuba and in Trinidad‘s post-1834 emancipation.5 To suggest European cultural similarities across the Caribbean, even in the Anglo-Caribbean, becomes a difficult assertion since the Caribbean islands, through their individual modes of colonization, were never all ruled by any one autonomous colonial empire—the French, Dutch, British and Spanish all had economic interests. The result, if one considers the region holistically, was cultural and linguistic cacophony. As Sidney W. Mintz notes it is inaccurate to refer to the Caribbean as a ―cultural area,‖ if by ―culture‖ is meant a common body of historical tradition. The very diverse origins of Caribbean populations; and the absence in most societies of any firm continuity of the culture of the colonial power have resulted in a very heterogeneous cultural picture. And yet the societies of the Caribbean—taking the word ―society‖ to refer here to forms of social structure and social organization—exhibit similarities that cannot possibly be attributed to mere coincidence. It probably would be more accurate (though stylistically unwieldy) to refer to the Caribbean as a ―societal area,‖ since its component societies probably share many more social-structural features than they do cultural features.‖ (914, 915, emphasis original) Taking Mintz‘s lead, I argue that the Caribbean and its people, both those descended from slavery and those who initiated slavery, for the most part shared societal, rather than cultural, commonalities. Still, there were moments of cultural similarity, particularly in relation to religion. The French Catholics of Trinidad, for example, organized private, 5 Williams notes that ―[t]he immediate successor of the Indian, however, was not the Negro but the poor white. These white servants included a variety of types. Some were indentured servants, so called because, before departure from the homeland, they had signed a contract, indented by law, binding them to service for a stipulated time in return for their passage‖ (Capitalism & Slavery 9). 6 carnival-like masquerade balls that were similar to the carnival-like festival the Spaniards held in Cuba.6 Still, Mintz‘s argument for a societal area is valid, especially since it reinforces sugar‘s claim as a patriarchal and homogenizing force. It is against such homogenization, as I will show in chapter one, that postemancipation carnival in Trinidad (1834) and Cuba (1866) resisted and thus moved toward cultural and ethnic egalitarianism.7 It is within sugar‘s ironic ethnic divisions (yet within its economic monopoly) that I seek to piece together similarities in enslaved resistance, a resistance which repeated itself in post-slavery carnival. It is through the resistance against sugar‘s all-encompassing