To be an Indian or East Indian from the West
Indies is to be a perpetual surprise to people out-
side the region...you don't go to Trinidad...
expecting to see Hindu pundits scuttling about
country-roads on motorcycles;to see pennants with
ancient devices fluttering from temples; to
see mosques cool and white and rhetorical against
the usual Caribbean of concrete and cor-
rugated iron; to find India celebrated in the street
names of one whole district of Port of Spain...
To be an Indian from Trinidad is to be unlikely. It
is in addition to everything else, to be the embodi-
ment of an old verbal ambiguity.
-----V.S. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon
In the 2004 Soca Monarch competition a crowd favorite was Denise Belfon, the Afro-Trinidadian former beauty queen who grew up watching Mastana Bahaar musical competitions, Hindi cinema produced in Bombay, and is of all things fascinated by Indian classical dance forms. Belfon's pelvic thrusts (influenced by Hindi film dances and the indentured migrants from Indian hinterlands specifically Bhojpur) and her rambunctious voice singing "Tonight I'm looking for an Indian man" performed an implicit critique of normative Creole Trinidadian masculinity. For decades male Calypsonians sang about the exotic Indian woman, representing her as the normative feminine, this was the first time that an Africana woman represented in her music sexual desire for an Indian man.
Indies is to be a perpetual surprise to people out-
side the region...you don't go to Trinidad...
expecting to see Hindu pundits scuttling about
country-roads on motorcycles;to see pennants with
ancient devices fluttering from temples; to
see mosques cool and white and rhetorical against
the usual Caribbean of concrete and cor-
rugated iron; to find India celebrated in the street
names of one whole district of Port of Spain...
To be an Indian from Trinidad is to be unlikely. It
is in addition to everything else, to be the embodi-
ment of an old verbal ambiguity.
-----V.S. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon
In the 2004 Soca Monarch competition a crowd favorite was Denise Belfon, the Afro-Trinidadian former beauty queen who grew up watching Mastana Bahaar musical competitions, Hindi cinema produced in Bombay, and is of all things fascinated by Indian classical dance forms. Belfon's pelvic thrusts (influenced by Hindi film dances and the indentured migrants from Indian hinterlands specifically Bhojpur) and her rambunctious voice singing "Tonight I'm looking for an Indian man" performed an implicit critique of normative Creole Trinidadian masculinity. For decades male Calypsonians sang about the exotic Indian woman, representing her as the normative feminine, this was the first time that an Africana woman represented in her music sexual desire for an Indian man.
If we look for key
arguments in Shane Vogel’s book, Stolen
Time two things stand out. Firstly, the fact that the spectacle of
mid-century Caribbeana in the form of what he refers to as the “Calypso craze”
was not simply a musical fad or a recording phenomenon. It operated within a
battery of performances and media-economic events which include music, dance,
theatre, cinema, television, club culture, fanzines, paratextual materials, and
local competitions as well as a middle class curiosity in island exotica, and
the proliferation of a new world network culture across airlines, concert
halls, hotels, hospitality and interracial sex fascination, taboo, and tourism
in the “coconut circuit”. Secondly, the craze destabilized the notions of that
destabilized authentic/inauthentic binaries and unsettled the epistemological
grounds of colonialism, and racial antagonism. Heavily criticized for its
inauthenticity (Belafonte’s rallying cry against the calypso craze, “This is not that”) the musically driven cultural sensation reorients our
notions of cultural authenticity and the political charge of diasporic
practices. While the craze of the 1950s is marked by black fad performances in
America, this is a fad that is premised on technological mass mediation, ‘idle
chatter’, and ‘vulgar time’ of racial tensions of Jim Crow era. In embracing and
acknowledging the inauthentic, these performances modified inauthenticity itself
and allowed for the possibility of an authenticity through inauthenticity,
enabling black performers in the United States to exploit the distance between
the ethnographic and the faddish in order to refigure relations between African
America and the Afro-Caribbean, using artifice and performance to challenge fixed
notions of blackness within the certain finitude of fad performance. To the
point that the act of going out dancing to perhaps faddish music in a phony
exoticized club becomes a temporal formation of race and cultural expression. Vogel
narrates the processes of black performers who throw into sharp relief the real-ness
of true Calypso which can only be articulated in terms of the not-real fad,
with a culture of racial appropriation in which they appropriated not Caribbean
culture but the fad itself and in doing so mocked American epistemologies of
racial authenticity. He writes: “The calypso craze offers blackness as change
and exchange. It is a copy that displaces the very question of the original.”(10)
Calypso and its circles of continuing fad musical cultures thus steal time via
twisted claims of ownership and possession in unexpected ways. What Vogel
manages to do in the course of the book is curate a deep time of black
performances and diasporic expressions using examples of these untimely
iterations of Calypso. The deep time can be traced through unfixed origins and
histories of gossip, rumor, misspellings, and the truth and un-truths in all of
them.
In chapter 4, Vogel
suggests the two meanings of mock as imitation and as assemblage whereby this
duality of the term mock, allows mock transnational performance to open up a space
of contradiction and disjunction in which “the false starts and dead ends of
transnational commodification could themselves be productive of new political
and cultural possibilities.” (139) Using examples of productions, he argues
that these complicate the relationship between African American racial
consciousness and theatrical form, on the one hand, and African diasporic histories
and fantasies, on the other. Such that even if these musicals were not about
Africa or Jamaica they refer to the very construction of diasporic thought and
the terms of racial representation. It is a strategy to advance a diasporic
imagination that shaped relations between the multiplicity of black ethnicities
within the United States and beyond its shores. The mock transnational mode
works as a commentary on midcentury US- Caribbean cultural relations by virtue
of its self-reflexive quality. Thus while being hinged on the erotics and
aesthetics of an undifferentiated Caribbean landscape and folk simplicity it foregrounds
the economic dependence of the local economy on the global market. They open up
a “sensate democracy”. (162)
With this I will segue
us into the directly performative part of the day. In the edited volume titled Globalisation, Diaspora Caribbean Popular
Culture, Christine G.T. Ho and Keith Nurse point out the dual play of
globalization and diaspora in modern Caribbean, composed of transplanted
European elite who had exterminated the indigenous population, forcefully
enslaved Africans, indentured South Asians, and integration of other groups
from the Middle East. One of the most penetrated and extroverted in the developing
world economies, the role of remittances, international aid and foreign direct
investment in the Caribbean, especially Trinidad stands testimony to the
extremely uneven and unequal flows of labor, media, and capital in the
globalizing process. This is signified in the rapid growth of labor migration,
proliferation of transnational networks, deterritorialization of nation-states,
and cultural hybridity in the region. The un-beginnings and instability of the
form, and Caribbean non-history is best explored in Chapter 5 of Vogel’s book on
dancing bodies, celebrities and dance memorabilia. Engaging with the unfixed
temporality of dance movement vocabulary he gestures toward the play of terms
in scholarship on the Caribbean. Doogla or dougla as a form refers to not
simply the pejorative term for miscegenation of Indian indentures with the
African descendants of the islands but also a sign of self identity and pride,
a new corpus of sensibility adhering to a political and cultural identity
rather than a biological one. These dance forms integrated a mythic
particularity in their repertoire to address racial distinction anchored on
aesthetic invention. With examples of dance instruction manuals like Glamour and other calypso fanzines, and
their failures to chalk mark the essentials of Caribbean dancing, Vogel
underscores the recycled choreographies involved here which acknowledge the miscegenation
of dance forms in the Caribbean archipelago and the impossibility of fixed lines
of origin. “It is an empty gesture that refers only back to the fad.” (178).
The masterstroke of the chapter lies in recognizing the ephemeral temporality
of calypso dancing with the play on the song Limbo-Calypso, the phantom limb,
and the emerging queer time associated with the limb of the performing
celebrities.
In Chapter 5, Vogel quotes Geoffrey Holder at length, from a 1961 NYT piece (at this point, several years after the height of the calypso craze). In what Vogel describes as "mock-outrage," Holder denounces the appropriation of Trinidadian culture with which he was once so intimately involved--in that article, he performs a doubling-down of distancing himself from the calypso craze. Vogel writes: "Holder thus removed himself from the fad twice: once on the Glamour recording and again in this article, where he rhetorically removes that very recording by attributing it to someone else. On the Glamour recording he is a trace, a phantom body troubling the productive, performative negation—the not-real, the disavowal—that structures black fad performance" (185).
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of Silpa's quotation from pg. 178, that the choreographed dance "is an empty gesture that refers only back to the fad." it does NOT, then, refer back to the original dance itself--the dance has been absorbed via appropriation into a U.S.-only nostalgia, accessible only through U.S. memory and experience, never accessible to its originators.
This makes me think very much about the U.S. "tiki fad" which happened alongside/possibly a bit after the calypso crazy--in this fad, mainly middle and upper class whites in the U.S. became infatuated with Polynesian culture, thus spawning the craze of tiki bars, tiki drinks (tiki torches, tiki "totems,"--google "beachcomber bar" for an apt visual companion). The visuals & commodities of this trend had so very little to do with actual Polynesian culture, but still became its own type of "real," understood to be inauthentic only if held in comparison to the original. Vogel summarizes this helpfully: "The impostor creates its original, and then the original disavows it" (6). Now, when tiki bars pop up today as some form of nostalgia, they are referring back to the tiki "fad" of the 50's and 60's itself, the U.S. memory/event, not original Polynesian culture. But that doesn't mean necessarily, or at all, that Polynesian folks who took part in this fad as being victims of "imperial appropriation," we might better understand them as highlighting the very realness of themselves by doing such pantomiming (5). Vogel says, "When the fad ends, such inauthentic images and sounds become trapped in the amber of their historical moment—a fossil record of that now-preposterous time when everybody was into that" (6-7). If every bit of history, "authentic" or not, is figured as "other," as almost unbelievable to our present-day "reality," it makes perfect sense to me how calypso artists could, as Silpa suggests, seek and gain "authenticity through inauthenticity."
Jane - I am glad you brought up the "tiki fad" in conjunction with Vogel, as I have been thinking of the irony of Trader Joe's mock Hawaiiana [/Polynesia-na] a lot lately. TJ's opened in CA in 1958, with its founder Coulumbe "said to have developed the idea of the Trader Joe's South Seas motif while on vacation in the Caribbean. The Tiki culture fad of the 1950s and 1960s was fresh in the cultural memory, and Trader Vic's was at its height with 25 locations worldwide. He had noticed that Americans were traveling more and returning home with tastes for food and wine they had trouble satisfying in supermarkets of the time" (WikiPedia). I blur the groups Hawaiiana and Polynesia-na here intentionally, in part for the slipperiness in the "mainland" social imaginary (persons from Hawaii/on island refer to the continental US etc as the mainland); additionally, Native Hawaiians trace their ancestry back to Polynesian settlers of the islands. Anyhow, the real zinger is that no Trader Joe's exist on the islands of Hawaii, so it is very common for locals* to get really excited when they are vacationing on the mainland and go shopping at Trader Joe's and buy enormous amounts of things to bring back home [This can also happen with Ikea, and used to happen with Victoria's Secret] -- as such, the referent of the Pacific isles as where this rare food is to be imported to the mainland is inverted.
Delete*My father's family is from Hawaii, and I lived there for two years in high school. The racial politics of Hawaii, including linguistically, are vastly complicated, and I am not an upmost expert in any way. However, I can say that "locals" is common parlance for persons from the island [not generally understood to be problematic], though there is somewhat of a spectrum of whether one is a "true local" or not. "Haole" [foreigner, especially white] and "hapa" [mixed heritage] are also common parlance, and "Pidgin" [commonly erroneously considered "pigeon" or derived etymologically from "pigeon"] is widespread, though again varying and with varying degrees of acceptability in business and by "foreigners."
Additionally, in reference to the quote you pulled from pg. 185 as well as Bellafonte's function as a phantom trace simultaneously constituting [not this but that], disavowing, and haunting the Calypso craze and black fad performance thereof, I have been thinking of the function of "haunting presences" and corporeal intertextual in performance. That is to say, bodies often [or always?] signify [at times mobilized in the diegesis of the "subsequent" performances, at times not] the past repertoire [and/or politics] of the performer even in different roles, though this might constitute a perceived breaking of the fourth wall or loss of "magic"/audience immersion. [Vogle noted Horne's strategic insertion and manipulation of her star persona in Jamaica in Ch 4, which "accomplished" an inability for the audience to suspend or disavow association and extra-diegetic being]. I've been attempting to think through what I deemed here "corporeal inter-textuality" and its insistences or possibilities in contrast to non-imagistic inter-textuality.
DeleteSilpa,
ReplyDeleteFirst, I think you weaved through a really dense text (Stolen Time) really effectively here and drew out some of the undercurrents in a really interesting way. Additionally, the framing of with Denise Belfon's performance added some interesting layers. In her challenging of masculine-centered cultures and their presence in Calypso traditions, I wonder if we might be able to understand her performance as its own kind of disavowal? I'm thinking of two referents in particular from this week's readings/viewings/listenings: 1) in "Rum and Coca Cola," the focus of critique appears to be Trinidadian women as they are(at least in Lord Invader's telling) willingly interpolated into colonial dynamics; 2) in the introduction to Stolen Time, Vogel describes disavowal's relationship to avowal (related to your recognition of the real's definition through the not-real): "The play between disavowal and avowal was one way that black performers modified their stance toward a fad culture that provided both opportunity and constraint" (4).
Might we understand Belfon's performance as a simultaneous avowal of kaiso and black fad performance's ability to challenge racial logics, and a disavowal of the way the "living newspaper" (see Vogel 2) reported on Trinidadian women in a critical light and, as you described, sexualized Indian women? Her performance both embraces and critiques while, through a meshing of histories and genres, speaking her subject position into them. At the very least, I think your inclusion of Belfon here continues the critical traditions that Vogel outlines in a way that interestingly extends his argument and emphasizes the gendered dynamics that underpin these conversations.
For me, one of the most interesting themes presented in Vogel’s work is the instability or blurred lines between the authentic and the inauthentic and how these qualities, seemingly opposites, can actually coincide within the complex relationships that diaspora creates. Vogel discusses the association Nadia Ellis makes between diaspora and disavowal, “‘the coming together of people mutually claiming to have no relation to each other'” (11). Turning to psychoanalytic theory, Vogel identifies that disavowal simultaneously maintains and rejects an idea and that even through denial the feeling or affect of the idea is still extremely palpable. This makes me think of the double meaning of the term “mock” as both imitation and assemblage, where the term assemblage might be defined in Deleuzoguattarian terms as “continuously shifting relational totalities comprised of spasmodic networks between different entities (content) and their articulation within ‘acts and statements’ (expression)." Alexander Weheliye, author of "Habeas Viscus" further contends that, “Articulated assemblages such as racialization materialize as sets of complex relations of articulations that constitute an open articulating principle—territorializing and deterritorializing, interested and asubjective—structured in political, economic, social, racial, and heteropatriarchal dominance” (Weheliye 46-49). Although I would not consider myself an expert on the complex phenomenon of assemblage, I do think that it relates very well to the constant pushing and pulling, and perceived similarities and contradictions that surround this complicated relationship of diaspora, and what counts as authentic and inauthentic based on the context. I also think it imperative to remember that in this case, inauthentic does not necessarily carry a negative connotation. Vogel’s project certainly makes us think of the difference between cultural appropriation of the calypso fad and its strategic use as a stepping stone or opportunity for diasporic connection for Black artists and political subjects. There is a lot of power and meaning that goes into the phrase “this is not that.” In this case, inauthenticity does not necessarily have to be done away with, but rather kaiso and the calypso fad can exist as separate entities, while also functioning as springboards for relationality.
ReplyDeleteTo jump off of Lana's response and your post, Silpa, I'm also centrally interested in how Vogel reads strategic inauthenticity in some of the performances of the Calypso craze. Particularly in regards to inauthenticity's relationship to diaspora--and the Ellis quote Lana mentions: "the coming together of people mutually claiming to have no relation to each other" (Vogel, 11)--Vogel's discussion of inauthenticity has been helping me situate one of the questions I've been struggling with this semester: how do we imagine diasporic projects within black studies that also take into account the particularities--potentially incommensurable--within different cultures, locations, communities, etc.? (Part of this question is coming from thinking about attempts to create diasporic unity based on a generally African rhetorical tradition and my wondering about how countries, like Egypt for instance, are or are not included in this unification work when we think about the way in which, unfortunately, some of these cultures today do not consider themselves African. Are these unifying diasporic projects meant to take into account some of the firmly-rooted consequences of colonization and globalization in imparting racist ideology to African countries? Or are they meant to be more imaginative projects that begin from a more imagined utopic past?) Anyway, to wrap it up, Vogel's theoretical dance between the authentic and inauthentic in order to play between and among categorical distinctions has allowed me to more deeply consider the way in which we can strategically utilize inauthenticity and the messiness of diasporic connection itself through performative claims of un/belonging and the performative creation of new spaces to inhabit.
ReplyDeleteI’ve been thinking a lot about what Vogel’s text opens up in terms of understanding the circulation of specific types of performance and what, then, diasporic performances allow. I was particularly drawn to Vogel’s assessment of Lena Horne’s performance in Jamaica (chapter 4). Vogel claims that Horne enacts Brooks’ theory of Afro-alienation through her failure to perform Savannah, a performance technique that is common (perhaps necessary) in mock transnational performance (153). Through Afro-alienation, “Horne sounds the irreconcilability of herself and her character, multiplying the meanings of blackness on the Broadway stage. In doing so, she repurposes Jamaica to tell a different story from the one sounded in its score or written in its script” (155). I am interested in what Vogel refers to as the “gap between performer and the performance, the actress and the character” (155) that Horne creates in this moment and the nuance of blackness that it allows her to create, the multiplicity in the performance. These attempts at performing Caribbeana—at times purposefully failed—highlight the vast differences between black experiences and black identities.
ReplyDeleteI want to pair this with Vogel’s claim in the introduction that black Calypso performers were not appropriating Caribbean culture but the fad therefore “mock[ing] American epistemologies of racial authenticity” (10). While I think this completely fits with Vogel’s reading of Horne and Jamaica, I wonder if this is always the case. For instance, what do we make of black performers borrowing from cultures that have not been a U.S. fad? Or, performers who are not saying “this is not that”? Must the referent always be in view in order to relegate the authentic against the inauthentic, or is there a point where the authentic and inauthentic blur and collapse?
Silpa,
ReplyDeleteI couldn’t stop thinking about the idea of abjecthood while reading this post. Ever since, I’ve been considering how this might be another generative lens through which to refract some of the observations and contributions you share with us here.
One of the things I’ve been mulling over has to do with the relationality of/in abjecthood. So far, we have discussed abjecthood as the condition of those who are pushed to the periphery in order for a dominant center that seeks to secure a sense of integrity. However, your epigraph opens: “To be an Indian or East Indian from the West Indies is to be a perpetual surprise to people outside the region.” This makes me wonder about the dynamics of abjecthood outside the binary and the role that third parties (“people outside the region”) play in it. This question becomes all the more interesting and complex as we start considering more and more the meanings and forms of transnational performance.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about abjecthood and migration. After watching Denise Belfon’s performance, I was curious to know about its reception in India and how that differed from her apparent success in Trinidad (judging from the audience response from the video). If we were to frame this performance as an abject performance in the sense that it is embracing the dougla form, should we say it is abject in relation to Indians in India, to non-mixed Indians living in the Caribbean, to black Caribbeans, or to all of the above?
Vogel shows us how integral, how braided, knowing and performance are. The trope of "this not that" he employs helps us think through the imperialism of aesthetic expression and the ways we can subvert and maneuver colonial/imperial ways of knowing. “Yet even while the calypso craze was an act of cultural imperialism, it was an opportunity for black performers to expand diasporic culture within and against such imperial claims of knowing” (4). I think Silpa’s comments on diasporic imagination and mock performance is a generative way of engaging Vogel’s epistemological concerns. Further, by challenging fixity, toggling between avowal and disavowal, and investing in a process that retains while rejecting an ideas/expressions, Silpa and Vogel show us alternative epistemological opportunities. Vogel writes, “These performers’ avowal of inauthenticity expressed a positive and productive relationship to the calypso craze that destabilized authentic/inauthentic binaries and unsettled the epistemological grounds of colonialism and Jim Crow. In doing so, these performance demonstrate how mass culture could unmake and remake diaspora” (4). Again, performance, especially that which is invested in "this not that," reminds us that the "real" participates in exclusion, that "authentic" works by negation, and that we do better to neglect the binary altogether for a more constellatory approach to expressive acts.
ReplyDeleteIn keeping up with our conversations about the archive, I am interested in Vogel’s explorations of the “ephemeral temporality” of the Calypso fad.
ReplyDeleteThe beauty and transience of performance is, I think, in the personal belief that it is largely an ephemeral practice. It exists only as it is happening and, therefore, can continuously be reimagined, reassembled, and reformed. However, Vogel has helpfully outlined the inherent problems that this perspective when not checked or examined properly. In other words, with that extremes of that perspective, all ephemera (and, consequently, performance) becomes flattened by the archive over time. That is, Lord Invader’s “Rum and Coca Cola” and The Andrew Sister’s “Rum and Coca Cola” are virtually the same according to standard archival practices, and Vogel’s is able to provide texture and context to ephemeral material that would otherwise be flattened by their seeming “sameness,” or, sameness by virtue of performance.
The phrase “this is not that,” then, may exist only as an ephemeral and temporal gesture of distinction but Vogel is advocating for (and, in fact, demonstrating how) this work should be done with historical performance materials.
Furthermore, mass culture can unmake and remake diaspora while also flattenning the diasporaic experience. This happens by localizing both true Calypso and the Calypso fad in the same “ephemera” of the archive: that is, because it’s something that only lasts for a short time, we can be freed and safe from the larger political, social, and economical consequences it implicates. This is not productive or inclusionary archival practice, and I am going to work to ensure I don’t fall into this trap in my own research on performance and performance practices.