Temporality and Evidence in Gayl Jones' Corregidora / Yasmine Anderson

Through its concern with historicity, the unboundedness of the past and its claims on the present, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora almost constantly performs a sort of temporal collapse; however, rather than doing so only to highlight history’s hold, it draws our attention to the subsumption of particularly located bodies under the wave of the slave trade and its reverberations. There are three examples I want to specifically point out here. 

The first is when Cat is talking to Ursa and she tells her about the white woman and man she works for. Cat says, “‘You don’t know what it’s like to feel foolish all day in a white woman’s kitchen and then have to come home and feel foolish in the bed at night with your man. I wouldn’t a mind the other so much if I didn’t have to feel like a fool in the bed with my man’” (64). Cat functions as the moving body that links the space of the kitchen and the bedroom as well as the bodies of her man, the white woman, and the white woman’s husband. This collapse works to establish Cat’s feeling of foolishness as an affective through-line. 

The second example occurs as Ursa’s mother is telling her about her conception.  After describing a scene of mounting sexual tension between herself and Ursa’s father, she says, “‘It was like my whole body wanted you, Ursa’” (116). In a moment that may work against the grain of our expectations, the novel gives us Ursa’s mother’s desire for Ursa. Ursa’s body fills the space we might expect her father’s to fill as the object of desire. Thus, the novel complicates traditional paradigms for thinking desire by highlighting the erotics of kinship and generational yearning.

In the third example, Ursa’s mother is speaking, but the story she is telling is that of Ursa’s Great Gram. Great Gram is talking through the voice of Ursa’s mother about the black man that is escaping while Corregidora is fucking her. She says, “‘He must’ve been fucking me while they was chasing after him’” (127) and later “‘And then somehow it got in my mind that each time he kept going down in me would be that boy’s feets running. And then when he come, it meant they caught him…’” (128). I find this to be one of the most compelling examples of collapse. In one sense, we have the collapse of the actual speaker since Great Gram speaks through the body of Ursa’s mother, but we also have the narration of the collapse between the scene in bed and the escape scene outside, the moving body of Corregidora and the moving body of the black man escaping.  It is important to note that all of these examples are rendered through stories—Cat’s, Ursa’s mother’s, and Great Gram’s via Ursa’s mother—which allows us to think about the way in which these bodily and spatial subsumptions are made possible within the particular space of the story.  

In turning to look at how evidence and witnessing function in the novel, it is clear that stories told from one generation to another become a valuable evidentiary vehicle.  How do we think through non-legal evidence, evidence not validated by court systems or, on a broader level, by the knowledge legitimation practices of dominant culture? What evidence or evidences are permissible? What gets a hearing? Ursa remembers being told “‘They burned all the documents, Ursa, but they didn’t burn what they put in their minds. We got to to burn what they put in our minds, like you burn out a wound. Except we got to keep what we need to bear witness. That scar that’s left to bear witness. We got to keep it as visible as our blood’” (72). What I find interesting here is that this quote comes close after the conversation where Sal tells Ursa that she can pass not for white but for, “Spanish or something” (70).  Therefore, the proximity of this memory to the conversation about passing between Sal and Ursa establishes a connection between passing and passing down. Ursa’s anxiety about the evidence that she does not visibly bear on her body as a potentially passing woman is connected to her anxieties about her inability to fulfill the genealogical call of passing evidence down. 

This is a very brief illustration of some of the themes that I find most compelling in Jones’ Corregidora, so I invite you to continue thinking through form, temporality, and evidence (as well as whatever else you’d like to!) in the comments.  How does the blues manifest itself in the textual space of the novel? I will be talking more about Roland Barthes’ “The Grain of the Voice” in my presentation and in relation to the activity, but does Corregidora foreground stylistic, temporal, dialogic, performative, expressive, affective, etc. modes that allow us to resist relegating our conversations to “communication, representation, expression, everything which it is customary to talk about” (Barthes, 182)?  If we were to attempt to unhinge ourselves from the definitions of permissible evidence most present in dominant culture, or even in the academy more specifically, and to instead look to Corregidora to give us a conception of evidence, what would that look like? What kinds of meaning-making structures would we come up against? 

Below are two of the songs explicitly mentioned in the novel:

Trouble in Mind, sung by Nina Simone (Jones, 44)

The Broken Soul Blues, sung by Ma Rainey (Jones, 159)

Upcoming Events: March and April 2019

Tues, March 19: DIANA TAYLOR (2 events)

Please note that Diana Taylor's main lecture and grad student workshop will take place onTuesday, March 19. See details below:

March 19, 2019 - 12:00pm to 6:00pm

Grad Student Workshop
12 - 2 pm •  William Pitt Union 527
Text: Performance, (Duke UP, 2016)

Main Lecture: Dead Capital
4 - 6 pm • University Club, Conference Room B

“Bom Retiro 958 metros,” a performance by Brazil’s theatre company, Teatro da Vertigem, leads us on a walk through São Paulo’s phantasmagoric world of things -things in a state of consumer glory, in use, in disuse, and in various stages of disintegration. This experiential piece challenges many of our assumptions about the desire to accumulate, transform, archive, and collect ‘things’ as we move through the underside of an immigrant neighborhood. What circulates? What remains, and what we assume disappears from culture?

Tues Mar 20 and Thurs Mar 21: Claudia Rankine (2 events)

Community Writing Workshop: Weds, Mar 20 @ 7pm at Alloy Studios (registration required)

Rankine and and Carrie Mae Weems:

Thurs, Mar 21 @7pm

Carnegie Library Lecture Hall
4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, 15213

April 4-6: Conference: Empire and its Aftermath: Transhispanic Dialogues on Diaspora. Multiple locations/times on campus. Click Link: Empire and Its Aftermath

April 11-13. Conference: Representations of Afro-Latinidad. (multiple locations on campus) 

Info in Link:Representations of Afrolatinidad Program and Registration

Henriques' Methodology of Listening/ Brittney Knotts

In Sonic Bodies, Julian Henriques offers an invitation to "become a listener" (xvii). While the book is focused on dancehall, I am interested in Henriques' claim that "thinking through sounding is relevant well beyond the particular example of the Jamaican sounds system" (xxvii). Henriques goes on: "There is a distinct and different way of thinking expressed through sounding. This emerges from the intimate nature of the relationship between sound and embodiment, one that is only matched by that between vision and the disembodied mind…"(xxvii).  In this way, while paying attention to sound and sounding may involve images and calculation, it necessarily moves beyond these ways of knowing into embodied ways of knowing—or into "depths rather than surfaces" (xxix). Part of this depth work is the literal "sinking into sound" that brings the person/researcher not only into the deepest of bass/base but also calls for a complete immersion in subject and sound, an acceptance of relationality of which the person/researcher/sound scientist is inevitably a part.

 

In chapter one, Henriques makes a move from sound (n.) to sounding (v.) drawing from Small's concept of musicking and Mackey and Baraka's theories of subjugation of the verb into noun form. Henriques, bringing these scholars together, posits that "the movement from verb to noun can be considered as a process of subjugation, if not oppression" (35) (emphasis mine).  By reclaiming the verb form and all the actions that are encompassed therein, listening expands to include all variations of "black inventiveness," pointing to details that are not typically available for consideration in listening to sound alone (35). At the same time, Henriques is careful to differentiate sounding from musicking, though they do share characteristics. While musicking creates similar Latourian maps of relationships and vibrations beyond hearing, sounding "asks more questions, has a greater disruptive potential—because it escapes the bars and all the other confines of systems of musical meaning" (37). Part of this seems to be because sounding starts at a much smaller level—the vibrations themselves (whether material, corporeal, or sociocultural)—rather than the meta-vibrations of rhythm. Sounding is also decidedly unconcerned with discourse, as Henriques discusses in the preamble.

 

Finally, I want to consider how this basis of sounding and thinking through sounding is espoused as potential methodology in chapter four. Though the chapter starts with the lessons of listening shared between "prento" engineer and teacher, there are meaningful advances toward research methodology offered both through Henriques' understanding of the apprenticeship model as well as his own embodied research in Kingston. He understands his methodology as moving to projects beyond those concerned specifically with sound. He argues that listening implies "a mode of attention" or a way of "giving attention" rather than "simply responding to a stimulus" (100). This mode of attention, as mentioned above, eschews distance in favor of a "sinking into," a "coming forward" rather than a "sitting back" (102). It is through this process of coming forward that brings the researcher into embodiment, literally vibrating from the sonic dominance of the dancehall sounding. With a methodology focused on listening, "participation is simply unavoidable, attesting to listening as a two-way reciprocal process" (107). For Henriques, dancehall sound engineers are simultaneously his group of research subjects and the ideal listeners, occupying a central space between theory and practice, creating a form of grounded theory (more of this on 115). This seems to be Henriques' call for a methodology: an emplaced researcher, balancing monitoring and manipulating, someone as a bridge.

 

I wonder if we can take these ideas and put them together with any of the other readings from this semester or outside of our course. I am personally interested in the potentially liberatory potential of sounding (v.) in conjunction with Vazquez's theory of listening in detail as well as Campt's ideas of listening to "lower frequencies" of images, though I'm not quite sure these texts are asking us to do the same work (but maybe they are in some ways). I am also drawn to overlaps between Sarah Pink's work Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009) and Henriques' methodology of listening. Like Henriques, Pink makes extensive use of Ingold and theories of embodied knowledge and learning, destabilizes viewing as the pinnacle of the sensory hierarchy, and is highly concerned with place (and how place is formed through social, sensory, and material contexts). Pink is also interested in participation as research strategy, though she seems to question how this form of knowledge can then be transferred back into the academy. With some of this in mind, I want to think about how we might "become a listener" both with other types of sound as well as with studies that are not grappling with sound as a main factor. How might we imagine Henriques' work expanding beyond the dancehall sound engineers of Jamaica?

Methodologies of Curiosity and Openness in Explorations of Blackness / Celena Todora

Through intertwined methodologies of visuality and performance, Fleetwood and Campt explore the role of affect in representations and/or perceptions of Black vernacular/quotidian experiences within the dominant public imaginary, which often flattens Blackness to identifiable visual performative codes. Both texts demonstrate how images of Blackness renders the Black subject within the dominant gaze. Concerned with challenging this perpetual simplification of Black identity, Fleetwood poses the question, “How do we return to what we already know with curiosity and openness so that new forms of knowing and recognition emerge?” (7). I argue that Campt’s methodology of “listening” to images exemplifies such a practice of “curiosity and “openness” with the potential to lead to alternative forms of knowing beyond predominant visual and performative codes that perpetuate stereotypes of Blackness.

Campt undoubtedly critiques the dominant cultural “troubling vision” of Blackness and argues that the embodied modality of sound enables us to “listen” to the “lower frequencies” of images (33) to re-envision simplified or problematic understandings of the Black experience. She asserts that attention to these lower frequencies illuminate the connection between touching and feeling in relation to visuality (100), enhancing our attention to the affective domain and the multiple temporalities that contextualize the images. By listening to an “ensemble of images together” (43), Campt offers “a complicated account” (37) as opposed to an “easy reading” (42) of Black identity within the photographed subjects, such as in Chapter 2 when she places the Gulu archive into conversation with Mendolsohn’s collection, imagining multiple possibilities for “strategies of diasporic survival” contextualizing the identities of the “sitters” (41). Thus, Campt’s integration of visuality and performance seeks to approach seemingly “quiet,” quotidian, mundane, or ignored images and challenge initial perceptions or easy readings that risk reproducing normative stereotypes of Blackness.

However, I am curious if, in some ways, Campt’s emphasis on the visuality of Blackness negates the possibility of “openness” in Fleetwood’s sense (as Fleetwood argues that it is the attention to visuality itself that leads to the “troubling vision” of Blackness). For example, how does Campt’s theory play into Fleetwood’s concept of non-iconicity? Fleetwood argues that non-iconicity is a “aesthetic and theoretical position that lessens the weight placed on the black visual to do so much. It is a movement away from the singularity and significance placed on instantiations of blackness to resolve that which cannot be resolved” (9). On the one hand, Campt’s emphasis on multiplicities of diasporic survival and identity surrounding an image align with this movement away from singularity—say, for example, the perception of a Black subject as a “pimp”—but do her suggestions of multiple tropes of Black identity simply expand the iconicity of the Black subject?

Additionally, does her primary emphasis on male Black subjects or “sitters” render the black female as what Fleetwood would refer to as “excess flesh?” Fleetwood argues that “the black visual has been framed as masculine, which has positioned the black female visual as its excess” (9). While Campt approaches her work from a Black feminist perspective and includes multiple female “sitters,” in no way does she ignore Black femininity, but an overwhelming majority of her selected images feature male subjects and (understandably, of course) comment on dominant narratives of the masculine Black vernacular. 

Thus, while this post is mostly questions and positioning of ideas at this point, in my presentation I hope to interrogate how Fleetwood and Campt’s methodologies of integrated visuality and performance align and converge, particularly in terms of their understandings of affect and embodiment.

"Citizen" & The Performance of Existence / Jane Rohrer

On pages 52 & 53 of Citizen is the image of Glenn Ligon’s untitled oil stick, gesso, and graphite on wood, borrowing a quote from Zora Neale Hurston: “I DO NOT ALWAYS FEEL COLORED” on one side, “I FEEL MOST COLORED WHEN I AM THROWN AGAINST A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND” on the other. The letters are all black, and, at the top of the page, the background is white. By halfway down the page, the background is smudged and splattered in black, and, by the time eyes reach the bottom, the black has grown so that the letters are nearly illegible. Citizen is made up, largely, of lived experiences; whether Rankine herself or friends or family lived them is unclear, but what we are to draw from this genre-bending book is that, for Black people, to navigate the United States’ racism is a series of unending performances, reactions to and against others’ actions. Rankine examines this tension between hypervisibility and invisibility—this tension which Ligon’s untitled portrays, and which we’ve discussed at many other points throughout the semester. On page 55, Rankine’s speaker, or Rankine-as-speaker writes, “you take in things you don’t want to all the time” after a friend tells her “you have to learn not to absorb the world.” The visuals in Citizen lend an interpretive hand, but not one we can control: we are asked to “take things in.”

 Throughout Citizen, Rankine masterfully examines the daily effort of existing-as-performance, asking that readers stand witness to the everyday racism the speaker tolerates. Over and over, we read as the speaker is mistaken for someone else, as the speaker is not who someone expects them to be, as the speaker is expected to laugh at racist jokes, as the speaker is the sole viewer of “invisible” racism. The speaker, who is often a universal “you,” not an “I,” fights for the right to be nuanced, to be a whole self; this speaker makes careful distinctions between bendably-alike terms: “it wasn’t a match, I say,” she writes on the last page, “It was a lesson” (159). I think part of what Citizen does most effectively is trouble our notions of the absolute human existence which is so often taken for granted in the white lived experience—that for someone, something as “simple” as sitting in a car (here, I am again referencing the last page) can be an act of menace in the eyes of someone else, a source of trouble or power or selfhood for the one doing the sitting. According to Rankine, every second of every day can be very much more than a simple existence, no matter how seemingly quotidian.

In the Introduction chapter to Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, Nicole Fleetwood offers a helpful elaboration on the “polyvalent meaning” of the word render, in reference to black visuality: “to give help; to translate; to deliver a verdict; to submit for consideration; to purify through extraction; to surrender something; to exchange or give something back—as they each contribute to an understanding of the visual, viewed and viewing black subject” (7). Here, and after Fleetwood references Wahneema Lubiano’s theorizing that “telling the ‘truth’ demands that we consider the truth of something compared to something else,” I had margin notes about how similar this felt to Shane Vogel’s concepts of the “real” and “authentic” (5). To be “real” or to be “rendered” is to be understood by an outside group as such—“real” or “rendered” and “existing” are not synonymous. So, if we are to understand that “truth,” “reality,” “authenticity” (etc.) are matters of nuanced performance, not binaries of good & bad, should we not be concerned with doing a form of close listening? Here, I mean listening as a way to approach visuality (and visual performance/performance cues) that is complicated, curious, and thus less natural, perhaps, than simply looking at it. As Fleetwood suggests, “how do we return to what we already know with curiosity and openness so that new forms of knowing and recognition emerge?” (7). I ask: how does one listen critically to a book of text which defies boundaries of genre and selfhood? Is close listening a companion to visuality or a challenge to it?  

To end, I would like to provide two examples of “video poetry,” where visual performance(s) (of race) are central to both the original poetry's content and the video which couples it. Senna Yee, who is Chinese-Canadian, and Monica McClure, who is Mexican-American, both use visuals to supplement, complicate, compliment, or otherwise, to borrow from Fleetwood, “render,” the poem itself.  I’d like us to think about how this visual interacts with the visuals throughout Citizen—in what ways do these visuals compare/contrast/interact with each other? How do they complicate our ideas of what it means to be a visible, legible, person?

Senna Yee, book trailer for "How Do I Look?"

Monica McClure, "Chiflada"

¡Oye Como Va!: Vazquez’s Listening in Detail

A difficult question that scholars focusing on the study of Cuba face is how to adequately represent the complexities of its culture. As Alexandra T. Vazquez—a child of the Cuban diaspora—has noted in the Introduction to Listening In Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (2013), scholars have tried to find qualities that solidify Cuban culture into a definitive set of practices, often erasing the diverse identities that form Cuba’s national and international community. The strive to define Cubanidad also creates a false essentialism, and one of the solutions to this problem is Vazquez’s invitation to a detailed listening of Cuban musicality. 

To listen in detail to Cuban music, according to Vazquez, is to consider “the ways that music and the musical reflect—in flashes, moments, sounds—the colonial, racial, and geographic past and present of Cuba as much as the creative traditions that impact and impart from it” (4). This theorization of listening is also a method that resists totality of academic argument, honoring the quality of being in a detail’s simplicity. This theoretical gesture creates room for more permutations of Cubanidad: “Totalizing attempts to define what and who Cuba is have long inspired possessive attachments to it. When approached through it’s details, and not via the overbearing bombast typical of any nationalism, Cuba offers creative furrows for being and belonging” (7). The greatest contribution of the introduction is the gift of a method that strives to resist totality, critiquing in praxis US imperialist forms of knowledge production. 

A key suggestion of the introduction is that Cubanidad is a performance. Even the exiled queer novelist Severo Sarduy has pointed to the performativity of Cubanidad in De donde son los cantantes(1967), a novel that uses the logics of sound to theorize constructions of space in Cuba’s landscape. Sarduy also does two important things: he criticizes gender by exaggerating it on the body of his not-quite-human characters and communicates what he believes is the fragmentary quality of Cuban culture by composing seemingly unconnected scenarios. The logics of sound, Vazquez beautifully proves, was also a great tool for the now lesser known but very influential Cuban playwright Maria Irenes Fornés, who felt artistically “oiled” by the sounds of Olga Guillot’s Añorando el Caribe (23). What Vazquez is pointing readers to are the details, these logics of sound, that are often missed or dismissed by critics searching for more obvious markers of Cubanidad. Musical details and the logics of Cuban sound as performative tools for the construction of identity, fluid or otherwise, are the subject of Vazquez’s inconclusive study. 

At the heart of Chapter One is a critique and reevaluation of the work that anthologies do. Tracing a brief history of the anthology and its function during colonialism and after the formation of nation states, Vazquez claims that anthologies have been an exercise in defining national boundaries. Examining Alfredo Rodríguez’s Cuba Linda(1996), a musical anthology as she puts it, Vazquez extends Cubanidad outside national boundaries, illustrating how Rodríguez’s music is in companionship with jazz in the US, for example, through a performative reflection of sound on the page. Sound migrates, and a sonic anthology would have to account how these migrations transgress and transform national boundaries. 

Chapter Two begins with a discussion of the subversive intellectual and the difficulty she represents for the academy. On the one hand, the academy needs her subversive work, but it cannot deal with the weight of her messy, unstable methods and methodologies, needless to say the material she works with. For Vazquez, this notion of the subversive intellectual is embodied by the music of and recorded oral histories by Graciela Pérez, a jazz singer who would have traveled the world by the time she was in her twenties. The chapter, while centering on Pérez’s work and her relationship to Vazquez, offers us a meditation on the work that we as striving subversive intellectuals must do: “There are no prescriptive because the subversive intellectual leaves none behind. Which is not to say that there are no rules. Openness seems to be inarguable condition. One has to go beyond reliable critical locations, listen a little harder, feel comfortable with flexible theories. A willingness to become trained in their methods of insurgence, escape, and risk taking is required” (95). Vazquez prescribes intellectual vulnerability as a tool for destabilizing the violent totalities of our productions. 

I leave you with an invitation to listen in detail to the work of Celia Cruz, Alexander Abreu, Krudas Cubensi, Los Van Van, and Orishas. Some of these artists were exhiled, some are queer, and some are bound to the island.

CeliaCruz , Yo Vivire 

Abreu, Me Dicen Cuba

Krudas Cubensi: 

Los Van Van, Amiga Mia

Orishas: Cuba Isla Bella

Abreu, Conga Pa' Cerrar 

Tengan pa’ que se entretenga (Suggested outside materials)

The Rest I Make Up (A film about Maria Irene Fornés)

https://vimeo.com/181778589

In search of Non-Nation/Un-history/Non-Race in the disruptive configuration of race, nation, and gender in Calypso craze

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.

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.