A Tale of Two Cities II
Conceived as a companion to Chapter 3, this chapter also examines movement in public spaces in two creole cities, but this time emphasizing an approach grounded in ethnography and focusing upon two relatively contemporary dance-based social communities: the rará performers of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, and the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans. It finds well-known historical and ethnographic parallels between these two social organizations within their respective urban-Caribbean contexts but also teases out more sophisticated and less familiar understandings of raráistes’ and Indians’ political intentionality--the parallel ways in which their costume, movement, and sound enables temporary, but potent, subaltern resistance to dominant culture’s control of public spaces.