Interview with Rebecca Hope Dirksen

Isabel Machado interviews Rebecca Hope Dirksen on After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy: Carnival, Politics, and Musical Engagement in Haiti (2020). Interview date: Mar 17, 2021 Dr. Rebecca Dirksen is an ethnomusicologist working across the spectrum of musical genres in Haiti and its diaspora. Her research concerns cultural approaches to development, crisis, and disaster; sacred ecologies, diverse environmentalisms, and ecomusicology; and applied/engaged/activist scholarship. She is a professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington and a founding member of the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT).

Mobile, Alabama’s Joe Cain Procession

This article investigates the contradictions that characterize Mobile, Alabama’s Joe Cain Day celebration. We look at the official narratives that established Mobile’s Mardi Gras origin myths and the event’s tradition invention in 1967 with a People’s Parade centered around Cain’s redface character, Chief Slacabamorinico. Then we discuss the complicated and ever-evolving symbolism surrounding the character by discussing more recent iterations of this public performance. In its inception, the Joe Cain celebration was a clear example of Lost Cause nostalgia, yet it has been adopted, adapted, and embraced by historically marginalized people who use it as a way to claim their space in the festivities. Employing both historical and ethnographic research, we show that carnival can simultaneously be a space for defiance and reaffirmation of social hierarchies and exclusionary discourses. We discuss here some of the concrete material elements that lend this public performance its white supremacist subtext, but we also want to complicate the definition of “materiality” by claiming a procession as a Confederate monument/memorial.

El Es Dios!

This article outlines a brief historical sketch of the Danza Azteca-Chichimeca, or danza for short, which is becoming ubiquitous in areas of the United States with a significant Mexican American population. It looks at its origins during the early colonial period of Mexico, especially its mythological beginnings, to help elucidate the deep foundation of the dance tradition. This sketch also addresses the evolution of danza after it spread from its place of origin in the Bajío into major urban areas like Mexico City, where, once there, it changed due to ideological and political trends that circulated in the post-revolution period. The article also looks at danza’s pseudo-militaristic undertones to suggest that it might have contributed to the growing discontent among peasants and indigenous people, leading to Mexican independence. Some scholars have suggested that it, as a revitalizationist tradition, belongs in the “crisis cult” category. This analysis became evident when danza encountered neo-Aztec philosophies that promoted nationalistic and restorationist ideologies. In sum, the article touches on the popularity of danza in the United States despite the current climate of xenophobia and anti-migration, and nods at its growing international and global appeal.

“Carnaval em casa”

The carnival of 2021 of Rio de Janeiro was unprecedently cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the city administration knew it would have to enforce the decision and convince residents to avoid celebrating despite the restrictions. Importantly, officials had the support of the samba schools and the blocos of street carnival, and the blocos organized a manifesto and campaign declaring that in 2021 carnival would be “at home.” While many scholars have shown how street music can mobilize revelers, this article shows that the blocos of Rio’s street carnival also have the capacity to demobilize them. Their campaign drew on familiar carnivalesque and Brazilian tropes to rationalize a biopolitical message of civic responsibility, respect for life, and resistance to virus denialism. They played on long-standing Brazilian tropes of carnival as an ephemeral moment whose presence is fleeting and soon experienced as saudade, or nostalgia. I explore various manifestations of the campaign, including its manifestos and arguments, as well as some of the alternatives that were offered, such as virtual carnival performances and new carnival songs adapted to the situation. By inverting their traditional demands to occupy the streets and instead limiting festivity to domestic space, the blocos framed their plea not as a departure from carnival tradition, but as fundamentally carnivalesque. I argue that classic carnival theories are best understood as performative rather than an explanatory; that is, it is how carnival practitioners deploy the carnivalesque tropes of inversion as elements of a persuasive discourse that is my focus.

Celebration of One

Brief interview with Valeria Molinari

George IV’s Coronation as Festival

This article analyzes George IV’s coronation as a multisensory festive experience in order to understand the meanings of diamonds within British material culture in 1821. Reframing the coronation as a festival allows historical scholars to bridge the premodern/modern divide in early nineteenth-century historiography and demonstrates the ongoing centrality of festivals in consumer culture in the modern era. It also offers a vantage point from which to study sensory paradigm shifts and clashes that occurred in this context and evaluate diamonds in relation to other pieces of material culture outside of the confines of a formal marketplace. The article argues that the coronation shifted how diamonds were thought about in Britain, though this shift was subtle and deeply embedded in the turmoil of the moment. On a widespread scale, the event normalized the association of diamonds with monarchy, imperial power, and light, in ways that made diamonds seem like quotidian items. The article is based on accounts of the event in newspapers, periodicals, and official histories.