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Reviews
| Just below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and U.S. South. Edited by Jessica Adams, Michael Bibler, and Cécile Accilien. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Notes and index. $59.50 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).
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In Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which cast slavery's victims into iconic status, Cassy—the beautiful but older biracial concubine—outfoxes her master by escaping first to Canada and then Liberia. Feminist critics champion Cassy's ingenious getaway in the company of Emmeline, an ingenue slave who can pass for Spanish, but hardly note Cassy's heritage as a French-speaking Creole. Slaves did not just speak English, although that is the image usually presented. Roughly a century and a half after slavery's end, its repercussions are still socially and culturally evident, but the reach of the plantation economy is rarely connected across tongues in comprehensive outline. Just below South explores the wider span of plantation ideology as manifested in tourism through kinships expressed in drama, poetry, literature, dance, and popular reenactments of yesteryear such as Carnival. |
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Language as social mask recurs as a theme in this ten-essay anthology, which draws from circum-Atlantic performance theories that emphasize slavery as dictating and redrawing borders. In the four essays of the first section, the focus is on interlingual resources. Carolyn Vellenga Berman's essay shows Cassy as having a second, more private language. Don E. Walicek's essay uncovers a barely known, nineteenth-century slave emigration from the United States to Samana in Hispaniola. Despite their status as exiles, descendants of the original six thousand emigrants saw themselves as Americans and struggled to maintain their English-based Creole and group integrity. |
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Two essays, by Rawle Gibbons and Kathleen M. Gough, reference Trinidad. They stand out in the second section, which is focused on resistant behavior. In the Gibbons essay, another group of blacks from the United States, whose arrival antedated the Samana settlement, received sanctuary on the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean. The Merikins, as they were called, fought on the side of the British in the American Revolution in return for land and freedom. Their presence is reflected in Carnival, which gained state sanction during the tumultuous civil rights era, when the past was reevaluated and, in some cases, renewed. As a public performance, Carnival reflects a continuum of opposition. Sailor, an enduring, resiliently popular icon, has his own Carnival masque, or mas, through which he links in fluid fashion communal experiences on the sea as well as the African cleansing rituals and Christian baptisms that water represents. |
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The third section is centered on innovative cartographies. Michael P. Bibler writes about Truman Capote to widen the range of marginalized bodies to include the sexual other. In House of Flowers (1954), a Broadway musical based on one of his short stories, Capote features a Haitian prostitute who, like a modern Cassy, is caught between city and country. In his novel, Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), the androgynous Holly Golightly—who draws cosmopolitan credit from being engaged to a Brazilian politician—deracinates her own history. In her dash to forget, she becomes unmoored, without ties anywhere. The collection's last essay, by Jana Evans Braziel, links a work by Jamaica Kincaid on the biracial matrix that slavery engendered with William Faulkner's take on this same matter in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In that novel, which revisits Haiti, the patriarch of a fated line marries a Native woman, thereby consigning his biracial children to outsider status. |
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The editors of Just below South posit an intercontinental plantation economy dependent on the transfer of dominated bodies. By inflecting the languages they learned with the languages they remembered, the dominated and their descendants retained a modicum of autonomy. Through that modicum they crafted song, text, performance, and an alternative narrative expressive of resistance. Their saga of plural identities is poised to redraw the borders not only of American Studies but also of other disciplines and area studies as well.
Barbara Lewis
University of Massachusetts-Boston
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