Cultures in Motion (Publications in Partnership with the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691159092 ISBN 13: 9780691159096

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2013

Synopsis

In the wide-ranging and innovative essays of Cultures in Motion, a dozen distinguished historians offer new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, these essays follow a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history.



Cultures in Motion challenges the premise of fixed, stable cultural systems by showing that cultural practices have always been moving, crossing borders and locations with often surprising effect. The essays offer striking examples from early to modern times of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. These are histories where nothing--dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, musical practices, feminist aspirations, sewing machines, streamlined metals, or labor networks--remains stationary.


In addition to the editors, the contributors are Celia Applegate, Peter Brown, Harold Cook, April Masten, Mae Ngai, Jocelyn Olcott, Mimi Sheller, Pamela Smith, and Nira Wickramasinghe.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel T. Rodgers is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University. Bhavani Raman is an associate professor in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Helmut Reimitz is a professor in the Department of History at Princeton University..

From the Back Cover

"Cultures in Motion represents first-rate scholarship and opens up a critical new space for historiography. Exploring the movement of things, ideas, and other cultural forms, the book--and the introduction in particular--gives an independent existence and importance to such work, and raises original questions about historical change and intercultural understandings."--Thomas Bender, author ofA Nation Among Nations

"This book provides a new approach to finding a language to describe the new realities that emerge from the interactions of geographically or temporally different cultural practices, material objects, and languages, as they meet in a given, shared space. The essays are engaging in subject matter and persuasively written, and the introduction is superb."--Barbara Metcalf, professor of history emerita, University of California, Davis

"This successful collection of essays focuses on the inherent instability of cultural spheres and the increasing recognition that traditional models of comparative, global, and transcultural/transnational investigation do not do justice to the complexities of human history. Cultures in Motion defines the contours of a new way of thinking and researching cultural history."--Patrick J. Geary, Institute for Advanced Study

From the Inside Flap

"Cultures in Motion represents first-rate scholarship and opens up a critical new space for historiography. Exploring the movement of things, ideas, and other cultural forms, the book--and the introduction in particular--gives an independent existence and importance to such work, and raises original questions about historical change and intercultural understandings."--Thomas Bender, author ofA Nation Among Nations

"This book provides a new approach to finding a language to describe the new realities that emerge from the interactions of geographically or temporally different cultural practices, material objects, and languages, as they meet in a given, shared space. The essays are engaging in subject matter and persuasively written, and the introduction is superb."--Barbara Metcalf, professor of history emerita, University of California, Davis

"This successful collection of essays focuses on the inherent instability of cultural spheres and the increasing recognition that traditional models of comparative, global, and transcultural/transnational investigation do not do justice to the complexities of human history. Cultures in Motion defines the contours of a new way of thinking and researching cultural history."--Patrick J. Geary, Institute for Advanced Study

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Cultures in Motion

By Daniel T. Rodgers, Bhavani Raman, Helmut Reimitz

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15909-6

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................
vii
Cultures in Motion: An Introduction Daniel T. Rodgers.....................
1
Part I: The Circulation of Cultural Practices..............................
21
Chapter One: The Challenge Dance: Black-Irish Exchange in Antebellum 
America April F. Masten...................................................
23
Chapter Two: Musical Itinerancy in a World of Nations: Germany, Its Music, 
and Its Musicians Celia Applegate.........................................
60
Chapter Three: From Patriae Amator to Amator Pauperum and Back Again: 
Social Imagination and Social Change in the West between Late Antiquity 
and the Early Middle Ages, ca. 300–600 Peter Brown........................
87
Part II: Objects in Transit................................................
107
Chapter Four: Knowledge in Motion: Following Itineraries of Matter in the 
Early Modern World Pamela H. Smith........................................
109
Chapter Five: Fashioning a Market: The Singer Sewing Machine in Colonial 
Lanka Nira Wickramasinghe.................................................
134
Chapter Six: Speed Metal, Slow Tropics, Cold War: Alcoa in the Caribbean 
Mimi Sheller...............................................................
165
Part III: Translations.....................................................
195
Chapter Seven: The True Story of Ah Jake: Language, Labor, and Justice in 
Late-Nineteenth-Century Sierra County, California Mae M. Ngai.............
197
Chapter Eight: Creative Misunderstandings: Chinese Medicine in 
Seventeenth-Century Europe Harold J. Cook.................................
215
Chapter Nine: Transnational Feminism: Event, Temporality, and Performance 
at the 1975 International Women's Year Conference Jocelyn Olcott..........
241
Afterwords.................................................................
267–278
Itinerancy and Power Bhavani Raman........................................
267
From Cultures to Cultural Practices and Back Again Helmut Reimitz.........
270
List of Papers.............................................................
279
List of Contributors.......................................................
283
Notes......................................................................
285
Index......................................................................
357

CHAPTER 1

The Challenge Dance

BLACK-IRISH EXCHANGE IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

April F. Masten

In his 1843 edition of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, Irishwriter William Carleton described the accomplishments of Bob M'Cann,whom he encountered in a "remote and isolated" part of Ireland. "Bob'scrack feat," Carleton recalled, "was performing the Screw-pin Dance, ofwhich we have only this to say, that by whatsoever means he becameacquainted with it, it is precisely the same dance which is said to havebeen exhibited by some strolling Moor before the late Queen Caroline."It is not surprising that Carleton recorded Bob's screw-pin dance in hisvolume since the love of dancing was considered a typical Irish trait, buthis speculation that it had African roots was exceptional.

Carleton was unable to pinpoint a site of exchange—that time orplace where African and Irish dancers shared steps, yet his details suggestmultiple possibilities. He identifies the dance as "Bob's crack feat,"which means it was his signature step, the humorous "brag" dance heperformed to show off or compete with other dancers. Bob might havemade it up himself, but the name "screw-pin dance" suggests he learnedit in a waterfront parish. Screw-pins were wooden spindles with whichsailors and dockworkers tightened the bales of cotton they stowed in theholds of ships. Negro stevedores used to sing as they pushed the spindlesaround, and these jack-screw shanties were transposed into dance tunesby shipboard and dockside musicians. Sailors hailing from England, Ireland,Europe, Africa, and the Americas traded dances on sea and in porttowns where ships docked and whites and blacks mixed freely. By the1840s, the U.S. South was the largest producer and exporter of cotton inthe world. So Bob's step could have been an American dance transportedto the coastal regions of Ireland in the body memory of ship passengers.

Or it might have been a Mediterranean hybrid transmitted straightfrom North Africa, another cotton-producing region, where the notoriousQueen Caroline spent the early 1800s carousing with her Italian servantsand a black dancer named Mahomet. During her trial for adulteryin 1820, Caroline's defenders compared Mahomet's dance to "the Spanishbolero or the negro dance" performed at theaters in London and Dublinsince the 1790s. Censored by the Spanish aristocracy, the bolero wasa sensuous peasant dance characterized by syncopated percussive steps,castanet clicks, and the pelvic twists common to many African dances.Then again, Mahomet's dance could have been like Bob's and incorporatedthe steps of sailors and actors visiting North Africa. In any case,by linking the brag dance of an Irish rube to that of a strolling Moor,Carleton was not denying its Irishness. Rather, his observation suggestsa contemporary awareness that peasant traditions were being producedaround the globe by intercultural mixing and a diaspora that sent millionsof Irish immigrants and African slaves to America.

This essay recovers the transnational origins of a distinctly Americantradition of brag dancing—the challenge dance. Part theater, partsport, challenge dances were jigging contests got up among and betweenwhite and black men, and sometimes women. Emerging in the antebellumera alongside boxing, scores of elaborate and impromptu jig-dancecompetitions enlivened riverfront and port cities from New Orleans toToronto. They took place on streets, docksides, and plantations, in marketsquares, taverns, and town halls, and in theaters and circus rings aspart of white and blackface shows. Spontaneous and planned, spread byword of mouth or announced in print, dance matches drew large raucouscrowds and were viewed, judged, and bet on like prizefights. Repeat winnersof large wagers claimed the title, or named themselves, "ChampionDancer of the World." These matches were the product of the intersectingdiasporas and cultural exchange of Irish and African emigrants movingthrough the Atlantic world.

Antebellum America's most famous rivals were a young African Americandancer called Master Juba and a young Irish American dancer calledMaster Diamond who engaged in a series of challenge dances between1843 and 1846. Master Juba, stage name of William Henry Lane, is afamiliar figure in the history of American dance. Visiting New York in1842, Charles Dickens saw him perform at Pete Williams's tavern inFive Points and immortalized him in his travelogue, American Notes forGeneral Circulation. John Diamond (Dimond) is less well known. P. T.Barnum found him dancing about the wharves of New York in 1839,signed a contract with his father, and put him in the hands of a theatricalagent. After 1843 both men traveled with blackface minstrel troupes,and their challenge dancing is usually studied in that context, with Juba'smoves providing evidence of African influences on American dance andDiamond's proving that white minstrels stole black material. But scantattention has been paid to challenge dancing as a popular social practiceengaged in by ordinary folk for sociability, sport, entertainment, status,and profit. Promoted professional challenge dancing relied on this practiceas a source for dancers and point of access for audiences. What isobscured when the challenge dance is looked at solely through the lens ofminstrelsy is the formative intertwining of Irish and African culture thatbrought Diamond and Juba into competition.

The jig dancing parodied in blackface minstrel shows of the postbellumera was quite different from that which emerged earlier in a varietyof settings. Challenge dancers swirled across racial and ethnic boundaries,not erasing those lines but helping to construct new social practicesand spaces. Even when they blacked up, their steps were called "awonder," "beautiful," and "intricate," words rarely used to describe lowcomedy. Using the influences at hand, black and white challenge dancersstudied, adopted, and transformed each other's steps and moves, jointlyforging a distinctive dance style and tradition. Their matches conveyed anational identity shared by lower-class whites and blacks that later formsof blackface minstrelsy erased.

White influences on black dance are rarely explored, despite the factthat Irish jigging was pervasive among slaves and free blacks in earlyAmerica. The spread of European language, food, music, dance, and religionto Africans is usually dismissed as the inevitable consequence ofracial slavery. But as Hazel Carby reminds us, "the migratory historiesand cultures of other peoples ... are sometimes carried by and sometimesexpressed through political and cultural vessels marked as black." MasterJuba was hailed as an exceptional jig dancer and Master Diamondas an outstanding Negro dancer, designations that suggest pervasive,inextricable black-Irish exchange. Nowhere better can this magnificentglobal crosscurrent be seen than in the steps, movements, rhythms, musicalaccompaniments, dress, stage names, advertisements, venues, andvocabulary of challenge dancers.

The term "jig" originally referred to a dance of Irish origins, yet innineteenth-century America it became synonymous with Negro dancing.Negro jig dancers were blacks who adapted Celtic culture to their ownpurposes; they were also whites, sometimes called "nigger dancers," whowore blackface or adopted the black jigging style. Such monikers werenot simply demeaning; they were denotative. Negro jigging pervadedthe Northeast in the 1830s, by which time gradual emancipation lawshad ended slavery in the region and an agricultural depression after theNapoleonic War had forced over 800,000 people to leave Ireland forAmerica. Thrown together in the slum districts of port towns, theseblack and Irish migrants enjoyed and developed creolized styles of musicand dance. In this context, newspapers, playbills, market books, urbanguides, and other texts employed the term "nigger dancer" to describeanyone whose movement and musical style asserted slave-like characteristics,that is, a mixture of African and Celtic or English elements.Beyond referring to African Americans, the term incorporated prejudiceagainst lower-class whites, particularly Irish immigrants. It signifiedthe sort of lowborn whites whom blacks interacted with and vice versa,and the way they were both elevated and disadvantaged by their connectionto each other. Masters Diamond and Juba matured and met asdancers in this complex, symbiotic world. But as suggested by WilliamCarleton, Bob M'Cann, and Mahomet, the blending of Irish and Africanculture that produced their dancing rivalry began much earlier andelsewhere.

SHARED TRADITIONS

It is impossible to know the first time an African captive shuffled to aCeltic tune or an Irish sailor reeled to an African beat, voluntarily orunder duress. Such exchanges began on sea and land, in Africa and theBritish Isles, and in every metropole and colonial outpost where blacksinteracted with whites. They flourished throughout the transatlanticworld, but most spectacularly in Jacksonian America where dancing waspervasive among all classes. Journalist George Foster in 1849 called it"a universal human instinct." Almost every militia group, firemen's company,art association, trade union, neighborhood tavern, upscale brothel,and political organization regularly held balls or shindigs, and thesesocial dances often ended with a dancing match, called a breakdown ordance for eels. During the financial recession of 1837– 43, these informaldance matches proliferated alongside commercial acts financed andpromoted by saloon and theater managers. In this environment, incomingdance practices collided with local traditions, creating somethingfresh and exciting.

Underlying this cultural exchange was not just the poverty and migrationthat brought black and Irish groups together but compatibilitiesin their two dance traditions. Across Africa and Ireland, people dancedwith regional differences in their movement and musical styles, but theymaintained a conceptual approach to the arts that created commonalities.Irish and African emigrants shared a love of dancing, complexrhythmic patterns in their music, similar dance formats and techniques,and an emphasis on training with a master, improvisation, and competition.Dancing was also universal among common people—young andold, male and female—who danced for entertainment, ritual, and sportat weddings, funerals, feasts, holy days, and other celebrations. Thesesimilarities made it easier for Irish and African migrants to creativelymerge their dance practices.

But their traditions also included formal differences (figure 1.1). InAfrican dance the action is falling, while in Irish it is rising. Africandancers are pulled to the earth; the dancer works with gravity using thebody's weight to accent the rhythmic beats of the dance. Irish dancersrebound from the earth; the dancer dances underneath the body, trappingeach note of the music on the floor as if the body were weightless.Nineteenth-century African dancers emphasized angulated postures andgestures, performing with relaxed knees and separating hip, torso, andshoulder moves. Nineteenth-century Irish dancers accentuated foot andlegwork, keeping the upper body erect and moving from the hips downwith relaxed arms. These differences were important to challenge dancers,whose success depended on not just precision in performing traditionalsteps but also an aptitude for improvisation. They represented newmoves with which to create novel steps. They gave black and Irish dancersa reason to interact.

Competitive dance can be traced to many societies, but the dominantfeatures of antebellum challenge dancing came from western Africa andIreland. In both places, dance competitions took place between menand women, or sometimes dancers of the same sex, within a circle ofpotential dancers and musicians. The nzuba or juba was a dance of skilland courting brought to the Americas by African slaves. In a customaryjuba witnessed in 1844 Cuba, a female dancer advanced and "commencinga slow dance, made up of shuffling of the feet and various contortionsof the body; thus challenges a rival from among the men. One of these,bolder than the rest, after awhile steps out, and the two then strive whichshall first tire the other; the woman performing many feats which theman attempts to rival, often excelling them, amid the shouts of the rest.A woman will sometimes drive two or three successive beaux from thering, yielding her place at length to some impatient belle, who has beenmeanwhile looking on with envy at her success."

The juba was absorbed and altered by white competitive dancerswho lived alongside slaves in North America. "Towards the close of anevening," observed an Englishman traveling through Virginia in 1775,"when the company are pretty well tired with country-dances, it is usualto dance jigs; a practice originally borrowed, I am informed, from theNegroes.... These dances are without any method or regularity: a gentlemanand lady stand up, and dance about the room, one of them retiring,the other pursuing, then perhaps meeting, in an irregular fantasticalmanner. After some time, another lady gets up, and then the first ladymust sit down, she being, as they term it, cut out: the second lady actsthe same part which the first did, till somebody cuts her out. The gentlemenperform in the same manner." Unfamiliar with challenge dancing,the observer did not recognize the dancers' "irregular fantastical" movementsas the formal steps of a dance, but Irish jig dancers did.

All nineteenth-century Irish jigs were competitive, but Ireland's counterpartto the juba was the moínín or moneen jig (figure 1.2). Accordingto contemporary accounts, the dancing couple faced each other inside acircle of spectator-dancers "scarcely more than two yards each way." Thefootwork was lively, and the woman held up her skirts to facilitate thesteps. After each step, "the dancers changed places, and moving slowlyfor a few seconds, commenced another which threw the proceedingone quite into the shade, and, as a matter of course, called out a louder'bravo!' and a wilder 'hurro!'" Without causing any interruption, "doorswere slipped under the feet of the dancers, which now beat an accompanimentto the music, as if a couple of expert drummers had suddenlyjoined the orchestra." Like the juba, Irish jigs required stamina, as onefactor was tiring out or "dancing down" one's partner or fellow couples.One Irishman described the dancing as "so violent ... the very recollectionof it makes me feel as if the barometer was some two hundred inthe shade." Another said that "the girls danced the jig facing the boysand that the lads couldn't stop dancing 'on point of honour.'" Carriedto North America by the Irish diaspora, this dance was taken up andaltered by African American dancers for whom such violent freedom wasa familiar element of dance.

When new popular dances or dancing styles reach people with strongdance and music traditions, they are merged into the repertoire and subtlychanged by each dancer's knowledge of steps, body type, and musicaltastes. Dance and music were inextricably intertwined in Irish andAfrican dance practice. In Ireland melodies distinguished dances just asrhythms differentiated them in Africa. Irish dancers felt the melody; Africandancers danced the drums. Good dancers did not just follow themusic; they embellished it with their rhythms; they played a duet withthe musician. Nor did good musicians just keep time by playing the tune;they responded to the dancer, inserting rhythmic and melodic passagesof their own. In Ireland and Africa a friendly rivalry between dancersand musicians could be heard in the increased tempo and intricate patternsof their embellishments. The musical instruments and techniquesused to accompany challenge dancing in America were products of bothregions. Fiddles (played against the chest) and banjos had African precursors(figure 1.3). Irish dancers also whistled or hummed the tune, a seannós (old style) technique known as "lilting," and black dancers createdrhythmic sounds by striking the body with the hands and the foot onthe floor, an African American technique known as "patting" juba. Theseaccompaniments were passed from one group to the other. In the 1830s,a travel writer in Buffalo noted that "the beaten jig time" of the Irish boysdancing on the wharves "was a rapid patting on the fore thighs," while ajournalist at a Philadelphia market observed New Jersey slaves dancing"while some darkies whistle."

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691159092
• ISBN 13: 9780691159096
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384
• Editor: Rodgers Daniel T., Raman Bhavani, Reimitz Helmut