Spring 2007
Symposia & Conferences
Creativity and Performance in the Circum-Caribbean World: Comparative
Perspectives
Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life, Tulane University
April 25 - 26, 2007
From 2002 to 2006 Tulane University hosted seven fellows as part of its Rockefeller Humanities
Fellowship program Shared Inheritances: Comparative Studies in Creativity and Performance in
the Mississippi-Gulf-Caribbean Region. The fellows will return to New Orleans on the eve of
the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival to share the findings and products of their research.
Click here to find out more information.
Creativity and Performance in the Circum-Caribbean World: Comparative Perspectives
The Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship Conference
April 25-26, 2007
Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life
From 2002 to 2006 Tulane University hosted seven fellows as part of its Rockefeller Humanities
Fellowship program Shared Inheritances: Comparative Studies in Creativity and Performance in
the Mississippi-Gulf-Caribbean Region. The fellows will return to New Orleans on the eve of
the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival to share the findings and products of their research.
Click here to download printable pdf version of schedule.
SCHEDULE
Wednesday, April 25
LBC 201, Race Conference Room
The Role of Community-Based Cultural Museum
and Associations Specializing in the Performing
Arts and the Cultivation of Identity in the
Diaspora: A Comparative Study
2:00 - 3:30
Fellows: Susana Baca & Ricardo Pereira
Co-founders, Instituto Negrocontinuo
Discussant: Tomás Ybarra-Frausto
Associate Director, Creativity & Culture
(Retired) The Rockefeller Foundation
Session Chair: Javier León Department of Music,
Tulane University
The comparative evolution of benevolent
societies in the African Diaspora: A Focus on
Guadeloupe and New Orleans
Fellow: Kathe Managan
Department of Anthropology
University of Michigan
4:00 - 5:30
Discussant: Helen Regis
Department of Geography & Anthropology
Louisiana State University
Session Chair:Tom Klingler
Department of French & Italian
Tulane University
Wednesday, April 25 Keynote Address
102 Jones Hall
6:00 – 7:00 pm
"Free to Be a Slave: Slavery as Metaphor in the Afro-Atlantic Religions"
J. Lorand Matory Professor of Anthropology & African American Studies Department of
Anthropology
Harvard University
Reception 7:00 pm 100A Jones Hall/Jones Hall Patio
Thursday, April 26
LBC 201, Race Conference Room
River-side Exchanges: Language, Ritual and Trade in
10:30 - the Amazon and Mississippi River Valleys, 1616-1823
12:00
Fellow: M. Kittiya Lee
Mellow Postdoctoral Fellow in Colonial Latin
America
University of Chicago
Discussant: Osvaldo Pardo
Department of Modern & Classical Languages
University of Connecticut
Session Chair: John Charles
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
Tulane University
REBEL: A Cuban Woman Soldier of the American
Civil War
Fellow: Maria Aguí Carter
Iguana Films
1:00 2:30
Founder,
Discussant: Lisandro Pérez
Director, Cuban Research Institute Florida
International University
Session Chair: Ana Lopez
Senior Associate Provost/ Director of Cuban &
Caribbean Studies, Tulane University
The New Orleans Mardi Gras and Rio de Janeiro
Carnival: Similarities and Differences in the
Kingdoms of Rex and Momo
3:004:30
Fellow: Fred Góes
Faculdade de Letras Universidade Federal do Rio de
Janeiro
Discussant: Frederick Moehn
Department of Music, SUNY Stony Brook
Session Chair: Nick Spitzer
Department of Planning & Urban Studies, University
of New Orleans Host & Producer, American Routes
(Public Radio International)
"Rock the City with their Congo Dances:"The African
Layers of Colonial New Orleans
5:00 6:30
Fellow: Ned Sublette
Co-founder Qbadisc
Discussant: Gage Averill
Dean of the Faculty of Music
University of Toronto
Session Chair: Christopher Dunn
Department of Spanish & Porgtuguese
Tulane University
7:00
Reception: Lavin Bernick Center for University
Life Faculty & Staff Dining Room
Location
The Lavin Bernick Center for University Life is located on McAlister Drive between Freret and
Willow Streets. It is building #29 on the official map of Tulane. A .pdf version of that map is
available for printing from the website.
Parking
The organizers recommend parking on campus or just off campus in the surrounding
neighborhood. Guest parking permits can be purchased at the Public Safety Office located in the
Diboll Complex, #103 on the Tulane map. There are also parking meters available on McAlister
Drive and the first floor of the Diboll Complex.
Please adhere to parking regulations in the neighborhood. The best streets to park on include
Broadway, Audubon Blvd (off of Willow), Calhoun, and there is limited parking on Willow and
Freret Streets.
For more information contact:
(504) 865-5164
(504) 865-6719 fax
e-mail: rtsclas@tulane.edu
Abstracts of Conference Presentations
The Role of Community-Based Cultural Museum and Associations Specializing in
the Performing Arts and the Cultivation of Identity in the Diaspora: A Comparative
Study
Susana Baca & Ricardo Pereira
This research project aims to deepen the understanding of how cultural and ethnic identity is
constructed, valued and maintained thanks to the promotion of these performing traditions
through a variety of grass-roots, community based organizations. The focus will be on
organizations that form a part of the African-American community of New Orleans, such as the
Backstreet Cultural Museum, the New Orleans African-American Museum, the Ashe' Cultural
Arts Center, and Black Arts National Diaspora, Inc., in order to understand how their outreach
activities are able to support the continued awareness and practice of those musical traditions that
are an integral part of the New Orleans at the community level. We will study the contributions
that performance can have to the education of the community, the role of social organizations
and institutions in the maintenance and development of local musical practices, the politics
regarding the use of social and ethnic stereotypes both as a form of internal critique and a
manner of seeking social acceptance, as well as those musical and cultural practices that are key
to the identity of African-American community of New Orleans. Finally, this project will reflect
on the connection between these organizations and those local forms of musical expression that
are closely tied to the everyday life of the community (work, festive occasions, religious
celebrations, funerals, etc.) in an effort to learn how to establish similar connections between
local community organizations and Afroperuvian forms of musical expression, many of which
are no longer performed at the community level.
The comparative evolution of benevolent societies in the African Diaspora: A Focus on
Guadeloupe and New Orleans
Kathe Managan
Throughout the circum-Caribbean one finds various mutual aid associations and social clubs. In
these societies, the subordinate populations of African descent have developed powerful
traditions of associational life, which arose in the context of social constraints brought about by
repressive policies of the slave period and served needs that were not addressed by the dominant
society. This presentation will explore the emergence and evolution of benevolent societies and
mutual aid organizations in different parts of the African diaspora, focusing on how once similar
organizations in New Orleans and Guadeloupe have evolved in different ways, yet still respond
to
ongoing asymmetries of power. As comparison, this presentation will briefly explore the
contemporary manifestations of these organizations in other African diasporic societies.
River-side Exchanges: Language, Ritual and Trade in the Amazon and Mississippi River Valleys
, 1616-1823
Kittiya Lee
Based on the colonial periods of two immense American river cultures, this project examines
exchange between and among Indians, Europeans, Africans and their American and mixed
descendants. My interests center on the ways by which these individuals created, experienced,
practiced and enacted exchange of their languages, rituals and material items during the early
and middle phases of the territorial occupation and social integration of peoples from the
Americas, Europe and Africa into the local human landscape of the Middle and Lower Amazon
and the Lower Mississippi River Valleys (1616-1823)
My project is bound by three lines of inquiry. First, I will explore the gamut of roles played by
pidgins, creoles, dialects and trade jargons in facilitating spoken communication between
peoples of distinct, unintelligible languages. Second, I shall identify and analyze instances
wherein rituals characterized, informed and developed from inter-group dynamics. Third, I wish
to examine the items of barter and the consequences of their induction into trading partners'
societies. The larger goal of this project is to identify how riverine communities have created
regional identities and evolved culturally; in closer scrutiny, I seek to understand the historical
development of the caboclo and creole identities which today reference the distinct but
comparable plural biological and cultural antecedents respective to the Brazilian Amazon and
Louisiana.
REBEL: A Cuban Woman Soldier of the American Civil War
María Aguí Carter
My project is a historical film titled REBEL, about a Confederate soldier who fought at First
Bull Run and Fort Donelson, was wounded at Shiloh and served as a secret agent. Serving under
the alias of Lieut. Harry Buford, Loreta Janeta Velazquez was a Cuban woman who had grown
up in New Orleans. In 1876 her 600-page memoir, A Woman in Battle, was released, one of only
two published 19th C. books written by a Hispanic woman in North America. Although a selfavowed Southerner, her memoir revealed the dark side of war and criticized the Confederacy.
For over a hundred years, skeptics have dismissed her as a hoax, but more recently, historians
have pieced together information confirming her existence. Structured as a detective story, my
film reenacts Loreta Velazquez's first person memoir as a complement and counterpoint to the
national Civil War narrative, while relying on interviews with historians and evidence from the
historical record to find the woman behind the myth.
This little-known story of a Southern woman from Cuba in the American Civil War presents an
opportunity to examine the cultural and political connections between Southerners and
Hispanics, and their history of transnational migrations and shared inheritances in New Orleans
and the South. During the Rockefeller Fellowship year I combed local historical archives and
Tulane's extensive Latin American collections for material to be used in the film, I researched
and completed a script, and produced/directed a series of dramatic 19th C recreation scenes in
Louisiana historical settings such as the Pitot House, the Rosedown Plantation and the French
Quarter. I taught a master class of Louisiana teachers about Velaquez to help expand their Civil
War and 19th Century history curriculums during an LEH-funded workshop, and wrote two
entries, now published, in ABC/CLIO's Women in the American Civil War: An Encyclopedia,
one on Loreta Janeta Velazquez, and one on Hispanic Women during the Civil War. I will seek
to publish a longer article that can include research findings and analysis not possible in the
film. Principal photography is now complete. I am in post-production and raising finishing funds
for this film slated for PBS broadcast, theatrical and educational video distribution. A website
with study guides and outreach campaign will accompany the film.
The New Orleans Mardi Gras and Rio de Janeiro Carnival: Similarities and Differences in the
Kingdoms of Rex and Momo
Fred Goes
Although born of different cultural contexts, Mardi Gras and the Rio carnival became established
in the second half of the 19th century inspired by European carnivals: krewes and Grandes
Sociedades (great societies) emerged as the "civilized," official cultural expression of the white
population. Alongside this official culture, however, groups of black participants dressed as
Indians have been a crucial component of both carnival festivities, albeit in the realm of
"unofficial" carnival revelry. Their cultural performativity would seem to suggest both an
affirmation of belonging through the appeal to an indigenous "American" identity as well as a
veiled critique of white carnival practices.
There are no more Grandes Sociedades in today's Carnival in Rio. Their floats are now part of
the samba schools' performances, but they have lost their original critical significance and now
function merely to reinforce the organizing syntax of each school's theme (enredo). The krewes,
which continue to be the main feature of Mardi Gras, are as structurally complex as the samba
schools, which have been accepted by the white population of Brazil.
"Rock the City with their Congo Dances": The African Layers of Colonial New Orleans"
Ned Sublette
"On Sabbath evening the African slaves meet on the green by the swamp and rock the city with
their Congo dances."-- letter written in New Orleans, 1819
I will discuss the distinct cultural consequences of the three distinct slave regimes that New
Orleans experienced in less than 50 years: the French, the Spanish, and the Anglo-American.
Each had a distinct African cultural matrix associated with it, operating under different
constraints. The layering of these cultures made New Orleans unique in the world.
New Orleans became a city, and the important port it was situated to be, during the period of less
than 40 years when Spain controlled it - the last third of the 18th century. To the general public,
this is the least known facet of New Orleans's history, but it is a moment of critical importance to
the formation of American music. During that time, when Louisiana's silver dollars came from
Veracruz and its governor reported to Cuba's captain-general in Havana, New Orleans was
brought simultaneously into the Spanish monetary system (coming out of Mexico, it ruled the
hemisphere) and the Afro-Spanish rhythmic system (coming out of Havana, ditto). New
Orleans's strongest tie was to Havana, a link which remained in place for 190 years, until
President Kennedy imposed the embargo of Cuba, which was also an embargo of New Orleans,
and harmed economies on both sides of the Gulf. New Orleans's relationships to Havana and to
the disappeared territory of Saint-Domingue (burned down and replaced with the republic of
Haiti) also affected the town's music in ways that we cannot Always stipulate precisely, but can
point in the direction of. Finally, the interstate slave trade from the Upper South and the illegal
trade (most famously, that carried on by the Laffites) created further overlays to the unique
musical culture of Afro-Louisiana.
We could with some justification refer to the Spanish period in Louisiana as the Kongo period.
It was during the Spanish years in Louisiana that the territory received the largest number of
bozales (Africans coming directly from Africa). Within that, the largest single group—perhaps
25%—was from the Kongo-Ngola region. The tie between New Orleans and Havana was not
only one of Spanish colonial officials: both places were buzzing with Kongo culture.
In New Orleans we find the first known written instance anywhere of the word tango, referring
to black dancing, in 1786. I will look at the relationship of tango and bamboula, and I believe we
can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that, although we don't know exactly how the
music at Congo Square sounded, we can decode one rhythm that was played there -- a simple,
versatile rhythm that has never been forgotten, and does much to define American popular music
to this day.
Biographical Information on Speakers
Gage Averill
Gage Averill, Dean of Music at the University of Toronto, is an ethnomusicologist,
specializing in popular music of the Caribbean and North American vernacular music. His
books on Haitian popular music and power (A Day for the Hunter: A Day for the Prey:
Popular Music and Power in Haiti, Chicago 1997) and barbershop singing (Four Parts, No
Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony, Oxford 2003) have won best
book prizes from the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, and the
Association for Recorded Sound Collections. He has written on culture industries, applied
ethnomusicology, Haitian popular music, Trinidadian steelbands, American barbershop
harmony, African diasporic music, world music ensembles, Alan Lomax, music and
militarism, and music in peace and conflict. He has consulted for the Ford Foundation, the
National Endowment for the Arts, the Smithsonian Institute, the Organization of American
States, and for films, festivals, and copyright law cases. He is currently at work on a 10-CD
boxed set of music and film originally recorded in Haiti in the 1930s by Alan Lomax.
Susana Baca & Ricardo Pereira
Negrocontinuo is the first experimental center for the music and dance and is headed by Susana
Baca (Director) and Ricardo Pereira (Executive Director). It is a space that brings together the
most distinguished musicians in Peru and Latin America with local young artists and performers
in order to nurture innovation and creativity among new generations of Peruvian popular
musicians. Negrocontinuo also seeks to reacquaint participants with dance and natural bodily
movement in an attempt to reintroduce this activity as part of the everyday musical life of the
popular musician and counteract the stagnant institutionalization of these activities at the hands
of folklore schools and dance academies.
Maria Agui Carter
María Agui Carter is an independent filmmaker working out of Boston, Massachusetts. She
graduated from Harvard University and worked as an associate producer for the Harvard Film
Studies Center. She founded Iguana Films in 1999 and has produced and directed documentary
shorts about contemporary Latino arts, culture and politics. She has been working on the feature
documentary about Loreta Velazquez since 2002.
Fred Góes
Frederico Augusto Liberalli de Góes is a Professor of Theory of Literature at the Faculdade
de Letras at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and a member of the Cultural
Council of the State of Rio de Janeiro. He is also the leader of a research group on Carnival
(Núcleo Interdisciplinar de Estudos carnavalescos). In addition, Prof. Góes is a lyricist
composer of Brazilian popular music. He has published many essays in literary magazines
and newspapers and is the author of eleven books. As a lyricist, he has composed more
than 60 songs recorded by different Brazilian popular singers.
Kittiya Lee
Kittiya Lee is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Colonial Latin American History in the History
Department at the University of Chicago. Her previous interests have ranged from study of
late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century women’s roles in coffee planter-class
societies of southeastern Brazil’s Paraíba Valley to examinations of the roles played by
music and theatre in the Jesuit evangelization of sixteenth-century Indians in Brazil. Recent
research on relations between and among Indians, Europeans, Africans and their
descendants in colonial North and South America have turned her attention towards issues
relating to missionary translation projects and language, cultural mediation, material
exchange and ritual performance – threads of inquiry she intends to take up in future
comparative work on the colonial Americas. But for now, Kittiya is busy working on the
manuscript of her first book, which identifies and examines the socio-historical development
of two Amerind languages employed as major colonial period lingua franca in Brazil and
Amazonia, from the sixteenth through to the mid-eighteenth centuries.
Kathe Managan
Dr. Managan is currently a Mellon Teaching Fellow in the Anthropology Department at the
University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. from New York University, writing her
dissertation on “Language Choice, Linguistic Ideologies and Social Identities in Guadeloupe.”
Her specialties include language and identities with particular focus on Francophone and
African diasporic cultures of the Caribbean and Louisiana. “Anthropological Linguistic
Perspectives on Writing Guadeloupean Kréyòl: Struggles for Recognition of the Language and
Struggles over Authority,” a chapter by Dr. Managan in Studies in French Applied Linguistics is
currently forthcoming.
J. Lorand Matory
Dr. Moratory studies the diversity of African, African American, and Latin American culture,
with an emphasis on how differently various peoples understand identity. Gender, nationalism,
and the role of manumitted black travelers in shaping the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion are
the subject of his latest book Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationlism, and
Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, which won 2005 the Melville J. Herskovits from
the Association of African Studies for the best book of the year about Africa. He is currently
writing a book about the ethnic diversity in the African-descended population of the US,
concerning the experience and influence of Nigerians, Trinidadians, Jamaicans, "black" Indians,
Louisiana Creoles, Gullahs, and others in American life. It is called The Other African
Americans.
Frederick Moehn
Fred Moehn is an ethnomusicologist whose regional focus is the music of Latin America, with a
specialization in Brazilian popular music. He studied music production and engineering as an
undergraduate at Berklee College of Music in Boston. After graduating, however, he devoted his
energies to performing jazz and other styles of popular music in the New York City area (guitar
and voice). Through jazz he discovered the work of Antonio Carlos Jobim and other bossa nova
artists; he eventually chose Brazilian music as his topic for graduate study at New York
University. He conducted field research in Rio de Janeiro in 1998-1999 as a Fulbright scholar.
His research to date has focused on the negotiation between nationalist and cosmopolitan
sentiments in urban popular music in Brazil, and on music production and recording there. He
defended his dissertation on this topic, entitled Mixing MPB: Cannibals and Cosmopolitans in
Brazilian Popular Music, at NYU in 2001. He is currently beginning the process of rewriting the
dissertation for a book manuscript. Before coming to Stony Brook, Prof. Moehn taught at NYU
and Columbia. He is an affiliate of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS)
at Stony Brook. Current teaching responsibilities include Music Cultures of the World, Music in
Latin America, Music and Race, and a graduate seminar on the music of Brazil. Other interests
include how music technologies influence the development of musical styles and aesthetics on
the so-called periphery; music and cultural policy; and Latin American cultural studies.
Osvaldo Pardo
Currently an Associate professor at the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and
Literatures at the University of Connecticut, Dr. Pardo teaches Latin American colonial
literature. He is the author of The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian
Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico published by the University of Michigan Press in 2004
and is currently working on a project researching legal history in early colonial Mexico.
Lisandro Perez
Lisandro Pérez is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthroplogy at Florida
International University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 1974. Dr. Pérez
has a lifelong interest in Cuban migration to the U.S., the dynamics of the Cuban-American
community, and social change in Cuba. His writings have appeared in the Latin American
Research Review, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and the International Migration
Review. He is the editor of the journal Cuban Studies and the co-author of The Legacy of Exile:
Cubans in the U.S. In 1991, he founded FIU’s Cuban Research Institute and developed it into the
premier academic center in the U.S. for the study of Cuba and Cuban Americans, serving as its
director until 2003. From 1997 to 1998 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.
For the 2004-2005 academic year, Dr. Pérez has been awarded a Mel and Lois Tukman
Fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library for
research on the Cuban community in New York City during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Helen Regis
Nick Spitzer
Nick Spitzer is professor of Cultural Conservation at UNO's Planning and Urban Studies
department and host/producer of American Routes, the two-hour weekly music show airing on
Public Radio International (www.amroutes.org). He holds a B.A. in anthropology from
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and a Ph.D. in anthropology and folklore from
University of Texas in Austin. He is a folklorist, professor, artistic director, and radio producer
based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Dr. Spitzer is known for his work in documentary media,
cultural creolization, ethnomusicology and the relationships between community cultures and
economic development.
Ned Sublette
Ned Sublette is the author of Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago
Review Press), the forthcoming The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to
Congo Square (Lawrence Hill Books), and the article "The Kingsmen and the Cha-Cha-Chá" in
the forthcoming anthology Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music (Duke University
Press). He has published articles and/or photographs in The Nation, Vibe, American Legacy,
World Policy Journal, The New York Times, Miami Herald, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Fader, Bomb,
Counterpunch, and other magazines and newspapers. He was a Tulane Rockefeller Humanities
Fellow in 2004-2005, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2005-2006, and a fellow at the
Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library
in 2003-2004. He was co-creator of the public radio program Hip Deep, heard as part of Afropop
Worldwide, and guest-hosted Radio Nation on Air America Radio for the month of April 2006.
His recordings include Cowboy Rumba (Palm Pictures, 1999).
Disaster and Migration: Hurricane Katrina's Effects on New Orleans' Population
Tulane University
April 13-14, 2007
Call for paper proposals due December 20, 2006. The conference will bring together
scholars contributing to a social scientific understanding of disaster and migration either
through theoretical analyses or empirical research. The concentrated period of depopulation
and repopulation of New Orleans and the concurrent racial, ethnic, and class-based shifts in
the social terrain are the focus of this conference. Paper proposals should describe the
research project and preliminary results in the case of empirical contributions or a welldevelped draft of a theoretical contributions. Submit proposals to: Elizabeth Fussell,
Sociology Department, Tulane University, 220 Newcomb Hall, New Orleans, LA 70118.
Please contact Elizabeth Fussell for more information at efussell@tulane.edu or Jim Elliott at
Elliott@uoregon.edu. To download poster of conference please click here. Updates to the
conference can be found on the website.
Fourth Annual Maya Symposium and Workshop: Murals and Painted Texts by Maya
Ah Tz'ibob
Tulane University
February 2- February 4, 2007
This symposium offers a glimpse of Maya life through images and hieroglyphic texts painted
by Maya scribes called ah tz’ibob. Murals from the northern Maya area will be the focus of
discussions by archaeologists, epigraphers, and art historians, with additional examples
from elsewhere in the Maya world. We will explore the earliest murals, recently discovered
at Late Preclassic San Bartolo, to the latest pre-Columbian examples from the Late
Postclassic sites of Mayapán and Tulum.