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ABSTRACT
This essay examines quadrille dancing in the Caribbean and the Mascarene archipelagos to theorize creolization as cultural process. Through close reading of French, Creole, and English sources, fieldwork, and attentiveness to the pleasures of social dance, I analyze the creolized quadrille as a balancing act between choreogenesis, or the emergence of new segments within the quadrille’s multi-part structure, and their fractal incorporation within that structure. An incompatibility with the logic of the market results, which, over the longue durée, is balanced by the creolized quadrille’s postcolonial memorialization within a festival economy, even as the commercialization of creolized partner dances became its circum-Atlantic legacy. The transoceanic frame of my argumentation reveals convergences as well as divergences between the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds that connect Europe and its (post)colonies. The creolized quadrille then emerges as a transoceanic leisure form that demonstrates creolization as an economic and cultural force within global modernity.
Acknowledgements
Fieldwork for this article (the visits to St Lucia in March 2018 and the Seychelles in October 2017, as well as multiple visits to the Caribbean, Western Indian Ocean, Goa, and Cape Verde) was funded by the ERC Advanced Grant “Modern Moves.” I thank Jocelyne Béroard, Rosa Beunel, Jean-Max Cazanove, Robin Cohen, Caroline Deodat, Elina Djebbari, Gabriel Essack, Brian Matombe, Marietta Matombe, Francesca Negro, Dinana Pinto, John Rickford, Guillaume Samson, Ania Stawarska, Patrick Victor, and Jean-Marc Volcy for their valued contributions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. She researches the intersection of the written text with other forms of cultural expression within acts of collective memorialization and forgetting. Through an ERC Advanced Grant (2013–2018), she led an interdisciplinary investigation into African-heritage social dance and music across language worlds. For her innovative work in the Humanities, she received the Infosys Humanities Prize (2017), awarded by the Infosys Science Foundation, India, and the Humboldt Forschungspreis (Humboldt Prize), awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (2018) She is currently writing “Alegropolitics: connecting on the Afromodern Dance Floor.” Her new research projects explore further the concepts of transoceanic creolization through cultural production across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.
Notes
1 “Madras” is checked fabric from South India, now emblematic of Caribbean Creole identity. “The Dennery Segment” is an international EDM style from St Lucia. Creole Day is celebrated worldwide on 28th October following UNESCO policy.
2 Research on creolized quadrilles consist overwhelmingly of ethnomusicological studies of specific Caribbean islands; e.g. Guilbault, “Kwadril Evening” (St Lucia); Miller, “Performing Ambivalence” (Carriacou); Gerstin, “Reputation” (Martinique); Lafontaine, “Musique” (Guadeloupe). Cyrille, “Politics” (Martinique), presents quadrille performance as historical process; Daniel, “Ethnographic Comparison” and Swed and Marks, “Afro-American Transformation,” offer comparative discussions: the former privileges quadrille as dance, but limits herself to the Caribbean; the latter unites creolized quadrilles from the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, South and North America, and the West African littoral, but its article-length scope restricts it to an inventory. Manuel, ed., Caribbean Contradance, provides the only book-length study of Caribbean quadrille and contradance traditions, while Chaudenson, Creolization, discusses Indian Ocean quadrilles under musical creolisation processes; for examples from the Seychelles, see Naylor, “Creolization,” and, from Reunion, La Selve, Musiques traditionelles. Some commentary on quadrille from Mauritius is found in Deodat, “Troubler le genre.”
3 See Cohen and Toninato, ed., Creolization Reader; Chaudenson, Creolization.
4 Mintz and Price, “Anthropological Approach,” 9.
5 Trouillot, “Culture on the Edges,” 1.
6 Appadurai, ed., Social Life of Things; on the birth of the commodity through exchange, see ibid., 9. Mintz and Price, “Anthropological Perspective,” 4 –19, usefully delineate spheres of contact and exchange within the plantation as cultural matrix.
7 Mintz and Price, “Anthropological Perspective,” 19.
8 Garaud, Trois ans, 339–346.
9 Taylor, Archive as Repertoire.
10 I do not, however, offer a history of the creolized quadrille, for which, see Cowley, Creole Music; Cyrille, “Politics”; and La Selve, Musiques traditionelles.
11 I take a cue here from the kinetic-acoustic deployment of a term, “segment,” usually understood spatially, by the developers of Dennery Segment. “Breaking away” appears in local taxonomies of Caribbean creole quadrille; see below, n. 60.
12 “Kavalyé o Dam,” in Kassav’, Yélélé (GD 0202, 1984). I thank Madame Jocelyne Béroard of Kassav’ for explaining these lyrics to me.
13 Cyrille, “Politics.”
14 For an illuminating exploration of these issues of pleasure in a related creolized dance form, see Maddox-Wingfield, “The Dance Chose Me.”
15 Daniel, “Ethnographic Comparison,” 28.
16 Manuel, “Contradance and Quadrille,” 8; Buckland, Society Dancing, 72.
17 Manuel, “Contradance and Quadrille,” 8–9.
18 Cyrille, “Politics,” 47. On quadrille choreography, Manuel has little to say: see his “Cuba: Contradanza to Danzon,” 63–67, and see Daniel. Daniel, “Ethnographic Comparison,” excellently analyses the spectacular effect of quadrille choreography.
19 Manuel, “Contradance and Quadrille,” 16.
20 Various quadrille sets emerged by the turn of the century – including the Albert Quadrille, Lancers, English Quadrille, etc. See Miller, “Performing Ambivalence,” 407.
21 Buckland, Society Dancing, 71.
22 Miller, “Performing Ambivalence,” 421. This vast geographical range is noted by Szwed and Marks, “Afro-American transformation,” and Daniel, “An Ethnographic Comparison;” but a detailed comparison of the quadrille in all of these sites, particularly the Indian Ocean, remains a lacuna. On the Goan Mando as an Indic creolized quadrille, see Kabir, “Rapsodia Ibero-Indiana.”
23 Granier de Cassagnac, Voyages, 220–224; cited in Cowley, Creole Music, 267, translation ibid., 203. Unless otherwise noted (as here), all translations from French and Creole are mine.
24 Saint Méry, De la danse, 26; on Lescouble and De Freycinet, see Chaudenson, Creolization, 205 and 210 respectively.
25 Labat, Nouveaux voyages, 2, 54; 68; 401–404; Lafontaine, “Musique,” 100–101.
26 Chaudenson, Creolization, 124–125.
27 Ibid., 126; supported by Labat, Nouveaux voyages, 37.
28 See Saint-Méry, De la danse, 40; La Selve, Musiques traditionelles, 62–63; and Daniel, “Ethnographic Comparison,” 20.
29 Chaudenson, Creolization, 199.
30 Ibid., 124–125.
31 Ibid.
32 Pratt, Imperial Eyes. See also the schema explicating “spheres of contact” offered by Mintz and Price, “Anthropological Approach,” 13–14, and Trouillot’s remarks on the plantation as cultural matrix in “Culture on the Edge,” 15–18.
33 Granier de Cassignac, Voyages, 211–220, cited in Cowley, Creole Music, 268, and translated, ibid., 204.
34 Dixon Gottschild, Digging, 13–16.
35 Lavollée, Voyage, 66–67.
36 Labat, Nouveaux voyages II, 51; Saint-Mery, De la Danse, 37–38.
37 Other words perform similar functions: chica, calenda/ kalenda, and, in the Indian Ocean world, sega, discussed below. See Gerstin, “Tangled Roots.”
38 Cyrille, “Politics,” 44, 45, and 56; see also Daniel, “Ethnographic Comparison,” 29.
39 JanMohamed, “Manichean Allegory.”
40 Young, Colonial Desire.
41 Cyrille, “Politics,” 43. See also Daniel’s use of the temporal marker “over time;” “Ethnographic Comparison,” 20.
42 Montforand, cited by Roussin, Album, 189.
43 On “sega” etymology, see Wergin, “T'shéga, Shéga, Séga,” and Chaudenson, Creolization, 204–210.
44 La Selve, Musiques traditionelles, 62.
45 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity.
46 Granier de Cassignac, cited in Cowley, Creole Music, 268, translated ibid., 203.
47 La Selve, Musiques traditionelles, 208, argues that the quadrille’s local evolution led to Reunionese sega.
48 Prolific composers included Frappier de Montbenoist and Isaac Gueny. See La Selve, Musique traditionelles, 57, 211, and passim for examples; and the work of Fanny Precourt and Guillaume Samson at the Pôle Régional des Musiques Actuelles de La Réunion. For the score under discussion, see Roussin, Album, 160–161.
49 On these instruments, see La Selve, Musique traditionelles, 17–19, 84–128.
50 Roussin, Album (n.p: images and illustrations are inserted into the work as non-paginated plates).
51 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 21.
52 Garaud, Trois ans, 339–346; reprinted in Cowley, Creole Music, 278; translated ibid., 212.
53 Lucrèce, “Usage musicale,” 11.
54 La Selve, Musiques traditionelles, 212.
55 Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 314.
56 Miller, “Performing Ambivalence,” 408, attributes the manifestations of this symmetry in patterns and counter-patterns on all scalar levels, “to a European original in terms of kinaesthetic linearity.” However, Eglash, in African Fractals, argues for fractal logic as an integral aspect of Africanist aesthetics. This line of enquiry could contribute a very interestingly to the debate about European and African contributions to creolization.
57 Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 314.
58 The story, “La Boule Blanche,” is preserved in Box 48 of the Dunham Papers held in Southern Illinois University. See Kabir, “Plantation, Archive, Stage,” 8–10.
59 Szwed and Marks, “Afro-American Transformation,” 30.
60 Guilbault, “Kwadril Evening,” 36, notes the “fasi” dances (couple dances) introduced at the end of a set. Miller, “Performing Ambivalence,” 408, notes that the final figure in the Carriacou quadrille is called a “break-away.” In the essay’s conclusion, I show how these terms help us theorize the epistemic and economic consequences of the quadrille’s creolization.
61 Roussin, Album, 160–161, 189–190, and 382. On the relationship between Indian Ocean creolized quadrilles and the term “Kaffir” of which “Cafre” is a variation, see Kabir, “Rapsodia Ibero-Indiana.”
62 See Szwed and Marks, “Afro-American Transformation,” 29; on polysemy around the Martinican bele, which includes “several dances incorporating quadrille choreography,” see Gerstin, “Reputation,” 389–390.
63 New names for dances signal movement from segmentation to breaking away (from the fractal structure). Note Swed and Marks’s suggestion (“Afro-American Transformation,” 32, n. 13) that “a much-accelerated mazurka of the French West Indies is the prototype of the beguine [sic].” The mazurka’s entry into the haute-taille’s final figure possibly precipitated a new phase of choreogenesis that assumed the name of beguine.
64 Daniel explicates this polysemy through agency manifested in the African-descendant body, which leads her to emphasize the Africanist elements of Caribbean quadrilles at the expense of their European counterparts (“Ethnographic comparison,” 20), but she struggles to articulate the principles whereby Creole societies distinguish between “new dance creations” and “veritable creole dances” (ibid., 31). I consider the clash of pre-existing value systems and emergent demands of the market as a more useful line of explication.
65 Dunham, “La Boule Blanche” (n.p.).
66 Chaudenson, Creolization, 211; Szwed and Marks, “Afro-American transformation,” 31.
67 Thus, Seychellois musician K. Valentin defines kanmtole as “the umbrella of a series of tunes;” cited in Naylor, “Creolization” (n.p.).
68 Alexis, Lanmizik ek ladans tradisyonel.
69 The caller had disappeared from St Lucian quadrille evenings by the 1980s, but the dancers remembered his function well; see Guilbault, “Kwadril evening,” 48, n. 9.
70 The DVD in question (n.d.), Festival Kreol, is produced and distributed by the National Cultural Centre, Seychelles (Sant kiltirel nasyonal). The CD is Loulou Pitou et Benoîte Boulard : du quadrille créole au séga (La Réunion : TAKA 0611).
71 For an examination of these issues with regard to the folklorization of a related Seychellois dance, see Parent, “le moutiya.”
72 Deodat, “Troubler le genre,” 148: “Les bals zarico favorisent le jeu, le hasard, et le partage.”
73 See Gerstin, “Reputation,” 396; and 390–391, for the consolidation of post-abolition “sware” culture (dance evenings hosted on a rotating basis by an informal network of households) in rural Martinique. See also Lortat-Jacob, Musiques en fête, 11, quoted by Deodat in her discussion of the bals zarico: “Il implique donc l’echange et donne l’occasion d’en multiplier les effets.”
74 See Gerstin, “Reputation,” 391, 396; Miller, “Performing Ambivalence,” 428–433.
75 Daniel, “Ethnographic Comparison,” 22.
76 Miller, “Performing Ambivalence,” 404.
77 Gilbault, “Kwadril Evening,” 45.
78 Miller, “Performing Ambivalence,” 403.
79 As Gerstin, “Reputation,” 394, notes: “bele remains marginalized, restricted to a small world of performers and aficionados.”
80 Miller, “Performing Ambivalence,” 493.
81 Guilbault, “Kwadril evening,” 35–37.
82 As reported from St Lucia; ibid., 36.
83 Miller, “Performing Ambivalence,” 408.
84 The beguine took Paris’s nightclubs by storm precisely when Dunham was experiencing it within Martinique; see Cowley, Creole Music, 231–266, for the accelerated migrations from the Antilles to Paris between 1926 and 1928 and the subsequent mingling of Antillean and Jazz dance cultures in Paris which necessitated the move away from Antillean quadrilles towards more easily learnt (“fasi”) couple dances, including the beguine.
85 In the 1930s Reunion saw the folklorization of the creolized quadrille spectrum on the one hand, and the commercialization of the “Anglo-American” couple dances associated with modern leisure (Loulou Pitou et Benoîte Boulard, liner notes, 24).
86 Apter and Derby, “Introduction,” xx.
87 “Kavalyé o Dam,” Kassav’.