Slaves to the Rhythm: the Rhythmic Evolution of Plantation Societies

Munro, Martin

doi:10.1080/17409292.2011.535260

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 14 publications

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“…The soundscape imbuing the plantation landscape, then, was another contact zone wherein a 'rhythmic counter-culture' operated within the colonial labour regime. 39 Although Oxholm's description does not detail the specifics of the song, it was common for slave work songs to follow an antiphonal rhythm, i.e. call and response.…”

Section: Temporality and The Landscapementioning

confidence: 99%

Cutting the Contact Zone: Race, Temporality and History in Peter Lotharius Oxholm’s Map of St. Croix (1799)

2019

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I n 1778, a 25-year-old lieutenant named Peter Lotharius Oxholm arrived on the Caribbean island of St. Croix. He was tasked with surveying the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, as well as proposing the improvement of their fortifications. 1 The survey of the three islands proved so difficult and laborious, however, that Oxholm nearly gave up, noting that '[t]hese islands are nothing but mountains and cliffs, where it is almost impossible to survey or prepare a geographic large scale map before one has first cut lines and ways through the bush to get on'. 2 'One' here notably refers mostly to enslaved workers that accompanied Oxholm, six of whom were required for the survey of St Croix. Suggested is also the centrality of enslaved knowledge in the mapmaking process, as he further informs us that the enslaved used the 'necessary instruments' [triangulation] to complete the task. 3 Following the completion of the survey, Oxholm eventually drew a large-scale map of St Croix which was engraved and printed in 1799. This essay focuses on the accompanying figurative cartouche that identifies the map (figure 1). I argue that the cartouche is a material manifestation of the ideology of slavery as an opposition between black and white. Reading the cartouche and Oxholm's writing on sugar production against the grain, I also propose that it reveals an anxiety about the economic and social instability of slave society. The cartouche comprises a sign displaying the title 'St Croix', represented as a sheet hung over two hollowed poles jutting out from each side, suggesting a cross. The sign is positioned in a landscape firmly marked as a West Indian plantation society, both an imaginary and a 'real' site of labour. In front of the sign, on either side, are black figures. On the right is a seated woman holding two children. The woman's head is in profile and all look up in the same direction. To the right of this group is a small tent-like structure, within which are two low containers or mattresses, conceivably containing infants.

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Section: Temporality and The Landscapementioning

confidence: 99%

Cutting the Contact Zone: Race, Temporality and History in Peter Lotharius Oxholm’s Map of St. Croix (1799)

2019

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Slavery, Childhood, and Abolition in Jamaica, 1788?1838

Vasconcellos¹

2015

152

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Practices of the Plantation in La loma del ángel

Millar¹

2013

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

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Most analyses of Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas's 1987 La loma del ángel, a parodical rewriting of Cirilo Villaverde's 1882 classic Cecilia Valdés, focus on the author's criticism of racial discrimination inherited from Cuba's slaving society, on an allegorical condemnation of Castro's post-revolutionary Cuba, or on the author's creative, carnivalesque use of language. This article argues that an alternative understanding of La loma del ángel demonstrates Arenas's circular and fatalistic historical vision, in which the exploitive plantation system reappears in different forms through Cuban history. It places La loma del ángel into the context of Arenas's other writing about the plantation in his poetic work El central and his autobiography Antes que anochezca, which together suggest that the continuities of the violence of the plantation system form the historical trajectory of Cuba's history since Spanish colonization. Using theoretical work on the Plantation in the Caribbean by Antonio Benítez Rojo, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Gustavo Pérez Firmat and Édouard Glissant, this article shows that in La loma del ángel, arts such as dance, music and literature represent a powerful yet fleeting antidote to the abuses of this system.

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Slaves to the Rhythm: the Rhythmic Evolution of Plantation Societies

Cited by 3 publications

References 14 publications

Cutting the Contact Zone: Race, Temporality and History in Peter Lotharius Oxholm’s Map of St. Croix (1799)

Cutting the Contact Zone: Race, Temporality and History in Peter Lotharius Oxholm’s Map of St. Croix (1799)

Slavery, Childhood, and Abolition in Jamaica, 1788?1838

Practices of the Plantation in La loma del ángel

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