A Tale of Two Cities: Akimbo Body Theatrics in Bristol, England, and Spanish Town, Jamaica

Abstract

Dale Cockrell’s seminal blackface study Demons of Disorder begins with workingclass street dance, an 1842 account from the flash paper the Libertine describing a gladiatorial contest between two prostitutes, Nance holmes and suse bryant, on boston’s long Wharf.1 Cockrell unpacks this event as iconic of antebellum street culture’s challenge to existing power, class, and economics. Public music and noise, its close cousin, have often exhibited contested, gendered, or sexualized associations, particularly when in the hands of marginalized social groups. We may think of the charivari of medieval weddings and “shivaree” of the American south, the masked and costumed noise of Carnivale, the gongs and firecrackers of China’s Taiping rebellion, even the vuvuzelas of twentyfirstcentury sporting events; in each case, “noise” becomes a tool for simultaneously creating subaltern group cohesion and contesting economic or political regulation. between the revolution and the Civil War, the louisiana Purchase (1803) nearly doubled the nation’s territory; the development of navigable waterways, culminating with the opening of the erie Canal in 1826, accelerated economic activity and westward expansion; urbanization drove economic rifts between agrarian, slaveholding south and industrializing, freemarket North (exemplified by the missouri