Abstract
Abstract This article advocates for a new perspective on Caribbean performance traditions by adopting an Afro-Iberian perspective. It argues that we are able to acquire a better understanding of the historical development of some of the most enigmatic Caribbean performances, including Jankunu, by taking into consideration that many of those who built the foundations of Afro-Caribbean culture had already adopted cultural and religious elements rooted in Iberian traditions before their arrival in the Americas. A comparative analysis demonstrates a series of parallels between early witness accounts of Jankunu and Iberian calenda traditions. In order to explain this, the article points to Iberian dominance in the early-modern Atlantic and, in particular, Portuguese influences in Africa. It highlights the importance of confraternities and argues that it was in the context of African variants of these mutual-aid and burial societies that elements rooted in Iberian traditions entered Afro-Caribbean culture.
Highlights
He did so with the conviction that the selective integration of European elements in Black cultural traditions was not a phenomenon that had started in the Caribbean but, rather, was one that built on an earlier syncretic process that had begun in Iberia and Africa
If we shift our focus to Jamaica, we find indications that, there too, African-descended people found inspiration in Iberian calenda traditions
Too, could be interpreted from the perspective of an Afro-Iberian tradition to which new, indigenously African, elements were added in Jamaica when, as Long observed, “in the year 1769 ... several new masks appeared; the Ebos, the Papaws, &c. having their respective Connus” (Long 1774, ii:425)
Summary
The cross-fertilization of indigenous African and Portuguese elements in coastal towns along the west coast of Africa explains the origin of the Fana(a)l tradition, the Upper Guinean nightly lantern parades featuring elaborate boat or house constructs (Havik 2004:194; Kohl 2018:185). Christmas procession from the city to a small village, with people carrying crucifixes and some other symbols of Christianity” (King 1822:318) This custom could explain the tradition among Africa-descended females in Jamaica to parade in splendid dress on Christmas Eve. In 1987, Dirks had already noted that the Jamaican sets “resemble the female cofradias [confraternities] of Old Castile, which celebrated fiestas in a somewhat similar fashion” and suggested that the “sets and the related Societies of the Flowers” could either “have been handed down directly from the days of the Spanish rule” or “carried over from Hispanicized African ports” (Dirks 1987:181). Lucia’s lantern competitions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3K4NOlHhNQ (both accessed October 7, 2020)
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