Dancing Revolution in the Caribbean Basin: Expressive and Revolutionary Movement and Moments in New Orleans History

The great northward bend in the Misi-ziibi (Ojibwe), as it flows to the Gulf of Mexico, has been a centre for cultural exchange since the first settlements of Mound Builders who came to farm, hunt, and harvest shellfish in the third millennium CE. But that exchange accelerated, diversified, and (often) turned contentious in the period after the first French colonial settlement in 1719. In the history of the City, successive waves of traders, travellers, merchants, sailors, freebooters, planters, and chattel slaves came, settled, and traded vocabularies about movement's meaning. This exchange accelerated and diversified still further in the brief but influential period of the Spanish Cabildo (1762-1803), and then again, with the very rapid transfer of NOLA from France to the young United States as part of "Jefferson's Folly", otherwise the "Louisiana Purchase", in 1803, and especially via the ongoing cultural exchange between NOLA and the African Caribbean. In this presentation, based in a larger project drawing on historical musicology, iconography, and historical dance practice, I will argue that, in New Orleans as in Port Royal and Havana, participatory street movement - street dance - had the capacity to carry powerful and complexly contested social power - and even to fire revolutions. 

About the author

Chris Smith is Professor, Chair of Musicology, and director of the Vernacular Music Center at the Texas Tech University School of Music. He is the composer of the theatrical show Dancing at the Crossroads (2013), the 'folk oratorio' Plunder! Battling for Democracy in the New World (2017) and the immersive-theater show Yonder (2019). His scholarly monograph The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (Illinois) won the Irving Lowens award from the Society for American Music in 2013; his new monograph is Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History (2019). He directs the TTU Celtic Ensemble, arranges for and conducts the Elegant Savages Orchestra symphonic folk group at Texas Tech, and tours and concertizes on guitar, bouzouki, banjo, and diatonique button accordion. He is a former nightclub bouncer, framing carpenter, lobster fisherman, and oil-rig roughneck, and a published poet.