Dance and Liberation in the Caribbean

We tend to associate subversion with the written word, political action, or massive social movements. We also identify it with conspiracies, state terrorism, and assassinations. Angel Quintero Rivera’s Cuerpo y cultura, in 2010 the winner of the Puerto Rican Studies Association’s 2010 Book Award and the Frantz Fanon Prize of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, focuses on a much more subtle form of social and political subversion. He takes us on a gripping 500-year-long journey through the Americas and the story of its enslaved people resisting repression through subversive bodily expressions and movements. It is the history of a captured people taken from Africa and transplanted into bondage in the Americas by Western Europe’s capitalist and mercantile expansion across the Atlantic.

The so-called New World gave way to a savage process of capitalist accumulation based on the forced labor of millions of Africans. At the same time, it wiped out the original peoples of the Caribbean, leaving no trace of their legacy or culture. Capitalist dispossession not only announced a new organization that enabled more accumulation through slave labor but also nurtured new societies and even created new myths arising from the social division of labor. The Caribbean became the breeding ground for the new “world” order divided not only by the social process of production but also by a superstructure that separated black and white (as well as “red” and white). This led to the appearance of an original social group called the “mulatto.”

Quintero’s book masterfully covers three themes. It is above all a critical study of the forms that social control assumes in capitalist societies. The emphasis is on the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and the role of music and dance. Sociologically, the issue is the clash between captive workers of African descent and a nascent European system of capitalist accumulation building a “New World” on conquered lands. This battle, which is still going on and is cruel, unequal, and relentless, has its expression in dance and music. Aníbal Quijano has described the social relations based on coloniality and domination in Latin America and beyond as a long-term prison of racist Eurocentrism. In the people’s struggles to free themselves from their shackles, Quintero explores a cultural aspect that is generally underestimated: dance. Body movements become weapons of subversion that speak for themselves and defy the system of domination.

A second theme is the history of Caribbean music and its influence on a global scale. The ruling classes have always limited and repressed peoples’ bodily expressions, but despite this they survive. In the Caribbean people protected their vibrant, rebellious, and liberating music and bodily expressions. Max Weber, in his analysis of different musical traditions, rationalized the repression of music and the stimulating effects of body movements.

Quintero’s third theme is probably the most appealing. Against the background he has provided, he introduces the recent history of what he calls “mulatto” music. The rich rhythms that arise from the African and European experience in the Caribbean have created followers worldwide. The many styles—merengue, son, rumba, and others—were literally taken apart during the second half of the twentieth centrury, rearranged, and orchestrated into what is now called “salsa.” Salsa, similarly to rock-and-roll, breaks down social prejudices, ignores social class, and redefines the ethnic (“race”) question on another playing field. Racism is partially transformed but does not crack. The marketplace co-opts salsa and converts it into the hegemonic musical expression of the Caribbean Basin and its cultural colonies in North America.

Quintero casts his objective—liberation—in bodily terms. The hegemony of the Western European dance form, literally dominated by the spine, is displaced. In its place, the “mulatto” Caribbean dance, in which no body part is dominant—in which there is complete freedom—becomes hegemonic throughout the Western world. The meneo (wiggle and shake), repressed by Western institutions, is finally triumphant over its oppressors. However, the racist “long-term prison” preserves its structures renovated and transformed but intact. To understand this book fully readers may wish to consult Quintero’s Salsa, sabor y control! (2005), which tells the long and sometimes terrible story of the oppressed peoples of Latin America, North America, and Europe and their ongoing liberation struggles, including bodily manifestations expressed through dance and its music.