Lunch seminar: The Symbolic Mask: Coded Communication through Ritual Performance Arts in the Cross River Region and its Atlantic Diaspora
How can images help us understand the cultural history of Africa and its legacy in the Caribbean, resulting from the largest forced migration in human history? The symbols used by the Cross River region’s Ékpè ‘leopard’ society are commonly found throughout West Africa’s forest belt: leopard-skins, chief caps & walking-sticks, body-mask performance, yet Ékpè culture assembles them in specific ways, making possible the study of this institution’s dissemination throughout this region, and then into the Caribbean. When Ékpè was established is unknown, but ceramic pots made 500 years ago were discovered in Calabar with designs used in the Nsìbìdì ‘codes’ of Ékpè culture (Slogar 2007).
In the Cross River region, archaeology is still rudimentary and comparative linguistics has not advanced far beyond colonial compilations like Goldie (1874) and early modern studies like Crabb (1965), leaving historians only with reports of early European merchants and missionaries (cf. Miller 2017). Alternatively, a comparative analysis of symbols in indigenous performance evidences their stability amidst local variations and adaptations. Such constancy is attributed to indigenous “sumptuary laws” reinforcing social hierarchies through restrictions on symbolic gestures, dress, and masking costumes. Ékpè symbols can often decode Cuban cognates (i.e., the Nkàndà mask), but sometimes, as predicted by Herskovits (1948: 1), the Cuban icon can decode an African source object (i.e., the Cuban Sése Eribó decodes the famous skin-covered masks of the Cross River region).
Speaker
Ivor Miller
Dr. Ivor Miller, a cultural historian specializing in the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and the Americas, is a non-resident Fellow of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University (2016-2018); he was a Senior Fellow at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution (2011-2012), and a Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria (2009-2011). He is also a Senior Lecturer in the Deparment of History, University of Calabar (2012-present). His book, “Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba” (UP of Mississippi 2009/ CBAAC Lagos 2011) was awarded Honorable Mention by the Association for Africanist Anthropology. Based upon fieldwork in Nigeria, Cameroon, Cuba, and the USA, it documents ritual languages and practices that survived the Middle Passage and evolved into a unifying charter for transplanted slaves and their successors. Current research interests are the pre-colonial formation of the Ekpe (leopard) society in West Africa, as well as issues of gender in initiation societies in the African Diaspora. His first book treated the Yoruba Diaspora in the Caribbean (written with Professor ‘Wande Abimbola); his second book Aerosol Kingdom: Subway Painters of New York City, documented the early Hip hop movement in New York City.
See www.afrocubaweb.com/ivormiller/ivormiller.htm for more information.
Date, time and location
12 June 2018
13:00-14:00
Pieter de la Courtgebouw / Faculty of Social Sciences, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK Leiden
3A06
Additional information
Posted on 28 May 2018, last modified on 11 June 2018