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Chapter 3 - Jonkanoo Performances of Resistance, Freedom, and Memory

from Part I - Literary and Generic Transitions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2020

Evelyn O'Callaghan
Affiliation:
University of the West Indies
Tim Watson
Affiliation:
University of Miami
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Summary

Throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, enslaved people in the Caribbean and South, Central, and North America performed Jonkanoo, a masked parade of dance and song. This Christmas tradition was rooted in the memory of armed resistance to imperialism in the figure of‘John Cannu’, also known as ‘John Konny’, a West African tribal chief who rebelled against Dutch settlers in the 1720s. After being captured and sent as a slave to Jamaica, he became a folk hero featured in Jonkanoo performances. Merging African dance and masquerade traditions with English carnivalesque mummery, these performances were tolerated by slave owners as a ‘temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men’, as Mikhail Bakhtin posited. Jonkanoo was nonetheless a form of resistance against white oppression and persists today in Jamaica and the Bahamas as vernacular performances of resistance, freedom, and memory that represent a fluidity between formal theatre, music, and street performances.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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