What They Came With

Abstract

This article identifies what was on the continent as festival and ritual performance forms before the Europeans arrived and what the Africans who survived the Atlantic sea crossing came with as “performative literacies” to the Brave New World. The article then examines how these cultural texts and phenomenological deposits have given us hybridized and syncretized aesthetic infrastructures that interrogate the theologies of supremacy often associated with Whiteness and other manifestations of Western cultural and intellectual hegemony. The article then asks, “Does the body have a memory?” and answers by examining how “translocated” indigenous African kinaesthetic intelligence informs the aesthetics of ritual, festive, and carnival performances in the Caribbean, North and South America, the Middle East, and Europe, including Candomble, Voudun, Santeria, Lucumi, Mardi Gras, Oshun, John Konnu, and hip hop, but the focus is on the Omabe Festival Drama of Nsukka-Igbo in Nigeria and the Carnival phenomenon from the Caribbean.