Speech : ANDREA MANTELL-SEIDEL

I am honored to have the opportunity to speak at this Transatlantic Citizenship for the 21st Century Conference, appropriately held here in Miami, often called the “capital of Latin America and the Caribbean,”

Now, a thriving center for transnational cultural exchange, Miami is frequently referred to as “the global city of the future.” I believe that Miami gives us a glimpse of America tomorrow. It is a significant site for this conference, the US, and internationally as a harbinger of the increasing cultural and economic globalization that eventually will impact all of America.

Here, in Miami, immigrant cultures collide, meet, and meld as hybridities of East and West, North and South. At Sushi Samba on Lincoln Road, we can dine on Japanese/Brazilian cuisine; rumba tap and reggae rap pulsate with the syncretized rhythms and movements of a fast moving urban ghetto and a sultry Caribbean. On South Beach, we may encounter Tibetan monks eating Haitian conch fritters at Tap Tap Restaurant. With borders open in Eastern Europe, Russian ice-skating instructors dominate the rink at the Miami Ice Arena. Amidst all this cultural interchange, food, language, and expressive culture, particularly dance and music, are defining markers of nation and ethnicity among immigrant populations; rumba and cafecitos, denote “ Cubanidad” in the New Land. Aristocratic danzon, working class rumba and polyphonic salsa fluidly merge on the dance floor at Café Nostalgia in Little Havana, recreating the glamour, images and sounds of l930’s old Havana. In this light, I think we can view Miami as a pivotal axis of an emerging Atlantic Rim.

Expressive, performative acts such as movement, ritual, chants, and music are not just entertainment or pastimes for cultures. Basic to all human experience , art and expressive culture perform important social functions; They may “embody” and encode an entire system of social relations, religious and moral beliefs, scientific and botanical information relating to healing, the ethno history of a people, and complex social relations. Art and expressive culture can promote social solidarity and order in everyday life and support distinctive cultural identities in the face of pressures toward assimilation into a homogenized, national mainstream. Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences, among others, has enlarged our understanding of dance, in particular, as a symbolic system that integrates the mind and body for the intelligent expression of the self. While Elian Gonzalez and Papa played out the conflicting dramas of Cuban nationalism in a tense political arena, fluid and malleable bodies in motion have the potential to cross national boundaries, to adapt and endure in spite of severe political oppression. While immigrant Afro-Caribbean population’s clash with resident African-Americans over job opportunities or political power, Black diasporic cultural expressions, such as Capoiera or Afro-Cuban orisha dances may meld and merge into constantly shifting, syncretic forms or stand distinctly side by side in a folkloric festival that celebrates the diversity and uniqueness of African Diaspora culture. While impoverished Haitian boat people are repatriated back to Haiti, virtuosi yanvalou dancers and drummers performing a staged version of the “snake dance” abstracted from Haitian voudon ceremonials may draw accolades from multiethnic audiences.

In the present moment of pulsating, polyrhythms of sound and motion, the dichotomies of wealth and poverty, power and disenfranchisement, black and white are ripe with the possibility of dissolution and reemergence into an organic whole. Onstage, the drums and footsteps of many nations can beat together in a unified harmony or proclaim and celebrate distinctive identities.

For marginalized cultures, such as Afro-Caribbeans or Native Americans, or marginalized continents of Africa and Latin America, the knowledge “housed in the body” chanted in songs, and encoded in rhythmic drumbeats, is passed down through generations as the historical memory of a people. For these cultures, the survival of their sacred rituals was integral to the survival of their nation. When the Oglala Sioux sun dance, which encoded the microcosm of the Oglala Sioux world view, was banned by the US government in the late 19th century, the culture was disseminated. Since this type of knowledge only comes alive in the ephemeral, present moment of performance, its survival and retention is especially vulnerable to suppression by dominant cultures.

In logo centric western societies in Europe and Anglo-America where verbal forms and text-based knowledge are prioritized, “embodied wisdom and memory” lacking a written history, has been marginalized, like the cultures themselves. This attitude toward embodied wisdom is also part of a broader cultural syndrome in which the body is marginalized, subjugated, or disregarded. Most notably the black, female dancing body, has been relegated throughout history to an erotic object of pruient male desire. History abounds with images of violent oppression and marginalization of bodily knowledge and the core values of minority cultures, particularly from the continents of Africa and Latin America. This oppression and marginalization is largely the result of hundreds of years of European colonization, the slave trade, and the struggle for the domination of territories, resources, and population.

In a post-colonial world, global homogenization, ubiquitous in MacDonalds, blue jeans, and Coca-Cola, continues to perpetuate the illusion that there is only one written history, one culture; an illusion that suppresses the differences between the different histories lived by different groups of human beings. Historical memory is a vital cultural action in the making and preservation of those differences and the destruction of memory is a prime means of domination. The vast and rapid expansion of mass media also threatens to destroy the roots of memory and popular culture as well as stifle creativity. In Internet cafes from Katmandu to Kansas, email in cyberspace can erase nation and ethnicity in a mouse click. As a result, the world has lost and continues to lose an enormous amount of significant values and ideas as indigenous and other marginalized peoples lose their cultural traditions.

In Miami, despite the prevalence of Afro-Latino and Afro-Caribbean culture, Euro centrism and hierarchical prejudices of the general population towards African-derived religions and culture dominates the Academy and other institutions. Santeria, a religion with roots in Cuba’s black population, and its music and dance has been persecuted or denigrated throughout most of Cuban history and continues to be denigrated today. Many Cubans, black as well as white, historically perceived Afro Cuban religions as uncivilized or “primitive” practices that should be discontinued if the nation was to advance and modernize. Afro-Haitian cultural and religious traditions likewise in Miami are tainted by the images of Haitians as impoverished people stricken with aids and tuberculosis. The bottom line is often that representations of Haitian culture and Cuban culture by Afro-Cuban groups are often viewed negatively as “too black, unrefined, lower class, and above all, threatening to Christian values.”

One of the large questions posed by this conference is how can North Atlantic and South Atlantic cooperate? Perhaps a secondary theme that might also emerge is how to address the inequities of cultural, political, and economic representation of the continents of Africa, Central, and South America. The programs of the Intercultural Dance and Music Institute (INDAMI) housed within the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University have focused specifically on reforming these cultural inequities. Hopefully, art and culture can pose some solutions to foster North and South Atlantic cooperation and promote inter-cultural understanding

With the rapid development and flow of information technology and increasing globalization, it is incumbent upon us to embrace new integrative, interdisciplinary, intercultural 21st models where information and knowledge flows freely across disciplines and cultures and is transmitted through a variety of modalities including intellectual, kinesthetic, aural, and visual learning.

INDAMI has taken a leadership role nationally in fostering and promoting interdisciplinary, inter-cultural education and integrative mind/body/spirit teaching and learning. INDAMI won national recognition for developing innovative, interdisciplinary, team-taught courses and cross-disciplinary exchange between humanities, social science, dance, and area studies courses in its Dancing Across Disciplines project, funded by a three-year grant from the US Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education .

One of our primary goals is to honor, acknowledge, and preserve the identity and cultural heritage of marginalized groups in the Western Hemisphere and to affirm their related sacred traditions and rituals that nourish the spirit. Most importantly, we seek to empower these communities and to bring this embodied wisdom into the mainstream.

Some of our objectives which I encourage other individuals and institutions to join us in embracing and brainstorming about are to:

We welcome other ideas for collaborative ventures. INDAMI’s specific projects include interdisciplinary Artist/Scholar residencies, lectures, workshops, performances and an Art and Culture Summer Institute involving a national consortium of Latin American and Caribbean Centers and multiple disciplines, as well as international cultural exchange. Our long-range vision is to create a collaborative, off-campus retreat center where intellectual, spiritual, and bodily knowledge can come together through the arts, education, spirituality, and the healing professions, where the primary focus will be on personal and societal transformation and peaceful change.

Perhaps most significantly, expressive culture can be transformative and healing, and helps societies to perpetuate themselves. I believe it is in this realm of transformation that expressive culture possesses its highest potential to transcend the prejudices, the power struggles, and the violence of the profane world. Here it is possible to enter and comprehend a more sacred reality where the psyche and spirit are healed and healing in turn is bestowed upon the world.

The lifeblood of change lies first in personal transformation. It is a call to arms for each individual to assess his/her own personal values and fears of difference that inhibit a deep level of personal as well as institutional change. Secondly, each individual can embrace a commitment to build new houses that we all share. In these houses, values of social unification, tolerance, and transformation will rise over the tyranny of technical, military, economic, and political gain.

It is our responsibility to put our humanity at the center of our universe and to bring healing and the deepest wisdom to a world in pain, a world on the brink of self-annihilation. As the Navajo say, it is the dance of the people that brings forth the hill, that grows then into a mountain and becomes the elevated center of the world, out of which all the human people come.