Rachel Buff’s ethnographic study of festivals in two American im/migrant communities, that of the displaced American Indians populating the area around the Twin Cities and of the ‘self-exiled’ West Indians in New York City’s borough of Brooklyn, brings forth new, innovative ways of better understanding the meaning of home and citizenship in the period of the post-World War II American society. Buff backs her ethnographic fieldwork with substantial archival research, in order to demonstrate the historical, cultural and theoretical links existing between the two groups that are rarely thought of as co-habiting in a paradigmatic double bind. What we encounter as readers on the pages of Buff’s extensive work is a rendering of the two distinct cultures’ celebrations as sites for (re)making the meanings behind the groups’ history and their respective survival.
My question that emerges from this exploration is connected with my ever-evolving understanding of contemporary American society and its history of institutionalized citizenship.
What is more desirable (wanted, admired, wished for, acknowledged as important), a nationally-bounded ‘citizenship’ or a transnational cultural ‘denizenship’? Could an individual possess both without feeling betrayed or treacherous for that matter? Is such a ‘multi-vocality’ within the framework of a democratic social union welcomed? Should it be?
The theoretical move that really captivated me in Buff’s work is her reading of the two festivals as vital, dynamic sites of inquiry into the nature of citizenship, race and social power. The American Indian powwows of the Minneapolis’ urban milieu and the West Indian American Carnival Day in NYC’s Brooklyn, as seen through Buff’s ethnographic suppositions, demonstrate a history of resistance to colonial oppression, while undergoing constant change as creative responses to the experiences of im/migration and the impact of the global(izing) mass-culture industry. Thus, Buff’s methodology may launch a series of alternative pairings/ juxtapositions/ triple relatedness among (seemingly) various popular culture products, events, such as for example Mardi-Gras in New Orleans and St. Patrick Day’s parade in Boston and New York City, which, in turn, may enhance our scholarly understanding of the different ways im/migrant identities are created by both national boundaries and transnational/diachronic cultural memory.
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