Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean. Patrick Taylor, ed. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001. Viii, pp. 220. $39.95, Cloth; $19.95 Paper.

Nation Dance, the result of the ongoing work of the Caribbean Religions Project at the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University, will add to the increasing literature in the emerging field of Caribbean religious traditions. It will help to strengthen the dialogue between religious scholars and practitioners in the Americas and those various ancestral homelands, and in various diasporic/exilic situations. The subject of book's essays is the "living religious traditions and their implications for Caribbean modernity" (1). A positive feature of the book is that most of its essays "address some of the major contemporary issues in the study of Caribbean religions as understood by practitioners and scholars who come from the region or who have done extensive fieldwork or research" (6). Consequently, the essays offer an authenticity missing in similar works.

The book demonstrates the critical function of religion in interpreting Caribbean cultures and will contribute significantly to the increasing conversation on the role of religion in the construction of post-modern societies. From a comparative perspective it shows that religion has been a force in the preservation of Caribbean humanity, provided a moral compass for the reinvention of Caribbean humanity and a creative force in transcending the tragic dislocation of Caribbean peoples from ancestral homelands in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean is an appropriate title for the book since it is a profound critique of modernity which dislocated and fragmented the existence of non-European peoples consequent to European invasion of non-European cultures in the modern world. The book's title, subtitle, and organization reflect the role of religion in the preservation, reinvention, and dispersion in the creation of Caribbean cultures.

An important manifestation of Caribbean expressive culture, the nation dance, is generally associated with the island of Carriacou, part of the sovereign state of Grenada, Carriacou and Petit Martinique. The dance is a collective creative reenactment of an African diasporic space in which several West African traditional, or national dances, are processually paraded and integrated into a whole on the island of Carriacou. The Nation Dance, in its varied local expressions, is a ritual of African retention, resistance, and recreation in the Americas. The book's subtitle emphasizes the intersections of religion, identity, and cultural difference in the Caribbean. A major goal of Nation Dance is to highlight "the contribution of Caribbean religions to Caribbean and world culture" (12). In addition to its fine Introduction, the book is organized into three sections: I. Spirituality, Healing and the Divine; II. Theology, Society, and Politics; III. Religion, Identity, and Diaspora. These are followed by a Supplementary Bibliography on Caribbean Religions, information on the contributors, and an index.

Taylor's introductory essay does an excellent job in introducing and providing an interpretative framework for the essays in the book: "all the essays in the book are but threads in a tapestry of the global movement of peoples into the Caribbean region from elsewhere in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia and back out again to all the continents of the globe"(10). In this respect the various essays in the book attempt to be comprehensive; to cover the ethnic, linguistic, regional, gender, and other dimensions that make up the diverse and complex Caribbean region as they intersect with religion in the Caribbean space. Arguably, the essential task of Caribbean religion is the creation of the new Caribbean person. Eschatologically, all the essays in this book point in this direction.

Part I of the book is centered on spirituality, healing, and the divine. The essays in this section covers different Caribbean cultures and regions and focuses largely on the experiences of Caribbean women. The chapters are very helpful in indicating how Caribbean religious traditions insert Caribbean folk into the cosmos (29), an approach which appears especially appropriate when one takes into consideration the extent to which women have been the preservers of African-based spirituality throughout the Caribbean. The essays by Eva Fernandez Bravo, Queen Mother Bishop Yvonne Drakes, Archbishop Doctor Deloris Seiveright reflect mutual recognition and unity in the midst of diversity and assert forcefully that the divinities/spirits accompanied African-descended peoples into exile. Men have made significant contribution in this area and should not have been excluded from the picture. In many cases both genders collaborated in the struggle to create the new Caribbean person. Archbishop Doctor Deloris Seiveright's recognition of the late Shouter Baptist leader, Archbishop Elton George Griffith, supports the contention. Archbishop Griffith, who migrated from Grenada to Trinidad and Tobago, played a pivotal role in the preservation and development of the Shouter Baptist tradition in Trinidad. Today whether they are from the Anglo-, Hispano-, or Franco-phone Caribbean there is an underlying Pan-African religious identity that fuses with Asian and other religious traditions to create indigenous religious traditions which transcend political-linguistic, ethnic, religious, and other boundaries imposed on the Caribbean since 1492.

Part II of the book shifts the discussion of Caribbean religion into a more historical framework. It focuses on the transformation of biblical theologies in the Caribbean and their impact on society and politics. Caribbean religious genius in therefore to be appreciated in the ways in which the Africans, and other migrants into the Caribbean, reformulated their traditional religious epistemologies in response to the degrading Caribbean situation. The Bible was one of the resources used by Caribbean people in their praxis of humanization. Caribbean peoples have created a heavily textured religious quilt to project a new humanity for themselves in the face of the modernity and the globalization process that begun in sixteenth-century Europe. Hence the Caribbean is a very important site to study the role of the Bible in the process of decolonization.

Some scholars might find Taylor's essay in this section problematic with respect to its methodological "detours" and "diversions." If it was intended to show Rastafari appropriation of the Kebra Nagast myth, which legitimated the Axumite Amharic dominant space in Ethiopian civilization, then it really needs re-working to make the Rastafari the primary cultural agents in the essay. Others would also take issue with Taylor's argument that the Rastafari interpretative process is "in defiance of both biblical hermeneutics and Liberation Theology" (74). On the contrary, Rastafari biblical hermeneutics is heavily eschatological and apocalyptic. It is conscientization (Freire) and "critical praxis in light of Scripture" (Gutiérrez). Nevertheless, in keeping with the book's emphasis on the implications of Caribbean religious traditions for Caribbean modernity, the essay is important in articulating the notion that Rastafari is an "irruption into modernity" (71). It marks a reversal of values in the transition from colonial to post-colonial identity and consciousness, a factor that has led to the globalization of Rastafari.

Arthur C. Dayfoot's essay on the West Indian Church can be considered a fast-paced rendition of his book on the subject. Juanita DeBarros's essay on Congregationalism and in the construction of Afro-Guyanese autonomy resonates with much in the emergence of continental African-American Christianity. Judith Soares's essay, "Eden after Eve: Christian Fundamentalism and Women in Barbados," makes excellent reading in terms of feminist liberation theology within a Fundamentalist site in Barbados, the most British of the Caribbean islands. Laënnec Hurbon's essay, "Current Evolution of Relations between Religion and Politics in Haiti" poses the question of the relationship between the right to practice Vodou and the democratic process in Haiti (123). In other words, major issues in the field of religious studies are discussed within the book.

Part III explicitly addresses the two related themes of identity and diaspora implicit in the earlier essays. According to Taylor, "If religion provides a fundamental source of identity in the Caribbean, diaspora as a religious trope and Caribbean reality has regenerated religious forms and meanings in ways that indicate that identities are ongoing constructions" (10). The section opens with Barry Chevannes essay on yaad (yard) as a metaphor for home and source of identity. This essay is a must read. Yaad can also be a metaphor for Jamaican and Caribbean cultural and political sovereignty. It is not surprising that Chevannes inevitably referred to Maurice Bishop, the late Prime Minister of Grenada, use of the term yaad in defiance of American aggression in the Caribbean (134).

Abrahim Khan's contribution to the book lays the foundation for much debate. Like all the other essays in the book it can possibly be best understood in terms of the author's historical Caribbean formation. Khan regards as suspect the notion of Caribbean identity because "it does not conceptually cohere with notions of personhood for culturally diverse groups of people forming the socio-historical reality of the geographical region" (138).
Although Khan's work resonates sentiments associated with Vidia S. Naipaul his essay
addresses some of the major issues associated with diasporic experience and the struggle to transcend them.

Frank F. Scherer's article further enriches Nation Dance with its study of Chinese Orientalism in Cuba. Scherer, like Khan, raises the problems of the effects of diasporas in decontextualizing people from their ancestral homelands. Ethnic essentialism is therefore a strategy to deal with this sense of radical decontextualization. In different ways, all the essays in the Dance address the issue of existence post-historical-decontextualization. Hence, it is easy to understand why Pan-Africanism can be called the gift of the Diaspora to Africa. To a limited extent the same applies to other diasporic experiences in the Caribbean: Indian, Chinese, and others. A practical implication of all this is that Caribbean peoples have been involved in many others peoples's liberative struggles against colonialism and imperialism in the modern world. Nation Dance indicates that Caribbean religious traditions might well be the matrix, or spatial womb, from which post-colonial worlds are born. Caribbean religions keep alive the memories of ancestral homelands critical to the recovery of lost humanity. The book's Supplementary Bibliography on Caribbean Religions is a very useful, though not exhaustive, tool for those interested in doing further readings on Caribbean religions.

Despite its many attractive features, the book fails to reflect the Caribbean religious environment in totality. It is virtually impossible for any single work to delve into the depths of Caribbean diasporic experience and its complex and diverse religious experience and traditions. Recognition, however, must be given to the book's attempt to transcend regional insularity. It is difficult to accept within such a worthy corpus the absence of an essay on Judaism in the Caribbean, religion and Caribbean literature, and religion and art.
Omissions can sometimes be pardoned. However, the book is to be commended for its use of dance imagery, and genuine attempt to represent the contemporary Caribbean religious landscape as fully as possible.

The dance opens an alternative space that radically critiques and subverts modernity's deliberate desecration of anyone and anything that was non-Western. The dance, however, open a space, an eschatological route or trajectory along which Caribbean peoples have plotted a path of freedom and celebrative march back to their ancestral homeland, imagined or real, from the Haitian Revolution to the present. The dance goes on. It is to be found in most, if not all Caribbean religious traditions, throughout Latin America and in the African-American Church.

Nation Dance fulfils the offer of its title. Hopefully it will be read, studied, and appreciated in the Caribbean and throughout the Americas. It will be very valuable to scholars and others interested in the field of Caribbean and Latin American Studies, African-American Religious Studies, Diasporic Studies, Postcolonialism, Postmodern, Multicultural Studies, and Atlantic Civilization. May others join the dance and, in keeping with the tradition, give their own response in recognition of the outstanding contribution Caribbean religious experience has made to the regional and global struggle to create a new humanity in the modern world. Nation Dance has set a standard to be surpassed.

Leslie R. James, DePauw University