Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-01, Section: A, page: 0292.

Director: Jon Butler.

This dissertation is the first monograph on the parading musical festival called Rara, traditionally practiced by peasants in Haiti during Lent. The work draws from cultual anthropology, history and cultural studies to chart the practices, beliefs, symbolic systems, religious meanings, social organization, gender relations and political uses of this popular festival.

A tradition with roots in plantation slavery that has continued throughout Haitian history, Rara is the most popular community-produced music and celebration form in Haiti It grows out of the Afro-Haitian religious complex called Vodou, and is used to launch political criticism of local and national leaders. It is now practiced in local gatherings and protest demonstrations by Haitians in diaspora, to become a key performance style in the emerging transnational progressive rasin ('roots') cultural movement.

Rara values move back and forth between private and public spaces, as well as between sacred and secular protocols, between Caribbean male and female value systems, between the spheres of the living community and its recently deceased, (when Rara bands capture the spirits, or zonbi, of the recently dead and mystically carry them in the parade), between royal-priestly and military principles of social organization and between popular laughter and engaged popular politics. Rara music and performance has emerged as one of the signifiers of progressive ideology in the transnational cultural arena of the Haitian diaspora.

This study examines Rara beliefs and practices, power dynamics and politics in the volatile years 1990-1996, from the first government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide through the period of coup d'etat and embargo, until the United States military intervention. It is based on field research, interviews, video recordings and audio recordings.