The Silenced Drums

Review of tribal economic development with special reference to Orissa and India in general.

Hiding in a lake under lily pads after fleeing U.S. soldiers, a Dakota woman was given a vision over the course of four days instructing her to build a large drum and teaching her the songs that would bring peace and end the killing of her people. From the Dakota, the "big drum" spread throughout the Algonquian-speaking tribes to the Ojibwe, becoming the centerpiece of their religious ceremonies. This edition of "The Ojibwe Dance Drum, "originally created through the collaboration of Ojibwe drum maker and singer William Bineshii Baker Sr. and folklorist Thomas Vennum, has a new introduction by history professor Rick St. Germaine that discusses the research behind this book and updates readers on the recent history of the Ojibwe Drum Dance.

In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse—jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album’s cover displays an image of a woman sitting atop a drum, depicting the way in which the drum literally obscures the female body, turning the subject into an object. This objectification of women leads to a critical reading of the role of women in jazz music: If the drum can take the place of a woman, then a woman can also take the place of a drum. The Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature challenges that image but also defines a counter-tradition within women’s writing that involves the reinvention and reclamation of a modern jazz discourse. Despite their alienation from bebop, women have found jazz music empowering and have demonstrated this power in various ways. The Drum Is a Wild Woman explores the complex relationship between women and jazz music in recent African diasporic literature. The book examines how women writers from the African diaspora have challenged and revised major tropes and concerns of jazz literature since the bebop era in the mid-1940s. Black women writers create dissonant sounds that broaden our understanding of jazz literature. By underscoring the extent to which gender is already embedded in jazz discourse, author Patricia G. Lespinasse responds to and corrects narratives that tell the story of jazz through a male-centered lens. She concentrates on how the Wild Woman, the female vocalist in classic blues, used blues and jazz to push the boundaries of Black womanhood outside of the confines of respectability. In texts that refer to jazz in form or content, the Wild Woman constitutes a figure of resistance who uses language, image, and improvisation to refashion herself from object to subject. This book breaks new ground by comparing the politics of resistance alongside moments of improvisation by examining recurring literary motifs—cry-and-response, the Wild Woman, and the jazz moment—in jazz novels, short stories, and poetry, comparing works by Ann Petry, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, and Maya Angelou with pieces by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Ellington. Within an interdisciplinary and transnational context, Lespinasse foregrounds the vexed negotiations around gender and jazz discourse.

Untangled takes the reader on a swirling tour of some of the most beautiful places in the Caribbean but also of the region's gruesome history. The eye of love searches the landscape in the wake of colonialism and the grim traffic of bodies and souls across the Middle Passage. Evoking everything from birdcalls to colorful festivals, missionaries' blunders to tasty traditional feasts, Joy Rudder is intimately knowledgeable of her home, which spans the entire Caribbean. She voices heartbreaking questions that most do not venture to ask. But her pain is transformed into poetry, her outrage into prayer. She finds that Christ has preceded her and is very present in her multi-ethnic, multi-religious native Trinidad. Christ is also present in her adopted home, politically correct and trendy Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada. She discovers love in unusual places, delights in friendships with strangers, and kneels to worship in a frat house bathroom. She muses on the grandeur of natural places she has been privileged to see in North America and the Caribbean, yet she unearths disturbing visions. In the end, she finds peace at the last, beyond her troubled quests, in the lived reality of hope.

Since first contact, Natives and newcomers have been involved in an increasingly complex struggle over power and identity. Modern “Indian wars” are fought over land and treaty rights, artistic appropriation, and academic analysis, while Native communities struggle among themselves over membership, money, and cultural meaning. In cultural and political arenas across North America, Natives enact and newcomers protest issues of traditionalism, sovereignty, and self-determination. In these struggles over domination and resistance, over different ideologies and Indian identities, neither Natives nor other North Americans recognize the significance of being rooted together in history and culture, or how representations of “Indianness” set them in opposition to each other. In Indian Country: Essays on Contemporary Native Culture, Gail Guthrie Valaskakis uses a cultural studies approach to offer a unique perspective on Native political struggle and cultural conflict in both Canada and the United States. She reflects on treaty rights and traditionalism, media warriors, Indian princesses, powwow, museums, art, and nationhood. According to Valaskakis, Native and non-Native people construct both who they are and their relations with each other in narratives that circulate through art, anthropological method, cultural appropriation, and Native reappropriation. For Native peoples and Others, untangling the past—personal, political, and cultural—can help to make sense of current struggles over power and identity that define the Native experience today. Grounded in theory and threaded with Native voices and evocative descriptions of “Indian” experience (including the author’s), the essays interweave historical and political process, personal narrative, and cultural critique. This book is an important contribution to Native studies that will appeal to anyone interested in First Nations’ experience and popular culture.

To those who associate Siddharthas enlightenment with magical happenings, Light of the Himalayas is an answer. The novel traces the gradual development of Siddhartha from an inquisitive child to a serious explorer on a trajectory of science and objectivity, until his discovery of the elixir of life, the eight-fold path, and the four golden rules. The book decenters many myths and misconceptions about the life of the Buddha and invites readers to engage in scientific discourse about the religion.

This issue contains varied articles on art, architecture and crafts.