Rhizomes and Dialogues: Early Bermuda and the Black Atlantic

This paper takes up J. Lorand Matory’s suggestion in Black Atlantic Religion (2005) that the connective, always regenerating, horizontally organized “rhizomes” and the heterogenous exchanges of “dialogue” are more productive metaphors for the Black Atlantic than “roots,” “survival,” or even “diaspora” and applies it to early Bermuda. Bermuda’s unusual demography of no indigenous population; the early establishment of slavery yet little importation of enslaved people from either transatlantic or intercolonial voyages after the first third of the seventeenth century; as well as its present-day colonial status have placed it outside many of the existing boundaries of Black Atlantic scholarship, which often differentiates it from the Caribbean. Yet cultural influences did spread and flow to, from, and within Bermuda. Thinking explicitly about rhizomes and dialogues makes possible a more complex analysis of Bermuda as a node in the Black Atlantic. In particular, this paper focuses on the ways the public processions and dances in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—the antecedents of today’s Bermuda Gombey dance—were connected to practices in other parts of the Atlantic and formed local and Atlantic dialogues.