Afro-Latin dance as reconstructive gestural discourse: the figuration philosophy of dance on salsa

ABSTRACT

The Afro-Latin dance known as ‘salsa’ is a fusion of multiple dances from West Africa, Muslim Spain, enslaved communities in the Caribbean, and the United States. In part due to its global origins, salsa was pivotal in the development of the Figuration philosophy of dance, and for ‘dancing-with,’ the theoretical method for social justice derived therefrom. In the present article, I apply the completed theory Figuration exclusively to salsa for the first time, after situating the latter in the dance studies literature. My first section explores Juliet McMains’ recent history, Spinning Mambo into Salsa, with an emphasis on the dynamics of class, race and sex therein. My second section explores a resonant Afro-Latin dance history, Marta E. Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, where she deploys salsa’s sister-dance (tango) as a ‘counter-choreography’ to the choreography of postmodern neocolonialism. And my third section applies Figuration’s four central aspects of dance (or ‘Moves’) to salsa qua member of its ‘societal’ family of dance. In conclusion, through partnering with salsa, Figuration emerges as a member of its own ‘discursive’ family of dance, while salsa emerges as a gestural discourse capable of helping reconstruct a more socially-just world from the postmodern ruins of today.

KEYWORDS:

• Salsa
• social justice
• Juliet McMains
• Figuration
• Marta Savigliano

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For more on the concept ‘ethnorace,’ created in order to resist the black/white binary and do more justice to Latinx identities, see Alcoff (2005).

2. McMains notes that the greatest mambo musician, Tito Puente, ‘always insisted he never played salsa – he ate salsa. He played mambo’ (52). And her ‘interview with Palladium mambo dancer Cuban Pete almost came to an impasse before it started because the release form I asked him to sign used the word “salsa”’ (53).

3. ‘When neo-Marxism, feminist theory, poststructuralism, deconstructive methods, world systemic theory, and postcolonial writing (all of which I use in my writing) demand consistency, exclusivity, and royalties, they stop serving me’ and ‘become confining’ (15).

4. I follow here Savigliano’s rebellious grammatical practice in her text, strategically using feminine endings as gender-neutral in place of the masculine endings required by the grammatical rules of Spanish.

5. See Wittgenstein (1991).

6. On this note, at a recent conference, Thomas Defrantz suggested that I needed to add an eight, ‘religious dance,’ for dances such as those of the whirling dervishes. I am considering this suggestion carefully, and may well incorporate it in future work on this subject.

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Joshua M. Hall

Joshua M. Hall is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of Liberal Studies at William Paterson University. His research focuses various historical and geographical lenses on philosophy's boundaries. This includes forty-six peer-reviewed journal articles (including inThe Pluralist, Philosophy Compass, and Philosophy and Literature), ten anthology chapters (including in the forthcoming Dance and Philosophy), and editing with Sarah Tyson, Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration.