Circum-Atlantic connections and their global kinetoscapes: African-heritage partner dances

ABSTRACT

This introduction to a curated volume of original essays on African-heritage partner dances presents their shared kinetic features as performative social practices arising from creolising processes in the Atlantic world. The expressive dimension of these creolised dances, particularly their dependence on the connection between two dancers, enables them to function as the embodied memory of and resistance to the racialized and gendered violence of the plantation, which, as the essays demonstrate through a range of interdisciplinary approaches, shape experiences of leisure, self-fashioning, and collective joy within the cities of the Atlantic rim and beyond. These structural and affective similarities between the dances examined in the volume, which include maxixe, lindy hop, tango, kizomba, salsa, and their predecessor, the creolised quadrille, confirm a circum-Atlantic entanglement of creolised expressive culture, the global spread of which is explicated through the theoretical concepts of kinetoscapes, alegropolitics, affiliative afromodernity, and fabulousness.

KEYWORDS:

• Lindy hop
• salsa
• kizomba
• maxixe
• tango
• quadrille
• creolisation
• alegropolitics
• cultural appropriation
• embodied memory

The six original essays collected in this volume focus on social dances which utilise the European-derived protocol of partner hold, together with kinetic and rhythmic repertoires derived from Central and West African cultures. These dances, which our volume designates African-heritage partner dances, can be traced historically to the fraught encounters between cultures and peoples which resulted from enslavement, giving rise to the cultural matrix Paul Gilroy succinctly termed “the Black Atlantic.”¹ They constitute a distinct category within the circum-Atlantic expressive practices that were generated through processes of creolisation as demotic responses to asymmetrical operations of power. Many such partner dances have existed – and continue to exist – as vernacular social forms that thrive transnationally today on dance floors worldwide; some genres are well-known globally, others have died out, while yet others enjoy but local traction; all have developed in symbiosis with musical genres, often (but not always) bearing the same name as the dance genre in question. In this volume, we examine five such dances: maxixe, lindy hop, tango, kizomba, and salsa. The sixth essay examines the creolised quadrille, a group dance involving the patterned interaction of dancing couples, that provides a historical antecedent of the partner dances under discussion. All essays emphasise the embodied, performative, and collective dimensions of social dance while tracking specific kinetoscapes that emerge through the fragmentation, re-assemblage, and circulation of kinetic material in global modernity.² They thereby probe the historical, economic, and affective interconnections that make the Atlantic world “a vast behavioural vortex,” within which swirl not just “mutually interdependent performances of circum-Atlantic memory” but, equally, “transoceanic micropolitics of rival pulchritudes.”³

Partner dances in the creolised mix

It is a civilizational paradox that the absolute power exercised by the plantation system on the bodies of enslaved people should have given rise to such an abundance of embodied “pulchritudes” as represented in the myriad versions of these partner dances that have emerged since the late nineteenth century, of which only some examples are scrutinised here. The paradox deepens when we realise that, despite the formation of these dances under the most brutal manifestations of capitalism, it is capitalism’s neoliberal machinery that offers channels for the continued but unpredictable transnational proliferation today of several of these dances within semi-formalised leisure industries. This proliferation relates in complex ways to the democratisation of leisure enabled by specific historical factors, including migrations to and movement between the cities of the Atlantic littorals – not merely after the abolition of slavery, but in the wake of the World Wars, decolonisation, and the Cold War; the technological capture of the musical genres that correspond to these dance forms; and their commodification that has proceeded in dialectical tension with the inter-racial relationships that gave rise to these dances in the first place: in short, all the macro-level processes that unleash “modernity at large.”⁴ In elaborating on some of these themes, our essays reveal African-heritage partner dances as touchstones of global modernity’s intricate relationship to the traumatic processes of enslavement, colonialism, and extractive capitalism. While enacting, on one level, cultural compromise, they are, equally, embodied and mobile archives: kinetoscapes of newness and expressivity that arise in response and resistance to cultural deracination.

If these dances embody both compromise and resistance, it is because of their structure that, at a kinetic level, brings together two people in improvised somatic communication on the basis of each possessing rhythmic and musical “literacy” appropriate to the dance concerned. Above, I have called this structure the protocol of partner-hold: let me now explain what such a protocol entails. The dancing unit here is a partnered couple, where one person, usually a man, “leads,” and the other, usually a woman, “follows.” Their synchronisation is ensured by shared knowledge on several levels: a repertoire of steps that are specific to leaders and followers while enabling each to generate a kinetic structure that incorporates the other (visually, this translates into some form of mirroring); an understanding of the rhythmic basis of the music (which is manifested in the dancers’ movements); mutual comprehension of the non-verbal cues through which the leader initiates displacement, return, and movement through the dancing space while mindful of other dancers, and the follower responds. The smooth, playful give and take of information, triangulated with the music’s demands, generates a process summed up in the concept of connection, the sum of the forces which hold together and propel the dancing couple as a unit. Given that our dances are improvised social acts, the quality of the connection, based on shared knowledge of the kinds outlined above, is crucial in ensuring a pleasurable dancing experience.

This imperative of improvisation transforms the European protocol of partner hold, as well as the European time signatures that structure the rhythm on the musical level.⁵ As a result, this spatial and temporal structure combines with polyrhythm, polycentrism, body isolation, and so-called syncopation – all features that derive from West and Central African kinaesthetic and percussive features.⁶ Through creolisation, these embodied cultural knowledges carried by European and African people to the Americas merged to give rise to a spectrum of partner dances differentiated by the extent to which the dance in question invokes its kinaesthetic African heritage – a choice which I have called elsewhere “the sliding signifier of the Afro” in standard descriptors such as “Afro-Latin” or “Afro-diasporic.”⁷ Given that it is the embodiment of Africanity which is the variable, and the European-derived partner hold which is the constant, why have we chosen to call them “African-heritage” partner dances within this volume? This question is also precipitated by our recourse to the theoretical framework of creolisation to explicate these dances as a circum-Atlantic phenomenon. Whatever the emic nomenclature bestowed on creolised cultural forms, the logic of creolisation militates against the etic labelling of these new cultural products in a manner that genealogically ties them to anterior essences. From this perspective, indeed, our calling these dances “European-heritage” would be as problematic as a decision to describe them as “African-heritage.” So why a name that recollects and privileges one element alone within the creolised mix? The answer returns us to the question of resistance.

Activating, remembering, resisting

The African heritage that is either foregrounded or camouflaged through the flexible resources of these creolised dances is also the heritage which gives dancers an affective vocabulary for somatically remembering aspects of identities experienced as lost, alienated, fragmented, and yet powerfully capable of inciting subversion and rebellion.⁸ This vocabulary is the physical correlative of an idea of Africa that haunts these dances, their music, and the habitus that accrues around them, often mediated through Afro-diasporic religious systems and the political and spiritual importance of drumming.⁹ At the same time, it is the European frame of the partner hold, always a defining feature of these dances, and its graphic equivalent, the musical score, that smuggle these somatic traces of Africanity into the realm of entertainment, leisure, and pleasure. Through rhythmic and kinetic epistemes, the African heritage of populations displaced through slavery and deracinated through colonialism interjects within European dance and music forms to recodify them. As our essays confirm, therefore, such traces are never completely neutralised or reduced to ornamental status. Moreover, they are reservoirs of collective memory that can activate at different times and places an imagined “Africa.”¹⁰ Conducted through the partner hold, our dances as acts of memory neither hold out the possibility of a return to origins nor plangently declare the impossibility of return. Rather, transmitting overt compromise and covert resistance, their activation of African heritage within the structures of creolisation celebrates survival and enacts hope through acts of connection.

The dancing body is thus the product of the “habitation-plantation as contact zone, where the brutal confrontation of cultures and peoples, a confrontation in which one group sought to dominate another, set in motion the chaotic and unpredictable process known as creolisation.”¹¹ But more than this: it is the contact zone. Marshalling the resources of polyrhythm, it registers in synchronicity diverse kinetic histories, even while bearing witness to its capacity to transform the violence of encounter by becoming its somatic record. While these statements arguably hold true for the gamut of social dances that arose through creolisation, it is the partner dance form that most eloquently expresses the creolising encounter through (and as) performance. What John Charles Chasteen calls the “dance of two” is a kinetic structuration and re-enactment of the contact zone as a space where “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths.”¹² The heteronormative expectations of the “leader-follower” paradigm may well be seen as capitulation to modernity’s defining collusion of patriarchy and capitalism, but – as the essays collected here reiterate through their examination of specific dances – they are better understood as a ceaseless performance of confrontation, negotiation, and a “grappling” that is, literally, manifested in the labile interconnectedness of torsos and limbs. Through serious play between the demands for compromise and the subtlety of resistance, the teleological quest for an ending is held in perpetual balance.

In other words, a dance enjoyed in partner-hold is durational – but it is not a narrative (with expectations of linearity, cause-and-effect, and sequentiality). Rather, through elements drawn from different heritages, the dance of two performs what Diana Taylor calls “foundation scenarios,” that “do not reduce gestures and embodied practices to narrative description.”¹³ An understanding of African-heritage partner dances through Taylor’s argument for “the scenario [as] a meaning-making paradigm that structures social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes,” underwrites our volume. There is, however, one crucial difference: Taylor, writing from Performance Studies, foregrounds the mise-en-scène’s potential “to reactivate a scenario;”¹⁴ our social dancers, in contrast, move on the dance floor, not on the stage. Nevertheless, “the embodied nature of the repertoire” makes actors of these dancers, who, through role play, re-enact the sexual and racial violence inextricable from creolisation, while seizing opportunities of improvised communication between the dancing couple to convert that foundational violence into a modus vivendi for survival through “reversal, parody, and change.”¹⁵ Participating in the use of masquerade and subterfuge that characterises performance cultures of the Atlantic rim, our social dances do not need the pomp and ceremony of carnival costumes to tap into those rich resources.¹⁶ The swag is in the strut.¹⁷ Value and meaning are generated through the partner hold as enabler of mimesis. Facing each other and playing with the beat, the dancing couple commemorates, subverts, parodies, and transmits culture through intersubjective mimicry and mirroring.¹⁸

Connecting bodies, across ocean and dance floors

As a “frame [which] is basically fixed and as such repeatable and transferable,”¹⁹ the African-heritage partner dance is a kinetic-somatic structure for embodied performance that connects not just people, but also places. As our volume emphatically demonstrates, the trajectories and forms of interconnectedness enacted by these dances are not restricted to the American side of the Atlantic Ocean. Neither do we examine them solely as “national rhythms” with “African roots,” best capable of illuminating cultural histories that explain the mysteries of nation-building in the so-called New World.²⁰ Rather, these dances vindicate the recent claim that “at its best, the goal of Atlantic history and its practitioners is to consider the past from a perspective bound more by the integrated nature of transnational engagements than by national borders.”²¹ Our essays thus resonate with new webbed and spiralling models for understanding cultural dispersal and re-aggregation throughout the circum-Atlantic space.²² In fact, these essays trace transnational entanglements that not only integrate the African and American shores and Northern and Southern latitudes of the Atlantic world, but also articulate that world with the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. We thereby respond to the “plea” which concludes Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s seminal argument for connected histories: “that we not only compare from within our boxes, but spend some time and effort to transcend them, not by comparison alone, but by seeking out the at times fragile threads that connected the globe, even as the globe came to be defined as such.”²³

Dance, that “remains a greatly undervalued and undertheorized area of bodily discourse,”²⁴ in fact constitutes an important category of Subrahmanyam’s “fragile threads.” In excavating connected histories through dance, moreover, it is social dancing of the kind we examine that proves particularly useful. As I have argued, its structure of the partner hold functions as the manifestation of connection, even as its variegated recourse to embodied Africanisms activates difficult yet redemptive memories. However, the dancing dyad makes sense only in the wider context of dance as event that unfolds in space and time, on dance floors, in studios and festivals and nightclubs.²⁵ Furthermore, social dance's immediate and ephemeral aspects are mediated through technological amplification, from the earliest experiments with mechanical reproduction to dissemination through social media today. Our essays are interested in probing together these materialist dimensions of African-heritage partner dances as well as its more ineffable phenomenology – the heady experiences of sweat, smell, heat, and the rhythm, that keep a dancing crowd on its feet beyond tiredness and in defiance of the ticking clock of capitalist labour: “we’re lost in music,” as the classic disco anthem from Sister Sledge declares, “feel so alive/ I quit my nine to five.”²⁶ In their instantiation of intersubjective connections through layered recourse to creolised kinetics, our dances are plumb lines for measuring what Émile Durkheim pinpointed in 1912 as a “certain rush of energy [that] comes to us from outside ourselves,” a collective effervescence that, following Polynesian ritual terminology, he called “mana.”²⁷

William Mazzarella attributes the Durkheimian fascination with “mana” to “a series of encounters that had their roots in the historically simultaneous rise of mass-mediated societies in the Global North and the consolidation of colonial rule in the Global South.”²⁸ These very encounters predicate the commercialisation of African-heritage partner dances which made possible their “social life” in modernity. The creolised partner hold incarnates Mazarella’s “mana of mass society” as both genealogy and symptom of a quest for “elective affinity as the constitutive face of the encounter.”²⁹ It fosters “extimacy – the simultaneous and ambivalent externality and intimacy – of an encounter that produced all the many ways of imagining and inhabiting the relation between an emergent Euro-American mass-mediated ‘civilization’ and its ‘primitive’ others.”³⁰ Capitalising on the democratic potential of the urban dance hall, these dances channel “the ambiguous energies of the masses tensely oscillating between volatile crowd and rational public” offering an alternative to both “the carapace of bureaucratic reason and the voluptuous ecstasy of war.”³¹ At the same time, technologies of recording and amplification set into motion fraught processes of “love and theft” crystallizing around circum-Atlantic cultural forms as they pass back and forth between racialized groups.³² Through dialogic exploration of the routes whereby specific partner dances entered the commercial arena, and their continuing structural reliance on the push and pull of mimicry, our essays shed new light on the complex relationship between race relations, cultural appropriation, pleasure, and the dance floor’s liberating potential.

Dancing beyond borders and boundaries

There are many ways to tell these intertwined stories of African-heritage partner dances, as many as the dances themselves. We present six possibilities. Five essays explore genres of dance that could each be affixed to a place or nation of origin: “Brazilian” maxixe from Rio de Janeiro; “American” lindy hop from New York; “Argentinian” tango from Buenos Aires; “Angolan” kizomba from Luanda; “Cuban” salsa from Havana. But as we reiterate, the dances refuse to be thus compartmentalised. Their entangled trajectories of production, consumption, and enjoyment are, as the sixth essay shows, already evident in the transoceanic quadrille, ab initio of many continents. In keeping with this subject matter, the essays cross and re-cross “archive” with “repertoire,”³³ as well as disciplines, languages, and the media, whereby a protean cultural form is captured and disseminated through technology. We are: a dance scholar analysing audio-visual and textual records of dance, three literary scholars analysing dance as embodied culture, an anthropologist considering postcolonial language politics, and an ethnomusicologist examining the sites as well as structures of dance. Song lyrics, liner notes, advertisements, films, flyers, posters, costumes, interviews of DJs, dancers, musicians, and impresarios, fieldwork diaries, social media updates, and documents from public and private archives, in French, English, Portuguese, Spanish, and several Creoles, are examined by us as the all-important paraphernalia of social dance as we move through Paris, Lisbon, New York, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, Luanda and Cotonou, Cairo and Beirut.

The sequence in which the essays appear traces an arc of argumentation through the flow of linked themes. The first two essays shed new light on an old circum-Atlantic story: the movement of movement as the tussle between cultural patrimony, cross-cultural sharing, and appropriation of black culture by white protagonists in the racialized post-plantation Americas. Cristina Rosa’s investigation of “The curious case of maxixe dancing: From colonial dissent to modern fitness” focuses on the maxixe’s movement between Rio de Janeiro, Paris and New York, gaining in commercial popularity but losing a tension in its embodied praxis as well as its political orientation. Kendra Unruh’s “May we have this dance?: Cultural ownership of the lindy hop from the swing era to today” probes parallel developments in the north through lindy hop’s heyday in black Harlem and its recent revival amongst predominantly white dancers. Unruh starts where Rosa ends: the contemporary life of these dances and the re-routing of resistive energies they encoded when they first emerged. Do these energies still hold valence through their transnational journeys? Were they dissipated, or perhaps transformed, as the dances morphed into globally prevalent leisure activities? An answer is offered in the third essay, Kirsty Bennett’s “One thousand and one nights of tango: Moving between Argentina, North Africa, and the Middle East,” which reads historical links between Argentinian, Andalusian and Ottoman cultures against modern Arab responses to tango to propose a Sufi-inspired elucidation of tango’s cross-cultural meaningfulness.

The three remaining essays develop new heuristic tools to calibrate this persistent crossing of geographical and political boundaries our dances share. In “Kizomba between Angolan-ness and Lusofonia: The transnational dance floor,” Livia Jimenez Sedano explores the recently-popularised dance, kizomba, through the movement of DJs, musicians, and club owners, their memories, and their preferred music between the French Caribbean, Luanda, and Lisbon. She delineates thereby the phenomenon of the transnational dance floor that defies methodological nationalism and language-based postcolonial affinities. Developing this theme, Elina Djebbari shows in “Dancing salsa in Benin: Connecting the Creole Atlantic,” the creative appropriation of Cuban music and dance by different generations of Beninese salsa aficionados, and proposes the concept of the “Creole Atlantic” as the best lens through which to assess such phenomena. These essays extend Bennett’s pursuit of postcolonial connections that unfold between differently-placed Southern locations through the music and dance forms under scrutiny. While, as Jimenez Sedano demonstrates, northern “hubs” never disappear from the horizon of investigation, they are effectively provincialised. The spotlight falls on actors in non-European locations using (and re-creolising) creolised cultural matter to perform modernity. The final essay, Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s “Creolization as balancing act in the transoceanic quadrille: Choreogenesis, incorporation, memory, market,” historicises these currents through the creolised quadrille’s diffusion across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean insular spaces. Kabir reveals how nineteenth-century creolisation processes responded to market forces to produce the partner dances explored in the other essays, even while the creolised quadrille itself enters festival economies within postcolonial identity-formation processes.

Alegropolitics of the broken circle

At the heart of all the essays is the dancing couple, where each “dancer move[s] autonomously and yet in the pull of the other’s rhythms.”³⁴ Wherever in the world they dance, whether their lindy hopping feet stomp and fly, whether their bodies spin, break, and shimmy to salsa, whether they rotate around each other’s torsos in the maxixe’s teetering whirls, whether they dance in close embrace, heads touching, executing tango’s delicate yet razor-sharp footwork or kizomba’s undulations of the lower torso, whether they are on the point of breaking away from the quadrille to creolise new-fangled partner dances from Europe (just to enlist the dances discussed here): they acknowledge a history that their bodies transmit through their kinetic repertoires. This is the kinetic history that returns to black dancers striving to connect with each other through a defiantly joyous reclaiming of the “disavowed geography of the world: the barracoon, the hold, the plantation, the camp, the reservation, the garret, the colony, the attic studio, the bedroom, the urban archipelagoes, the ghetto, and the prison.”³⁵ It is a history that Saidiya Hartman has recently excavated, with empathy and elan vital, from the perspective of the “wayward” black girls who arrived after emancipation to northern American cities, staking their claim to modernity, determined to escape “the marriage plot: daddy, mommy, and child, existence on her knees – intent on making a new life possible [.]”³⁶

It is of immense significance to our volume that Hartman closes her book with an account of these girls congregating in Harlem’s cabarets, where “on the dance floor, they refused the world that refused them” and where “it was clear that existence was not only a struggle, but a beautiful experiment, too.”³⁷ Pushing back the edges of photographs and other documents from the attempted archival capture of precarious black lives, Hartman’s prose conjures up the way in which the girls move “in the broken circle of the dance floor” as they “readied to get free” – we see “that little extra something, that improvisation of becoming together, that call to assembly, that two-step and slide announcing the struggle against an imposed life, that sensual embrace of a body unmarked by stigma and undisciplined by servitude.”³⁸ Yet she does more than make us imagine them dancing in polyrhythmic call and response that riffed off “the energy pulsing from the streets” of Harlem, “exemplify[ing] the vitality of the ordinary.”³⁹ She reminds us that “all those sweaty bodies gathered on the floor [that] sought escape from the dull routine of work and the new forms,” that, fleeing the plantation, the “practice of bodies in motion” they inadvertently choreographed was “a call to freedom.”⁴⁰ Her intense focus on the women caught up in this “freedom time,”⁴¹ however, means that Hartman does not unpack the full significance of dancing in complicity with a partner (be that partner man or woman).

That precarious complicity, of making-vulnerable of the self to a dance partner, is precisely the point where autonomy and surrender orbit each other. The equipoise of partner dance and the dynamism of improvised yet structured connection stretch the point out across the duration of the song. “Each dance was a rehearsal for escape,”⁴² but one that had to be undertaken by both parties connected in the dance. In this balancing act, which is examined in Kabir’s essay but also played out in the danced scenarios assembled across the volume, we find a meta-history of creolisation itself as the unexpected, even “miraculous” creation of exhilarating cultural resources out of violent encounters and brutal histories of repression and dehumanisation. Where we might expect the body to capitulate, and, to reject the other by closing ranks, we find instead new vocabularies of self-fashioning through collaborative survival, an alegropolitics of the dance floor that remakes the self through taking on and improvising with the kinetic equivalents of Europe’s so-called civilising mission.⁴³ African-heritage partner dances register the power of parody, of mimicry, of “strategic essentialism,” and “sly civility” – all tactics elaborated within postcolonial theory, but evaporated on to the wholly discursive and verbal level of speaking with “forked tongues”⁴⁴ – in making enjoyment and pleasure the performative weaponry of the dispossessed. Our essays reveal this weaponry as offering resources for “wayward” self-making to a range of people who, constricted by the labels and routines of neoliberal capitalism, choose to perform an affiliative Afromodernity through dance.⁴⁵

“Why is our music so contagious?” asked Richard Wright in 1941. “Why is it that those who deny us are willing to sing our song? Perhaps it is because so many of those who live in cities feel deep down just as we feel.”⁴⁶ Attempts to explicate the “contagious” nature of black music and dance must perforce remain vigilant to the economic and ethical consequences of cultural appropriation as a responsibility and duty towards the historical burdens of modernity we are implicated in.⁴⁷ But the evidence of our essays also points towards the psychosocial domain pinpointed by Wright when we seek to understand why, with or without genetic filiation to African heritage, people the world over are pulled towards its performative expressions. “If the birth of the racial subject – and therefore of Blackness – is linked to the history of capitalism,”⁴⁸ it is the stylised “gestures that disclose what is at stake – the matter of life returns as an open question.”⁴⁹ This challenge to the system through an improvised vocabulary of “self-styling” is what Madison Moore has theorised as the “fabulous,” and it is this art of being fabulous, “created in duress,” born out of racialisation, that throws out a lifeline, a “gift” whose reception goes beyond racialized distinctions: “I have found,” Moore declares, “that the people most likely to do fabulous performance are either those who, though well-off, feel hemmed in by conservative conditions or, alternatively, those who have in some way faced historically conditioned, systemic oppression.”⁵⁰

This volume presents African-heritage partner dances as resources “bringing people together in rhythmic affinity” in the anonymous yet pulsating streets of the Atlantic rim city, punishing in its demands for labour and conformity, and yet trembling with possibilities for self-styling through recourse to “histories written on the body through gesture.”⁵¹ They bridge the gap between Moore’s recognition that “fabulousness is always an embrace of yourself when you’re constantly reminded that you don’t deserve to be embraced” and Marta Savigliano’s perspicacious question, “Whose embrace was the tango embrace?”⁵² Our dancers instantiate a mutual embrace amidst the alienations of modernity, “relaunching,” through the touch of the other, “the forms of reciprocity without which there can be no progress for humanity.”⁵³ As demotic sources of healing “the racial and class displacement provoked by urbanization and war,” – and we should add, gendered violence, too – the African-heritage partner dance “competed for a place of its own, among the dances that were already being danced, pending, as always, benediction in the cultural empires of the world.”⁵⁴ Yet what makes its “status as vernacular knowledge useful was the part it played in the endless labor of reparation.”⁵⁵ Our creolised dances-of-two represent the Afro-Atlantic vernacular gone global through kinetoscapes that bypass the stamp of high cultural “benediction.” As a “system of exchange, reciprocity, and mutuality” for “sharing the world with other beings,” they affirm – when the connection is right – that “our vocation to survive depends on making the desire for life – a shared desire – the cornerstone of a new way of thinking about politics and culture.”⁵⁶

Acknowledgements

The research which this essay draws on was funded by the ERC Advanced Grant “Modern Moves.” Its writing was facilitated by a Humboldt Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Germany, and by the hospitality of Professor Andrew James Johnston at the Department of English Philology, Freie Universität, Berlin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. She researches the intersection of the written text with other forms of cultural expression within acts of collective memorialization and forgetting. Through an ERC Advanced Grant (2013–2018), she led an interdisciplinary investigation into African-heritage social dance and music across language worlds. For her innovative work in the Humanities, she received the Infosys Humanities Prize (2017), awarded by the Infosys Science Foundation, India, and the Humboldt Forschungspreis (Humboldt Prize), awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (2018). She is currently writing “Alegropolitics: connecting on the Afromodern Dance Floor.” Her new research projects explore further the concepts of transoceanic creolisation through cultural production across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Research Council [grant number 324918]. H2020 European Research Council

Notes

1 Gilroy, Black Atlantic.

2 To the “ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes” that Arjun Appadurai marshalled into his influential exploration of global modernity (Modernity at Large, 33), I add “kinetoscapes” to privilege the cultural encounters that took place, and still do, through the historical movements of people and their kinetic traditions across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. See Kabir, “Oceans, Cities, Islands,” 119–120.

3 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 30–31.

4 Appadurai, Modernity at Large.

5 Fraser Delgado and Esteban Nuñoz, “Rebellions,” 12–13; 18; Carpentier, Music in Cuba.

6 See Gottschild, Digging, Farris Thompson, Tango.

7 Kabir, “Oceans, Cities, Islands,” 119.

8 Fryer, Rhythms.

9 Matory, Fetish.

10 Apter and Derby, “Introduction.”

11 Couti, Dangerous Creole Liaisons, 2. On the “contact zone” as concept, see Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

12 Chasteen, National Rhythms. The quote is from Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7.

13 Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 16.

14 Ibid., 29.

15 Ibid., 31.

16 Roach, Cities; Nunley, “Jolly Masquerades.”

17 Moore, Fabulous, 9: “Fabulousness isn’t just about sequins: it’s what happens the second we stop trying to fit in and start daring to inhabit space on our own terms.”

18 In this context, see the robust argument for Afro-Uruguayan expressive culture’s transformation and survival (rather than appropriation) offered by Andrews, Blackness in a White Nation.

19 Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 31.

20 Chasteen, National Rhythms.

21 Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 242.

22 See Pinnix, “Sargassum,” and Winters, Mulatta, 38.

23 Subrahmanyam, “Connecting Histories,” 762.

24 Desmond, “Embodying Difference,” 34.

25 Fraser Delgado and Esteban Muñoz, “Rebellions.”

26 Sister Sledge, “Lost in Music,” from their album We are Family (Cotillon, 1979). On the power of nightlife as a setting for social dance, see Fraser Delgado and Esteban Nuñoz, “Rebellions” and Moore, “Nightlife as Form.”

27 Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 213.

28 Mazzarella, Mana, 38.

29 Ibid., 36.

30 Ibid., 50.

31 Ibid., 41, 43.

32 Lott, Love and Theft.

33 Taylor, Archive and Repertoire.

34 Hartman, Wayward Lives, 303.

35 Ibid., 347.

36 Ibid., 299.

37 Ibid., 305, 307.

38 Ibid., 306.

39 Ibid., 300.

40 Ibid., 305, 306

41 Wilder, Freedom Time.

42 Hartman, Wayward Lives, 306.

43 Kabir, “Fleeting Taste.”

44 All phrases are from Bhabha, Location of Culture; except “strategic essentialism,” for which see Spivak, In Other Worlds, 205.

45 Kabir, “Decolonizing Time.”

46 Wright, Reader, 227.

47 Rothberg, Implicated Subjects.

48 Mbembe, Critique, 179.

49 Hartman, Wayward Lives, 349.

50 Moore, Fabulous, 29, 35.

51 Fraser Delgado and Esteban Muñoz, “Rebellions,” 9.

52 Moore, Fabulous, 8; Savigliano, Tango, 32

53 Mbembe, Critique, 182.

54 Savilgiano, Tango, 32.

55 Mbembe, Critique, 180.

56 Ibid., 181.