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Modern Moves: Kinetic Transnationalism and Afro-Diasporic Rhythm Cultures

Final Report Summary - MODERNMOVES (Modern Moves: Kinetic Transnationalism and Afro-Diasporic Rhythm Cultures)

In May 2018, Modern Moves officially completed life as an investigation into Afro-diasporic rhythm cultures and their relationship to modernity. Its central question was: how did dances formed through traumatic histories of slavery and colonialism become a mode of exhilaration and self-discovery for people worldwide? Our starting point was the enthusiastic adoption of these dances, the heritage of African diasporas, by dancers who often have no relationship to or awareness of that heritage. During our five-year journey as a multi-lingual interdisciplinary research team, we collected data relating to this phenomenon, and developed methodologies and critical language to explain our findings.

We explored the social function of African-heritage dances by investigating them as embodied experiences, both historically and in the present. Combining methods from literary studies, memory studies, dance and performance studies, history, and ethnomusicology, we examined different categories of evidence: not just the technical analysis of dance and music styles but their contemporary and historical representation through flyers, posters, music videos, and social media posts on the one hand, and archival photographs, drawings, and written descriptions on the other, as well as the experience and representation of sites and events— parties, studios, and festivals-- where people come together to dance.

Through these interdisciplinary methods, we explicate dance as a semiotic and political system driven by enjoyment, communication, and pride in technical achievement. Our focus on African-heritage dances that developed under conditions of extreme suppression of human agency, namely enslavement, established them as defiant celebrations of vitality and autonomy that simultaneously remember the past. These dances as diasporic memory offer resources for protest and resistance, precisely because their subversive power is enacted through the enjoyment that surrounds dance as a social event. To track this power and its global appeal, we coin the terms “fabulousness” and “alegropolitics” (politics of embodied happiness).

We link fabulousness and alegropolitics to the process of creolization, or the unpredictable generation of new cultural products through violent, racialized, and gendered encounters between unequally-positioned demographic groups. Creolization as an analytical tool explains how, structurally, these dances draw on both European and African elements. It also explains their emergence through the macro-level forces that shaped global capitalist modernity, including expansionism, colonialism, and imperialism; how they were cultural resources during decolonization and the Cold War; and their transformations under neoliberalism. The transnational dance floor is the urban site where these creolized dances circulate in creative tension with market forces.

Our framework of creolization accommodates Angolan dances kizomba and semba and Afro-Latin dances salsa, tango, and bachata, Brazilian dances such as samba de gafieira and maxixe, and African-American dances such as lindy hop; it places these couple dances alongside urban and processional styles such as voguing and second-line parades; it crosses the linguistic barriers separating dances from Spanish-speaking, Portuguese-speaking, Francophone, and Anglophone cultures. These breakthroughs were possible because we were comfortable doing research in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Bambara, and various Creoles, in fieldwork sites on both American and African sides of the Atlantic, and in Goa and several Indian Ocean islands.

In connecting theories of creolization to the influential concept of the Black Atlantic, we propose the “Creole Atlantic” as a new analytical tool. Furthermore, by examining the history and postcolonial practice of the creolized quadrille genre, we conclude that the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds share a history of creolization which, by the early twentieth century, diverges along economic and geopolitical lines. Under neoliberal transformation of racialized identities into the commodification of heritage, these now separated cultural histories are ripe for re-convergence through innovative partnerships. These discoveries promise exciting new approaches to research on Indian Ocean cultural and creative economies.

Throughout this multi-sited, multi-lingual, interdisciplinary project, we focused on social dances and dancers operating within precarious and unstructured economies, to remain alive to dance as resistance bubbling up along the faultlines of a global politics of marginalization. Our curated events invited artists representing African-heritage dance styles worldwide to experiment with collaborative possibilities and engage with academic specialists. We thereby brought the dance floor into the space of the university. While tracking the connections of the semi-clandestine fiesta to the globalized dance festival, Modern Moves remained faithful to its original vision of the dance party as ontological state and epistemic enabler.