Casualties

A guiding philosophy of any dance class is to reproduce: reproduce an instructor's choreography, reproduce an obedience to rhythm, reproduce a social order. In a class, we dancers pay, in part, for an occasion to mime. Dancers arrive with an intention to encounter the limits of their own body and to train that physical mass toward a new iteration of itself. Dancers—and here I am directing my attention to those who deliberately show up to a dance class ready to pay a fee for an embodied experience—arrive with assumptions in tow. In addition to tutoring the body, to attend a dance class is to traffic in community building—however robust, thin, or fleeting.

Dance classes are also a sum of losses.

If one is there to reproduce a choreography or to experience the transmission of embodied information, one is also reproducing an African diasporic social order. West African dance classes are moments of contention, of identity slicing, and of policing. All dancers shed, redesign, or abandon a past version of themselves; each one matters to the space. The less-rhythmic dancer makes the skilled appear cleaner. A close public relationship with a teacher means that one can chase the rhythm and still provoke the patience, if not the tutoring, of the advanced students. One's social context influences the terms with which a dancer's movement is measured (see Scott 1997).

Scholars of African diaspora studies have theorized diaspora as both a noun and a verb; the African diaspora exists and it is in a constant state of enactment (Edwards 2001; Hall 1996; Hartman 2007; Nelson 2011). Analyzing diaspora through the framework of articulation, Brent Hayes Edwards writes:

If a discourse of diaspora articulates difference, then one must consider the status of that difference—not just linguistic difference but, more broadly, the trace or the residue, perhaps, of what resists translation or what sometimes cannot help refusing translation across the boundaries of language, class, gender, sexuality, religion, the nation-state.

(2001:64)

Further, Edwards mobilizes the French word décalage—"the kernel of precisely that which cannot be transferred or exchanged, the received biases that refuse to pass over when one crosses the water [...,] an unidentifiable point that is incessantly touched and fingered and pressed"—to capture the fundamentality of difference in the making of diaspora (2001:65). According to both Stuart Hall and Edwards, décalage explains the ambivalent nature of linguistic translation. Thus décalage provides an occasion to regard African diasporic communities as heterogeneous, incommensurable, and performatively constructed.

While décalage has been historically applied to the logocentric, this theory of (mis)translation is activated even when few words are uttered. Translated as a "gap," "discrepancy," "time lag," or "interval"—"décalage" rubs up against a related term: casualties. Reading for casualties can assist scholars of black diasporic dance in mapping the force of West African movement in reproducing racial and gendered difference.

Scholarship on West African dance has tended to focus on its healing properties for African diasporic people and its capacity to suture difference (see Daniel 2005; and Welsh 1998). Dance is a means through which people (black and not) pursue a connection to the African diaspora, sometimes through monetary exchange. For black Americans, this mode of recuperative identity politics directly challenged anti-black histories that positioned African Americans as beginning with the institution of slavery. Non-black West African dance participants have sometimes treated the dance practice as a spaceship launching toward racial transcendence and sexual freedom.

While scholars have attended to the notion of transmission as central to the act of teaching, it might also serve us to turn our attention to what falls away through ongoing enactments of choreographic transference.

Applying the logic of décalage to West African dance practice exposes a configuration of African diasporic dance politics that moves beyond its capacity to repair racial injury. It provides a useful framework through which to consider West African choreographies themselves—how they circulate transnationally, transform, and undergo choreographic casualties as they transfer between bodies. A casualties framework helps theoreticians of diaspora to chart the nonverbal "utterances" that get taught, translated...