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Introduction: Positionality and the Choreography of Theory They call us men of cotton, coffee, and oil They call us men of death But we are men of dance, whose feet grow stronger As we pound upon firm ground. —Léopold Sédar Senghor Dance and Africans have a long-standing association that has been nurtured through the last two centuries by colonial histories and anticolonial struggles.On the colonial side of history,the coloring of theAfrican body with the heavy tones of racist discourse and the devaluation of dance as a prediscursive form of expression concurred to make African dance a powerful icon of primitivism. On the anticolonial side, African dance allowed for the articulation of indigenous cultural beliefs and the expression of historical continuities , making dance also a powerful medium of indigenous resistance against the European colonizers. The space between personal and social histories is the territory from which I write and the ground on which I dance. And here I stand, not at the beginning of it all,not at the end,but at a start.Colonized Africa confronts me with phantasmagoric creatures—powerful Africans scantily dressed, savage people of great strength—that engage in battle with dancers in flesh and blood. They fight for my attention on the stage and pull me between reality and fantasy , between the present and the specters of history. Here I stand. I turn white as I step into African dance; I turn white like my dead ancestors who invented the tones of racialized discourse. This color sticks to my skin and cannot be brushed away by a blissful forgetfulness. The sweat of ecstatic dancing cannot wash out the whiteness on my body and erase the memory of four centuries of slavery, over half a century of colonial domination, and its permutation into neocolonial yokes.This memory designs a space with its own choreographic imperatives: it pulls me back to a place of beginnings, of roots, of movements into the past, never stepping forward. Africa, the mother of humanity.At the beginning there was also dance,the mother of the arts, the most primitive of artistic expressions. Thus, Africa and dance make a good duet, supporting each other in the making of stereotypes of primitiveness . We used to say that Africans have no history and only we, the white ones who possess written language, have a history worthy of mention. We now say that Africa has no future,a whole continent of hopelessness,with perhaps the exception of its tip—South Africa. Through this writing I question this choreography, this movement backwards, and at the same time I account for its origin. With arrogance and stubbornness—no, with humbleness and cowardice, I presume to write about Senegalese dance. The single term “dance” hides within it the struggles of dance makers over the control of their products; the circulation, consumption, and proliferation of dances beyond an original locus of production; and the gaps in age and cultural and social background between artists, producers, and audiences. The term “Senegalese” covers an even more heterogeneous ensemble of religious, political, economical, ethnic, generational, and gendered identities and histories . “Senegalese dance” as such does not exist, yet I have sutured the plurality of the uneven strands covered in the fictional singular by taking the National Ballet of Senegal as the official embodiment of Senegalese dance, invested by the state to construct, represent, and preserve the cultural patrimony of the nation. I thus began and ended this research project seated at the Irvine Barclay Theater in California, watching the National Ballet of Senegal perform in 1995 and again in 1998. Between these two events I labored to acquire the resources to interpret the performance of the Ballet not only as a spectator /critic but also as an ethnographer.1 From January to March 1996 and from September 1996 to March 1997, I conducted ethnographic research in Dakar, the capital of Senegal,interrogating the activities of the National Ballet of Senegal and of three other African Ballet companies operating in the city. Central to my ethnographic approach to the work of African Ballets in Senegal has been the concept of choreography, which I define in the context of the dance practices under analysis as a form of historical writing that foregrounds the corporeal dimension of social subjects as the means and object of writing .This conceptualization is intended to disturb the association of dance with the ephemeral and the nonverbal that has until recently dominated the disci2...

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