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5 Putting on a Pano and Dancing Like Our Grandparents: Nation and Dress in Late Colonial Luanda Marissa Moorman They liked Brazilian music, they danced very well and they liked American cinema. I remember that the big stars at the time were Don Ameche and others, obviously cowboy ¤lms. . . . This imaginary of American cinema was re®ected in the way they behaved, in their suits, in the way they wore their mustaches—in the design of their mustaches you would see the presence of the American actor, the white actor. And there was certainly the in®uence of the black actors too, but this was mostly re®ected in the way they dressed. —Michel Laban, Mário Pinto de Andrade, Uma entrevista1 Referring to the 1940s and ’50s at the Liga Nacional Africana (National African League) in Luanda, Pinto de Andrade reminisces about his “mais velhos”2 as they performed American-inspired dances and artistic numbers in the halls of an association dedicated to the defense of the rights of Africans. Although the Liga was an elite institution it nonetheless preoccupied itself with the conditions of its downtrodden black brethren just as it sought to reclaim “Africa” from colonial cultural ignominy. Liga members would present a play representing life in the musseques (Luanda’s urban shantytowns which housed the majority of urban African residents ),using local instruments,ways of speaking,and dress as readily as a performance of American-style tap dancing or a Carmen Miranda number.3 An insistence on this duality of Western and Africanpracticeswouldbecome the unself-conscious hallmark of this young group. The Liga’s position as a loyalist association was the source of intergenerational political con®ict as some of this younger generation began to argue for an uncompromising nationalist politics. Like Malcolm X as described in Robin D. G. Kelley’s Race Rebels, these young men did not associate their dress with political expression. And yet, as Kelley argues, the dance, dress, and culture that Malcolm X later dismissed as the accouterments of a self-hating black man were “not a detour on the road to political consciousness but rather an essential element of his radicalization.”4 In the Angolan instance, radicalization was bound up with a larger set of cos- mopolitan cultural practices, of which dress was one. Young Angolans reached beyond the cultural vistas of Angola and the horizons of the Portuguese colonial imaginary to create local fashions and other cultural practices that asserted both their difference and their participation in the “global ecumene.”5 What developed was a cosmopolitan youth culture that recognized itself in the cut of a jacket, the length of a skirt, or the tilt of the hat from elsewhere just as it donned those symbols as intimate expressions of angolanidade (Angolan-ness). As the colonial state became more repressive in response to nationalist political activities in Angola, such self-styling grew in its signi¤cance, becoming both more widespread (within the capital and throughout the territory) and more meaningful. The possibilities for dress and their consequent meanings varied by gender, and this could not help but have implications for the nation being forged in the seemingly apolitical practices of dress and entertainment. Cosmopolitanism and the Nation Mobutu Sese Seko’s mandated authenticité in independent Zaire is perhaps the most well-known example of the association between dress and politics, dress and nation in Africa. Here the independent state promoted African apparel as a form of roots recovery to advance the nation-building project. African cultural forms were to remedy the European-centered identity that could be discerned in the tendency of at least some urban residents to dress in European styles and to speak French. But as Thomas Turino’s recent work demonstrates, borrowed cultural markers and materials can be more than the mere trappings or imitations of another culture. Turino describes this phenomenon as cosmopolitanism and de-¤nes as cosmopolitan “objects,ideas,and cultural positions that are widely diffused throughout the world and yet are speci¤c only to certain portions of the populations within given countries. . . . [Cosmopolitanism] has to be realized in speci¤c locations and in the lives of actual people.” It is both local and non-local while not necessarily being nationally evident, as it is often tied to speci¤c classes or social groups. Turino argues that nationalism is itself an example of a cosmopolitan doctrine that both arises from cosmopolitan practices and aims to spread them throughout a national territory. What is...

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