A Contested Corporeality: Solidarity, Self-Fulfillment, and Transformation through African-Derived Dancing

When it comes to important political concerns, such as migration and its relations to race, socioeconomic inequalities, and appropriation of cultural traditions, does it matter what occurs between student and teacher in a dance studio? Is there a transformative potentiality in learning to dance dances other than one’s own? If so, how does that happen? If not, what are the reasons? Several dance scholars would at least attest to the dance studio as important in shaping both subjectivity and world view (a few examples from different dance genres are Foster 1992; Cohen Bull 1997; Cooper Albright 2013; Schupp 2015). My answer to this question when it deals with the framework of migration is rather ambivalent, and therefore the aim of this article is to engage in a discussion, rather than attempt to provide a definitive conclusion. Let me first start with some background that triggered my personal interest in these issues.

In the beginning of 2014, the Multicultural Centre in Stockholm published a report on Africans living in Sweden and their living conditions (Afrofobi 2014). The investigation was commissioned by the Swedish Minister of Integration, and it collated statistical facts with the goal of working against African phobia. The document uses the concept of Afro-Swedes to categorize every inhabitant with some kind of African ancestry. The report was introduced to the public through articles in the leading daily newspapers. “The society must take the growing African phobia seriously,” was the headline of one of them (Beshir, Hübinette, and Kawesa 2014). The report notes that discrimination against Afro-Swedes is growing, even though the general level of hate crimes in the country is diminishing.¹

Reading this report reminded me of my own work as a pedagogue in African-American theatrical jazz dance during the 1970s. I had taken classes with former students of Pearl Primus and Matt Mattox but had no formal training as a dance teacher, since my main aim was to integrate my own dance practice with dance research at the university. I was employed by ABF, the Workers’ Educational Association (Arbetarnas Bildningsförbund), to teach evening classes for amateur teenagers and adults. ABF is one of Sweden’s largest adult liberal education associations and, since its start in 1912, has focused on questions of social class. It is a politically independent organization, but it “share[s] the values of the labour movement” (“About ABF in English” 2017). I recall struggling to embrace the proud declaration of solidarity and the general democratic goal of this education as set out in the course book (Vásárhelyi et al. [1973] 1975). This book was to be used in tandem with the teaching of the dancing itself, which focused on developing the students’ bodily technical skills.

Since that time, there has been a steady growth in courses in what I, in this context, call African-derived dances. One would (perhaps naively) imagine that the extended participation in African dancing cultures should have helped in supporting a different public attitude than the one found in the 2014 report on African phobia. I write “naively” to point to a potential national amnesia concerning how deeply rooted racial inequalities are in countries of the European north that describe themselves as sociopolitically democratic. In the following, I will in fact argue that some of the aims found in the ABF education of the 1970s were contradictory to the vision of creating the kind of equal society that Sweden hoped to achieve. I consider the aims to have helped in shaping a focus on an embodied self-fulfillment rather than an interest in learning about cultural and historical specificity, an attitude that has returned in today’s widespread interest in dancing “African” dances.

Based on the above description of the situation, this article will investigate the teaching and practicing of African-derived dances in Sweden from the 1960s until contemporary times. The reason behind choosing this longer time span is that it enables an analysis of how these dancing practices took place in different sociocultural spaces, and of the kinds of subjectivities and...