Boucan! Loud moves against invisibility in postcolonial France

Abstract

In the late 2000s, young French black people, practicing different African popular dance genres, use the term boucan (loud noise) to describe forms of bodily expressivity that are mostly inaudible. Boucan, to them, is predominantly visual and is produced through ingenuity, boldness and flamboyance in competitive performances relying on dance, appearance and conspicuous consumption, taking place in public spaces. This article looks at the ways in which both sonic and visual ‘noises’ are used to negotiate presence and circulation in urban spaces that are only virtually open to all. Examining a moral panic around Black female ‘gangs’ at the end of the 2000s, this paper focuses on the role of Black youth culture in articulating the ‘politics of appropriateness’ to which young French Black women are subjected in public space. It asks how these women make their presences felt, occupy space and claim a ‘place’, navigating between the trope of the (loud) ‘angry black woman’ and that of the (silent) ‘traditional’ woman. This discussion of boucan puts into perspective the rhetorical linkage, long established in scholarship on race and gender, of dominated and racialized groups with the body, danger and ‘noise’. It relates the aesthetics of loudness developed by danseurs/danseuses afros to the in/visibility of blackness in France.