Oceans, cities, islands: sites and routes of Afro-diasporic rhythm cultures

Abstract

Since at least New York's Jazz Age, people the world over have filled urban social spaces (dance halls, dance clubs, the dance floor) to enjoy themselves through partner dances that evolved from the fusion of African-derived percussive rhythms and body movements on the one hand, and European melodies, instruments, and courtly dance styles on the other. These dances originated through the colonization of Africa, the forced displacement of African peoples, their enslavement on plantations throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. Despite their traumatic origins, they have become synonymous with the kinetic, somatic, pleasurable dimensions of urban modernity. What can this paradox reveal about people who enjoy dancing to these rhythms, including those with no connection to “Africa”? What is the relationship between the transoceanic routes that first brought these rhythms from Africa to the Americas, and the transnational webs that have ensured their global popularity? Can we excavate a history that connects the ship, the jet engine, and the beats of the drum? Can rhythm help bridge the histories of the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, especially given that similar rhythm cultures evolved in the Indian Ocean space through its own long histories of migrating and displaced peoples? By focusing on the sites and routes involved in the propagation of Afro-diasporic rhythm cultures from the plantation to the dance floor, this essay will argue that the unpredictable alliances forged thereby between bodies, rhythms, and places update both the Black Atlantic paradigm dominant in thinking about music and dance, and return pleasure and the body to studies of globalization.