Racialization, Gender, and the Negotiation of Power in Stockholm’s African Dance Courses

Abstract

This paper explores the micro-politics of globalization, that is, how abstract and generalizing descriptions of processes of globalization are also a part of the negotiation of cultural identities in everyday encoutners. By “everyday” I mean the encounters and negotiations that occur as people follow their daily life pathways; that is in the “non-spectacular” aspects of life (Essed: 1991). I discuss how the travel of peoples, goods, and capital, has also come new encounters and negotiations of meaning and power. Modern meanings, and in particular, those based on bound meanings of “race,” geography, and culture, have also necessarily come under reformulation and rearticulation. Questions of who “legitimately” belongs, and what criteria this belonging is based upon, have become hot questions for not only nation-states but also individuals and their local understandings of community and self. Meanings of “Africa” and “Africans” are not static, but under constant reformulation and change. For example, the criteria used to define concepts such as “Africa”, “Africans”, and “African cultural productions” has been given varied significance by different actors positioned in different locations and time-periods. These are meanings that are not only racialized, but also gendered and sexed. Perhaps most well known are the ways that black African men and women’s bodies have long been a foil onto which Western capitalist longings for a different self, culture, and nation have been projected (Gilman 1985; Morrison 1992; Roedriger 1991; Sawyer 2000). At different historical periods, geographical locations, and cultural contexts normative understandings of “Europe” and “European men and women” have been reflected upon a mirror of an imaged “Africa” and “Africans.” These historical imaginings of an African “Other” have been used to legitimate power imbalances, privilege, and exclusion. This paper looks at one such reformulation of meanings of Africa and Africans. I discuss how the marketing and consumption of “African dance” in Stockholm is a site where meanings of “African culture” are under negotiation. A goal of the paper is to show how ”local” gendered and racialized power relations (and by that I mean the cultural politics of belonging in Sweden and Stockholm), are an integral part of the meanings of Africa and African culture that are produced in these settings. In particular, I will discuss how issues of “authenticity,” and in particular, how criteria such as gender, nationality, and the geographical space of Africa, are used by both instructors and students to negotiate perceived power imbalances between dancers and students. Through listening closely to their narratives it becomes evident that processes of globalization are also an integral part of the Stockholm everyday. Categories of ancestry, gender, biology, “race,” language, religion, territory, and “history”, were used as powerful agents in both the dance students and instructors claims of their own and other belonging to African community of dance. Methods used for this research are anthropological participant observation and open and closed tape-recorded interviewing techniques. The interviews cited in this paper were conducted as a portion of a larger Ph.D. research project on Swedishness, racism, and Black diasporic identities in Stockholm (Sawyer 2000). As one part of my dissertation fieldwork during 1995-6 I participated in