Tracking Dance in Latin American Literature

Abstract

This article traces the under-explored place of dance in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literature, from modernista poetry up to contemporary narrative. It argues that literature understands dance in a variety of ways: as a form of bodily labor or pleasure, a practice of interdisciplinarity, a mode of thought or a virtuosic display, a release or an enmeshment, an escape from control or a submission to it. Whether amateur or professional, individual or collective, organized or improvised, dance in literature is taken to offer a grounding in the present routed through the body, while affording a potential connection—via both deliberate gestures and muscle memory—to the past. Giving an overview of dance's historical routes through the continent, and highlighting recent critical and theoretical attention to the art form, the article analyzes the appearance of dance in poetry by Rubén Darío, Luis Palés Matos, and Nicolás Guillén, and in narrative by José María Arguedas, Roberto Bolaño, and Valeria Luiselli.