Paper short abstract:

The paper addresses Afro-Cuban diasporic dance as a form of embodied knowledge that challenges Eurocentric educational models through pedagogies rooted in the broader project at the core of the Cuban Revolution.

Paper long abstract:

The paper addresses Afro-Cuban diasporic dance as a form of embodied knowledge that challenges Eurocentric educational models through pedagogies rooted in the broader project at the core of the Cuban Revolution.

Cuban dancers find careers abroad to be a viable alternative to an otherwise difficult to access European labor market. Their experiences and professional trajectories in migratory contexts are overdetermined and overladen with racist meanings, which condition their ways of being in the world. Cuba – as imaginative construction – holds a central place on the global dance marketplace, which values or devalues dancers for their race and ethnicity. Inscribed as commodities in an ‘economy of diversity’ (Tomé 2019), dancing selves are consolidated in a race for economic and symbolic capital governed by market logic. As embodied knowledge becomes commodified, disrupted transmission processes are revived and integrated into new socio-cultural contexts, shifting positions of knowledge control. The transformative capacities of the dancing body as a living archive open pathways to memories of the past and at the same time new possibilities for future performances.

Choreographic inheritance embodied and disseminated through Afro-Cuban dance addresses the underlying epistemological tension of Black dance (and Black bodies) being controlled, dominated, and exoticized, and reclaims agency for Cubans within a music and dance style that has been repackaged and reinterpreted around the world.