"African dance is the new yoga!" and other assumptions, misperceptions, and questions raised by the teaching of African dance in America

This is sort of a continuation of my Field Notes 2 post, but more about my experiences outside of the Mande dance class--at lectures and on the internet--that have affected the way I think about teaching West African dance in America.

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Last Wednesday (April 2), I went to a lecture called "The Orientalism of Anti-orientalism", given by Leigh Jenco, a Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Political Theory Project at Brown. Although she explained a little bit about why anti-orientalism is often orientalist (the self-proclaimed anti-orientalists are often Europeans drawing on European methods to critique Orientalism, and thus are still primarily responding to Western concerns), most of her lecture (which turned out to be more of a class-like lecture/discussion) was focused on her own "anti-orientalist" approach, which she first warned everyone that she was still in the process of thinking through, and just wanted people's feedback.

The solution to Orientalism, at least in the university setting, she suggested, is to organize classes not by methodology (like philosophy, for example), but by region (like Africana studies). This shift from dividing classes between the "real" subjects and mere "case studies" would include a radical transformation in the way knowledge is gathered, as the classes would not specify beforehand the content of knowledge (or the nature of thinking, for that matter--though this could prove difficult). Thus, the classes might actually be about learning to think differently, rather than just learning to support the same sorts of ideas and knowledge through different examples.

As Jenco emphasized throughout the lecture, inhabitants of different parts of the world, both in the East and the West, think and have their own theories, so we should try to look at their culture through their own eyes, using their own methods of thinking and categorizing knowledge. It would be a dialectical relationship--not only building up a base of knowledge, but learning new things that can then be used to reflect on and critically think about the old. "You learn how to do things, you're not born with them", she avowed, giving away anti-essentialist leanings. In other words, just because you're born in the West doesn't mean you have to adhere to the Western ideas you have been taught. You can learn the intricacies of another culture (as she has learned the intricacies of Chinese culture as an American), but can you truly learn the intricacies of another way of thought?

This relates in many ways to the issues I have been thinking about lately regarding the Mande class. For one, am I an orientalist for taking the class, for wanting to know about this "other" culture? Am I merely perpetuating a cultural imperialism of sorts, by asserting my elite privileges of "worldliness"? And am I merely using this "other" culture for my own, Western purposes (to relieve myself of the stresses of the Western world and cultural restrictions)? Is learning a different culture's way of thought (and not just the culture) any less orientalist? There is so much we can learn from other cultures, it seems, and perhaps that they can learn from us, but the sticky issue lies in who is really benefiting most from the relationship--who holds the power over the cultural ideas being transmitted? The U.S., it seems, is very fond of the "traditional", the uncommercial, per se--that is, when they are outside of our own borders (for this view of the traditional often entails a certain image of pre-modernity and technological primativity that we are not willing to revert to in the name of cultural preservation). What connections might the continuing division between the developed and the developing world have to the U.S.'s desire for traditional goods and services (like African dance classes, for example)? These are really difficult questions to face, as they prod and poke at (a little too close for comfort) my own desires to learn about and experience cultures less tainted by the evils of modern society.

On a similar train of somewhat difficult-to-swallow (in that it is largely self-reflective) thought, I found an interesting blog called African.Dance.Drum.Life! that discusses the issue of race in the context of African dance, something that Michelle in her interview briefly discussed as it played out in her dancing experiences in both Mali and Boston. As Michelle discovered at her dance classes in Boston where she was told to "get to the back of the room", not everyone believes that non-Africans or non-African Americans should be able to participate in African dance. In a blog post entitled "A look at 'that guy' in Black dance", the author Malena, a 23 year old teacher and student of West African dance (who identifies as Part Black American, Part Nigerian) writes about 'that guy', the non-African or white dance participant who is just so dedicated to African dance: "he's the ultimate insider-outsider who is now becoming the face of African dance in America." According to Malena, her main problem with white people participating in African dance is the commercialization that comes with them--"African dance is the new yoga!" and "Aaah, the healing powers of mainstreamization" she writes with more than a tinge of sarcasm:

With classes springing up in cities big and small, the dance and drum that emerged several decades as a tool of Black empowerment has undoubtedly become a porous canvas where now all kinds of people use to ink out their expressions.

[...] These trends raise important questions about cultural ownership and also the marketing of African products.

Even more interesting are the comments and discussion that the post generated. Malena, in response to one person's comments, wrote:

I especially like your reference to these cultural trips folks take to Africa. To me, whites re-entering Africa for cultural digs relates an ironic failure of 20th century Pan-Africanists back-to-Africa movements. Instead of more and more blacks returning to Africa, we see a deluge of whites "coming home," and reaping benefits of an environment their ancestors helped to rip open and expose. This may sound a bit harsh, but I find it sad many non-whites, particularly blacks interested in Africa, simply lack the proper funds to travel to Africa. What ends up happening instead is a commercial re-colonizing of African art forms as they are used for the liberation of Western souls...

In addition, I'm personally alarmed by the mixed-racialized ethnic dance scenes primarily because i think people of color have fewer and fewer exclusive spaces where we can talk about and develop our people. Though I support inter-cultural/racial art participation, I worry this setting puts people of color in perpetual performative roles where we are constant bearers of culture. What besides co-option are non-"insider" artists going to bring to the table? Part of me asking this is for controversy's sake alone, but I think it's worth coming off as crude to find some real answers...

To which another commenter "Marcy" responded:

I come from a culture that isn't very open emotionally and what I've experienced in dance classes of African origin is something I've been starved for in my own upbringing. Would you deny me that based on the color of my skin?

And yet another commenter "Tigi" replied:

but to me, what's worse is having continental africans over here teaching drum and dance when in fact they aren't even musicians or dancers. often times, teaching false representations of rhythms and movements because they see it as a way to make a living. people gotta eat, but what is this doing to the true "keepers of the culture?"

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a girl in my "family" who took time off from Brown to live in Mali for 8 months. I asked her whether she had encountered or done any dance when she was there. To my surprise, she said, "Not really." She had taken a dance class twice during her stay there (as in, for two days only), and other than that, she really had not seen much dance in Mali. The fact that this surprised me, that I thought it weird that someone in Mali had not encountered any dance during an eight month stay there, made me realize my own potentially false assumptions about Mali. Because the Mande dance class focuses mostly on dance and how dance functions as part of the culture in Mali, I assumed that everyone there does dance--that dancing in Mali was as inescapable as eating hamburgers and pizza in America. Which is to say, certainly not everyone eats hamburgers and pizza in America. As the implications of this bad analogy suggest, I realized that maybe not everyone dances in Mali either.

This made me further question the knowledge I had gained thus far about dance in West Africa--to what extent, then, does dance really play a role in modern Mande culture? Does it more commonly take place in villages, or in the city? What is the range of participation in dance for different age groups, genders, etc.? How are those who don't participate in dance viewed by the community? Is it acceptable for women to play the accompanying Djembe drums (as far as I have seen, it isn't--are there any exceptions to this rule, though)?

As the blog commenter Tigi pointed out, we can't assume that all West Africans do dance or play the drums, just because they are from West Africa. Yet just from my own assumptions, perhaps rising out of the fact that my sole encounters with West African culture have been through dance, it seems that this image is often perpetuated in America, perhaps because of the essentializing view we often take of West Africa, or perhaps because of a strategic essentialism that many West Africans themselves take up just to make a living (or perhaps because the West Africans who choose to make a living by teaching their cultural heritage, real or perceived, are just more visible in America's superculture that has come to increasingly embrace a certain essentializing "multiculturalism").

Either way, I am curious to hear more about what other students' experiences have been who have been to Mali and who are now in my Mande dance class (I know there are quite a few). I am also interested in looking at the implications of viewing West African cultures as "healing" and as antidotes to the perceived evils of American culture. What lessons do people take away from learning about West African culture (in this case, through dance), and how do these lessons differ from the ones that are learned from other dance or yoga classes (just to delve a bit deeper into the blogger Malena's bitter remark that "African dance is the new yoga!")? Perhaps more specifically to my own research, what do students see as the outcome, either desired or actual, of the Mande dance class?