The Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula was the primary inspiration for this book, when he gave an interview as part of the 2007 Utrecht Springdance Festival and said: “I am a dancer. I am African. But I am not an African Dancer” (2007). The work Linyekula presented that year was called The Dialogue Series. iii Dinozord and addressed the difficult and violent history of the Democratic Republic of Congo since colonial independence and throughout the years of Mobuto Sese Seko’s dictatorship. Here was a choreographer with a vision of creating contemporary theatre and dance to address the conflicts that have shaped his own life and that of his country. Was he then, a contemporary African dancer, no matter the movement vocabulary, choreographic strategies, and international funding bodies and collaborators involved in putting his work onto a Dutch festival stage?
At this moment I began to question definitions of African dance and the meaning of the contemporary in the making of dance theatre works touring international festivals. I focused my attention predominantly on Germany, France, but also the UK, Canada, South Africa and the US. As curator Simon Dove wrote in his introduction to the festival programme, much of what we base our life on is based on belief and make-believe, which makes the arts a predestined site for some of the political paradoxes that aesthetic make-believe can create (Springdance Festival Programme 2007). One such paradox is embodied in the terms Africa, African culture and African dance. Africa is, after all, a continent that today contains fifty-five member states as part of the African Union and within those a cultural diversity and pluralism, according to UNESCO, of around two thousand spoken languages without accounting for the many live dance and music traditions on the continent (www.unesco.org).
Expecting to see African dance and African dancers in the theatre that evening, I may have expected to witness the unfolding of such cultural diversity subsumed under the one name. Instead, I was in for something rather different. First of all, it was difficult not to look at Linyekula’s work through the discursive lens of a colonialism imposed by the consistency of racial stereotypes that Europe imposes on Africa and the black dancing body through its genealogy of mystification, exoticism and construction of racial otherness—a paradox Francesca Castaldi’s groundbreaking study of the National Ballet of Senegal first critically addressed (Castaldi 2006). Secondly, what precisely was marked as African dance was informed in my experience by the European gaze of whiteness in the white institution of the Western theatre stage? As I witnessed Faustin Linyekula’s performance challenging the history of the Congo by acquainting the audience with the ghosting presence of King Leopold II’s atrocities against the Congolese from 1885 to 1908 and the military dictatorship under Mobutu Sese Seko 1965–1997, the complex entanglement of colonial histories, cultural imperialism and post-independence nationalism were foregrounded. Whatever my beliefs about Africa and the Congo, these would be demolished over the next hour as Linyekula interrogated the notion of the African dancer through his choreography.
Since his performance, I have wondered to what extent Western theatre, as a medium so deeply steeped in the history of Western imperialism and the aesthetics of the white supremacist gaze, was able to be a backdrop to the unpacking and conscious resistance to the white gazing imposed by the majority Utrecht festival audience present that evening? And what kind of dance would be able to achieve the seemingly impossible shift beyond colonialism and race (Gilroy 2000; hooks 2012)? After a long, and admittedly painful, struggle with misunderstanding this project, I slowly came to understand that looking for definitions and articulations of African dance was always going to be unproductive. Whichever way I framed the notion, I was re-performing a white supremacist trope that has historically objectified African identities. What I needed to deal with was my own slow awakening to the necessary deconstruction of Africa, via a phenomenological detour that radically interrogates my own cultural socialization and embodiment of whiteness and its often unquestioned premises, aptly termed “white fragility” by Robyn DiAngelo, as part of this un-learning process (DiAngelo 2018).
Thus, I noticed how I, as a white scholar, took my own educational views and knowledge systems for granted, and by objectifying the dance before me, I often ended up in the pseudo-universal mesh of alleged colour-blindness that left systemic racism largely at work and untouched. Whiteness as a pernicious system of thought and privilege is thus built on discursive objectification of the seen as an outside. Yet this book is not about an analysis that posits African dance predominantly on the outside, as an object for analysis in that Western sense of understanding and fixing the unknown. Rather, the book is an attempt to interrogate the felt quality I often experienced as a sensual and epistemic process of “un-suturing” white spectatorship in response to the dance performances I discuss in this book (Yancy 2017). One of the main questions I pose is thus to consider the following: How do I see myself, and whiteness at large, differently in and through the encounter with contemporary African dance theatre aesthetics on the international festival circuit?
In an attempt to answer to this complex question I will begin with a focus on the aesthetics of contemporary African dance theatre in order to show how choreographies of this genre seek to interrupt the political and institutional hegemony of the white gaze and allow for an experience that engages white fragility through the deconstruction of white supremacist assumptions. This aesthetic analysis contends that dancers and choreographers of contemporary African dance theatre often utilize the label African purposefully, in a double-mimesis that reiterates colonialist assumptions about Africa at the same time that such assumptions are constantly undermined.
In order to explore this latter theoretical lens more fully, this book positions itself methodologically as a political critique of white supremacy and its entanglement with a capitalist–colonialist necropolitics. The theoretical argument here draws heavily from Achille Mbembe’s analysis of blackness and its discursive entanglement with necropolitics as played out on the African continent and across the African diaspora, but then I try to turn his argument around to consider whiteness as the inverted mirror reflection as is implied by Mbembe’s own argument drawn from Frantz Fanon’s earlier writings. In Critique of Black Reason (2017), Mbembe not only situates the Atlantic slave trade at the heart of the constitution of modern Europe as a white colonialist project but also analyses how white hegemonic discourse on blackness has historically functioned as an oppressive symbology with psycho-pathological consequences reaching into our present times (2017, p. xi). “Black difference”, as argued by Mbembe, plays a crucial role in the violent discourse of racial capitalism and the gigantic necropolis it has built (2017, p. xi).
One of the leading questions Mbembe’s critique poses is about the epistemic role that the semiotic construction of “the black” played in the making of this modern world. It does this by examining the triangulation of blackness as a global discourse of oppression and by demonstrating how race discourse has operated historically across Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and North and South America. Mbembe’s critique shows how race discourse operates as an “immanent consciousness” of white modernity always underpinned by nineteenth-century narratives of anthropology, evolutionism and nationalist rhetoric. This psychopathology of the racial paradigm was first outlined by Fanon in his Black Skin, White Masks (1986), as already mentioned. Colonialism, according to Fanon’s earlier argument, not only systematically suppressed the many facets of African cultural expression, it also upheld whiteness as the enigmatic mirror of subjective self-esteem and success. Languages, religions, philosophical views and dance thus carry the long history of European colonialism and the internalized structures of the white hegemonic gaze.
The colonial mythology of blackness as a white colonialist strategy of systematic oppression was historically confined to the geographical continent and location that became Africa as a linguistically fixed territory of the white imagination and gaze. In postcolonial emancipatory discourses such as Pan-Africanism and Négritude, for example, race discourse functioned as a cultural trope which remains fundamentally intact despite the fact that these movements demonstrated a revolt against the prejudices and discriminations tied to it (Mbembe 2004, p. 14). Postcolonial efforts of independence during the twentieth century were stifled by discursive over-determination. The ongoing impact of white European colonialism and the imperial phantasm of distributing world power created a global stigma of blackness as other than/inferior to whiteness (Yancy 2004). Such global racialized politics effectively erased the continent’s own claim to African identity to the extent that the continent subscribed to the nineteenth-century paradigms of Christianity, mark...