Circum-Atlantic connections and their global kinetoscapes: African-heritage partner dances

Abstract

This introduction to a curated volume of original essays on African-heritage partner dances presents their shared kinetic features as performative social practices arising from creolising processes in the Atlantic world. The expressive dimension of these creolised dances, particularly their dependence on the connection between two dancers, enables them to function as the embodied memory of and resistance to the racialized and gendered violence of the plantation, which, as the essays demonstrate through a range of interdisciplinary approaches, shape experiences of leisure, self-fashioning, and collective joy within the cities of the Atlantic rim and beyond. These structural and affective similarities between the dances examined in the volume, which include maxixe, lindy hop, tango, kizomba, salsa, and their predecessor, the creolised quadrille, confirm a circum-Atlantic entanglement of creolised expressive culture, the global spread of which is explicated through the theoretical concepts of kinetoscapes, alegropolitics, affiliative afromodernity, and fabulousness.