Afrofuturist Remains: A Speculative Rendering of Social Dance Futures v2.0

Abstract

What are the refashioned circulations of the social in African American social dance? What might be alternative alignments of capital and dance-making, that might align the applied science of the physical within the social, as a doing enlivened by a being? If African American social dancing situates as a local present that animates memories of deep compassion, where are its unknowable future circumstances most likely to produce a social profit, of some sort? This essay explores an impossible afrofuture, a place where dance arrives as a memory of something propulsive, personal, and still in the future; an emancipated dance of communion that can be entirely mediated and digitally exchanged. The essay argues for afrofuturist remains that are pre-, pure-, and post-human iterations of corporeal connectivity: dance born of a belief in the social essence of creativity.