Dancing Opacity: Contemporary Dance, Transnationalism, and Queer Possibility in Senegal
Dancing Opacity: Contemporary Dance, Transnationalism, and Queer Possibility in Senegal
by Amy E. Swanson
University of Michigan Press, 2025
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-0-472-07766-3
Paper: 978-0-472-05766-5
eISBN: 978-0-472-90525-6 (OA)
About the Book
Amy Swanson’s Dancing Opacity chronicles the ways in which contemporary dancers in Senegal navigate the global contemporary dance circuit while challenging heteropatriarchal ideologies at home. A longstanding hub of African performing arts, Senegal was at the forefront of the explosion of contemporary dance across the continent at the turn of the twenty-first century. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research, Swanson demonstrates how Senegalese choreographers and dancers contend with entrenched racialized prejudices about Africa outside the continent, while pushing back against repressive regulations of gender and sexuality within Senegal. Swanson employs the concept of opacity, defined as a refusal to adhere to the colonial logic of transparency for dominant gazes and argues that artists create work with multiple layers of meaning that are not meant to be immediately transparent to all viewers. By doing so, these artists evade cultural norms that govern gender and sexual expression in Senegal, while challenging their international audiences to expand their perceptions of African dance. Dancing Opacity highlights the artists’ accounts of their pedagogies, performances, aesthetics, and lived realities, as well as Africanist conceptions of gender, sexuality, and queerness that have yet to be applied to contemporary dance.
About the Author
Amy E. Swanson is Assistant Professor of Dance Studies, Theory, and History at the University of Oregon.
Reviews
“Dancing Opacity is a groundbreaking, thoroughly researched, well-executed and beautifully written study of the interface between dance and queer discourse in Senegal. Swanson seamlessly blends archival research, solid ethnographic work, and interviews to create a book that effortlessly holds its own against noted texts in queer theory, dance studies and African studies.”— Ayo Coly, Dartmouth College
“Swanson’s impressively detailed and beautifully written manuscript honors the complexity and artistry of contemporary Senegalese dance while conveying the difficulty of managing the expectations of audiences with radically divergent tastes. Dancing Opacity makes an important contribution to the academic discourse surrounding African dance.”— Catherine Cole, University of Washington
“…Dancing Opacity's strength is in the ways the analyses of contemporary dance works reveal ”the ways in which corporeality, gesture, and dress offer insights into the multi-valent ways in which gender and sexuality are imagined and critiqued." The consideration of embodiment and nonverbal expression is essential for gender studies and queer studies and should have a more central position in African cultural studies in general."
— Elina Seye, Canadian Journal of African Studies
Tags
Anthropological aspects, Senegal, Modern dance, Gender identity in dance, Heterosexism, Queer Possibility, Dance, Race & Ethnic Relations, LGBTQ+ Studies, History & Criticism, Performing Arts, Social aspects, 20th century, Social Science
Open Access Information
License: CC BY-NC
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