This article examines Eleo Pomare's concept of vitality in his piece Blues for the Jungle (1966) as a black aesthetic approach to choreography. Vitality seeks to connect with black audiences in Harlem by referencing and affirming shared cultural knowledge, conveying an embodied epistemology of the US political economy defined by the lived experiences of Harlem: “Harlem knows.” Using a lens of diaspora citation, I argue that Pomare's choreographic citations of “vital” ways of moving and knowing in Harlem critique the terms for “proper” national belonging, while articulating diasporic belonging in motion.
This article examines Joan Miller's use of choreographic citation in her solos, Pass Fe White (1970) and Homestretch (1973). The solos “read” the desire to embody idealized, feminine whiteness in a critique of institutions for accessing national belonging—celebrity, education, and marriage—satirically exposing the gendered and racialized exclusions of the figure of the abstract “human” as “proper” citizen. Miller's work performs queer, Black feminist, diasporic desires for a world beyond Black and white nationalist logics, refusing to be “properly” placed in national hierarchies of female objecthood, while affirming the capacity to desire differently by proposing alternative terms for belonging in the world.
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