Abstract:While salsa dance is popularly, and now globally, understood to be a symbol and expression of Latin identity, its adoption in non-Latin contexts has produced new meanings and cultural configurations. This is particularly the case in West Africa, where salsa is not only catching on among urban youth, but is becoming understood and approached from an African perspective. This article explores the ways in which salsa dance in Ghana serves as an innovative, embodied expression of a contemporary, pan-African identity. This is seen in Ghanaian dancers’ ideological reinvigoration of salsa’s African history and in the physical incorporation of local styles and presentations. Salsa in Ghana is recast through global networks, which in turn contributes to its global character while refashioning it to better suit local motives and desires. Thus, rather than emphasizing salsa’s African roots alone, dancers in Ghana equally engage with the complex routes of the dance.
Since its emergence among Spanish-speaking immigrants in New York City in the 1960s, salsa dance (and music) has become a quintessential symbol of Latin identity in and outside of the United States. The worldwide adoption of the dance has opened up new possibilities for identity construction. Using field research from Accra, Ghana, this chapter explores the ways in which salsa dance has come to inform a pan-African identity, creating moments where local ethnicities become deemphasized. “Traditional” dances in Ghana have historically been viewed as reflecting local “tribal” and/or ethnic identities and later appropriated by national dance companies as a way to construct and display a Ghanaian “national culture.” However, the adoption of salsa dance in Ghana is what I call an “inventive dance tradition,” one not espoused by colonial administrators or postcolonial leaders, but pioneered by a new generation of urban youth with more global agendas.
Drawing on three years of partnership with residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, I discuss some of the insights and challenges of working toward a critical community engagement that is antiracist, anti-colonial, and "place-engaged" (Siemers et al., 2015). I specifically reflect on how the bridging of academic practice with Indigenous models of teaching and learning can offer a powerful way to center social justice in community engagement work. I model this approach by discussing academic concepts and pedagogies used in the classroom alongside Lakota concepts and stories shared during our engagement. I then include the voices of students as they critically reflect on lessons of racial privilege, Indigenous survivance, and reciprocity/allyship. Lastly, this article is my own attempt at some form of reciprocation, as a way to respond to the common expectation that many Lakota elders/teachers expressed during our time with them-that we share these lessons beyond the Reservation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.