This article explores Fanon's thought on dance, beginning with his explicit treatment of it in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. It then broadens to consider his theorization of Black embodiment in racist and colonized societies, considering how these analyses can be reformulated as a phenomenology of dance. This will suggest possibilities for fruitful encounters between the two domains in which (a) dance can be valorized while (b) opening up sites of resignification and resistance for Black persons and communities-including a revalorization of Black embodiment as a kind of empowering danced experience.
The Afro-Latin dance known as 'salsa' is a fusion of multiple dances from West Africa, Muslim Spain, enslaved communities in the Caribbean, and the United States. In part due to its global origins, salsa was pivotal in the development of the Figuration philosophy of dance, and for 'dancingwith,' the theoretical method for social justice derived therefrom. In the present article, I apply the completed theory Figuration exclusively to salsa for the first time, after situating the latter in the dance studies literature. My first section explores Juliet McMains' recent history, Spinning Mambo into Salsa, with an emphasis on the dynamics of class, race and sex therein. My second section explores a resonant Afro-Latin dance history, Marta E. Savigliano's Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, where she deploys salsa's sister-dance (tango) as a 'counter-choreography' to the choreography of postmodern neocolonialism. And my third section applies Figuration's four central aspects of dance (or 'Moves') to salsa qua member of its 'societal' family of dance. In conclusion, through partnering with salsa, Figuration emerges as a member of its own 'discursive' family of dance, while salsa emerges as a gestural discourse capable of helping reconstruct a more socially-just world from the postmodern ruins of today.
This article is part of a larger project in which I attempt to show that Western formal logic, from its inception in Aristotle onward, has both been partially constituted by, and partially constitutive of, what has become known as racism. In contrast to this trend, the present article concerns the major philosopher whose contribution to logic has been perhaps the most derided and marginalized, and yet whose character and politics are, from a contemporary perspective, drastically superior-John Stuart Mill. My approach to my core concern will be one of narrowing concentric circles. I will begin with Mill's occasional political writings that bear on the issue of racism, including "The Negro Question." From there, the core of the article will explore the political dimensions of Mill's A System of Logic. I. Questions of Race in Mill's Political ActivismIn brief, my argument in this first section is that, despite J. S. Mill's complicity with the immoral colonial rule of the East India Company, he was resolutely opposed to chattel slavery and the violent oppression of the black residents of Jamaica, making him a force for racial justice in his era. In this way, Mill stands in stark contrast to a majority of the other central figures in the history of Western logic, including Aristotle (who articulated an infamous theory of natural slavery), Leibniz (who advertised his formal logic to European monarchs as an instrument for forced Christianization of darker-skinned non-Europeans), and Frege (who celebrates anti-Semitic practices in Germany as well as a young Hitler's rise to power). 1 It is this level, of a progressive logician resisting logic's reactionary history, which is my primary concern.Beginning with Mill's reply to his erstwhile friend, the famous Scottish satirist Thomas Carlyle, I will detail fifteen reasons why Mill deserves to be recognized as racially progressive in his era. In Mill's "The Negro Question," he (1) sacrifices his friendship with Carlyle and exposes himself to public ridicule by attacking Carlyle's racist views, (2) explicitly links 17. See, for example, Paul Vincent Spade's Five Texts on the Mediaeval Problem of Universals. 18. See Richard Mendelsohn's introductory remarks to Frege's diary, 303-43.
The central role of gestural language in Buddhism is widely acknowledged, as in the story of the Buddha pointing at the moon, the point being the student's seeing beyond the finger (as object) to its gesture (as act). Gesture's role in dance is similarly central, as noted by scholars in the emerging interdisciplinary field of dance studies. Unsurprisingly, then, the intersection of these two fields is well-populated, including the formal gestures (called "mudras") Buddhism inherited from classical Indian dance, and the masked dance of the Mani Rimdu Festival. In this investigation, I will articulate a new Buddhist philosophy of gestural language, based on a new conception of emptiness that I locate in the work of contemporary U.S. choreographer Deborah Hay, as influenced by Nāgārjuna and Zen. And this, finally, suggests that contemporary Western philosophy should incorporate this compassion as a normative dimension to its own theorizing and practice.
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