Contamination in Cuban Modern Dance Histories

Abstract

This article examines how and why Cuban modern dancers and their scholars cite several white US dancers as forebearers in their nationalistic, anti-imperialistic, and anti-racist dance tradition. I use “contamination” to analyze this complicated topic, which threatens to unfairly center US dancers at Cubans’ expense or to romantically caricature Cubans defying US imperialism with a nationalist hybrid. Multidirectional, indeterminate contamination moves us away from narratives about US culture as a homogenizing force or a vanquished one. Contamination also importantly connotes stink, given that it is a product of imperialism and capitalism bringing far-flung people into close encounters. US contamination in Cuban modern dance histories, then, pushes attention to the shadowy reaches of the unseemly and incongruous—stylistic impurity, structural racism, historiographic neglect, revolutionary disaffection, and failure. Seeing the regrettable provides a fuller picture of the past, including the often-overlooked reality of shared damage and destructibility.