Dancing Through Differences: West African Dance in Italy

Around the turn of the 21st century, traditional dancing and drumming associated with ethnic groups and practices from West Africa became increasingly widespread in Italy, growing in tandem with local West African diasporic communities and the corresponding national fear and anxiety over migration. The circulation of West African dancing and drumming created a distinct economy of classes, workshops, concerts, festivals, and cultural trips to Africa engaging practitioners and audiences across diverse demography in terms of class, age, profession, and ability. At the same time, it created a substantial network of artists with transnational connections to other African artists in Europe and the African continent. Dance and music provided African artists in Italy with some form of subsistence and, in some cases, a means of legitimately staying in the country. Equally important, it offered visibility and a form of self-identification to the growing West African diasporic communities in Italy. By engendering personal connections, intimacies, and experiences between African artists and, primarily white, Italian students and audiences, it also provided opportunities for encounters across racial, cultural, and geographical distances. However, as the comments of Giulia and Sara highlight, the reception of West African dances was embedded in problematic discourses that drew upon colonialist racialized imaginaries. In the dominant narratives of Italian students, African dance and drumming became the means for an inner quest of emotional expressivity, spirituality, and connection to nature that was located in an ancestral notion of "Mother Africa." Alongside the problematic reduction of the continent to a single reified category, these narratives often associated African dance with notions of authenticity rooted in romanticized representations of the "primitive" Other.