Afro-Latin-Africa: Movement and Memory in Benin

Abstract

The Afro-diasporic music styles that developed in twentieth-century Cuba and their corresponding social dances, from rumba to mambo to salsa, have been ‘returning’ to West and Central Africa since at least the 1930s. Different frameworks have shaped this transatlantic movement of Afro-diasporic rhythms: transcolonial exchanges, decolonization, the Cold War, and, today, globalisation, social media, and other internet-enabled technologies of communication. What do these transactions between ‘Afro-Latin-Africa’ signify in a deeper memorial context? This paper will draw on fieldwork with dancers and musicians conducted in Cotonou, Benin (February 2015 and January 2016), and a collaborative experiment, ‘Afro-Latin-Africa’, that brought together in London a dancer and a singer from Benin and Cuban musicians. This public event took place in London in September 2015. It was commissioned through the ERC research project, ‘Modern Moves’, which I direct. The analysis is given a further twist through my reading of archival documents pertaining to the launching of UNESCO’s Slave Route at Ouidah, Benin in 1994, a high profile event that had involved a veritable who’s who of the Black Atlantic intellectual world, including Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Edouard Glissant, and Wole Soyinka, and aimed at building an ‘Afro-American bridge’ connecting continents, memories, and traumas to promote world peace and development. Reading the body in and out of the text, I analyse the movement of memory in the circum-Atlantic context. The somatic and affective ties binding memory and movement in the (new) Black Atlantic enable me to conceptualize modernity through decolonial cultural exchanges between the Americas and West Africa, while taking seriously the return of ‘enchantment’ through the dancing body as a way out of difficult memories of a shared yet severed history.