Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Dancing Opacity: Contemporary Dance, Transnationalism, and Queer Possibility in Senegal

Dancing Opacity: Contemporary Dance, Transnationalism, and Queer Possibility in Senegal

Swanson, Amy E.

Paperback

DanceGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesGLBTQIA Studies

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ISBN10: 0472057669
ISBN13: 9780472057665
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: Sep 22 2025
Pages: 280
Weight: 1.14
Height: 0.71 Width: 5.98 Depth: 8.98
Language: English
Amy Swanson's Dancing Opacity chronicles the ways in which contemporary dancers in Senegal navigate the global contemporary dance circuit while challenging heteropatriarchal ideologies at home. A longstanding hub of African performing arts, Senegal was at the forefront of the explosion of contemporary dance across the continent at the turn of the twenty-first century. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research, Swanson demonstrates how Senegalese choreographers and dancers contend with entrenched racialized prejudices about Africa outside the continent, while pushing back against repressive regulations of gender and sexuality within Senegal. Swanson employs the concept of opacity, defined as a refusal to adhere to the colonial logic of transparency for dominant gazes and argues that artists create work with multiple layers of meaning that are not meant to be immediately transparent to all viewers. By doing so, these artists evade cultural norms that govern gender and sexual expression in Senegal, while challenging their international audiences to expand their perceptions of African dance. Dancing Opacity highlights the artists' accounts of their pedagogies, performances, aesthetics, and lived realities, as well as Africanist conceptions of gender, sexuality, and queerness that have yet to be applied to contemporary dance.

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