Like many other phenomena, the history of the tango is steeped in the notion of a progressive evolution at once social, sexualized, and racial, a sort of three-fold whitening which is accompanied by the contemporary tendency to valorize its 'black roots'. One can only be amazed at the studies which strain to drag in blackness, although the historiography of Argentina is primarily one of whitening, and the growing international adoption and adaptation of the tango leave little room for minorities. These strange hybridizations provide useful illustrations for exploring the questions of identity surrounding the tango (dance) known as 'Argentinean' in the context of its globalization., unedited non–English abstract received by RILM] Comme bien d’autres expressions, l’histoire de la danse tango est imprégnée par l’idée d’une évolution progressiste à la fois sociale, sexuée et raciale, un triple blanchiment en quelque sorte, qui s’accompagne d’une tendance contemporaine consistant à valoriser ses « origines noires ». On ne peut que s’étonner des travaux qui s’efforcent de rapatrier de la négritude, alors que l’historiographie dominante de l’Argentine est dominée par le blanchiment et que les conditions d’actualisation de cette danse de par le monde offrent peu de place aux minorités. C’est à la faveur de ces curieux croisements que sont examinées les questions identitaires qui gravitent autour du tango dansé que l’on dit « argentin » dans le contexte de sa mondialisation.
The dance-music complexes known as salsa and bhangra have not been subjected to any comparative academic scrutiny, despite clear parallels in their respective histories as cultural processes born out of multiple ruptures and conjunctions, including European colonialism, migrations during the postcolonial period, and transnational cultural and commodity flows. While salsa has resulted from the movement of people, music, and rhythmic cultures across Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, bhangra evinces their movement across the partitioned space of Punjab, the United Kingdom, and the post-Partition nations of India and Pakistan. Both salsa and bhangra have, moreover, moved beyond original regional ambits to become cultural signifiers (albeit often contested as much as claimed) of wider Latino/a and Desi (pan-South Asian) identities respectively. Undoubtedly, it is the academic and cultural embedding of salsa within a Hispanophone postcolonial paradigm, and of bhangra within its Anglophone counterpart, that has prevented serious comparative work between these two musical expressive cultures which are equally but differently exemplary of the complex relationship between music and migration. Yet across the world, from Delhi to San Francisco, the two dance-music complexes increasingly meet each other in the same space, particularly that of the dance floor. Drawing on such evidence as well as on personal experience of dancing both salsa and bhangra, I will advance in this article a theoretical framework for their comparison as transnational musics, suggesting ways in which such a framework can illuminate the circuits of pleasure and politics that traverse each of these dance musics as embodied histories of a traumatic yet life-affirming postcolonial modernity.
