Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Standing at the intersection of diaspora theory, dance studies, performance studies, and critical ethnography, Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora explores the relationship between West African dance, race, gender, and sexuality in the United States and Guinea. Considering the relationship between dance, diaspora, and belonging, it works to reveal the power of dance in shaping participants’ individual and collective identities through the premise of African connectedness. Through the study of multiple West African dance and drum contexts—dance classes in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, dance and drum “homecoming” workshops in Guinea, and the North American Broadway stage—Johnson explores the ways people with various amounts of experience with West African dance (the master teacher, the lifelong practitioner, the professional dancer, the beginner, and the audience member) make use of West African dance to confer self, community, and diasporic membership. Revealing the ways practices of pleasure are enmeshed in the operations of power, belonging, intimacy, and difference, Rhythm Nation shows how dance links the symbolic and physical dimensions of diaspora: namely, the imaginative work that fosters diasporic connectedness and the physical movement through and across space that has, and continues to, yield variegated African diasporic communities. Rhythm Nation asserts that West African dance both widens the circle of African diasporic “we” and polices its ever-shifting boundaries of belonging.</jats:p>