Neveu Kringelbach, Hélène; (2024) West African performers and the art of navigating interrupted mobilities. New Diversities , 25 (1) pp. 59-76. 10.58002/00g3-3n28.

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Abstract

In the 1990s and early 2000s, much of the scholarship on the performing arts celebrated the new insights afforded by the transnationalism paradigm and the ‘mobilities’ turn. There was both enthusiasm and concern about the intensified global circulation of people, things, ideas, and capital, as well as art forms. New research questioned whether these ‘mobilities’ reinforced the postcolonial world order, or whether they had the potential to make more visible previously marginalized artistic forms, a case in point being the debates on who ‘world music’ really empowered (cf. Stokes 2004). Since then, there has been a growing recognition that a focus on mobility in its multiple forms risked obscuring important aspects of the ‘social life’ of art worlds. There is a need to reconsider the relationship between mobility and immobility, between moving and ‘staying put’ at different stages of artistic lives. How have migration regimes, which have increasingly aimed at keeping people from the Global South away from the Global North, shaped what performing artists do? How have West African dancers and choreographers in particular addressed the migration issue? Do we need to rethink the temporality of our studies? Drawing on ongoing research with performing artists in Senegal and in migration contexts since 2002, this article argues that much can be learned from the ways in which artists deploy long-term strategies to navigate a world in which their work is valued, but from which their bodies are largely excluded.

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