The Body Questions: Celebrating Flamenco’s Tangled Roots

The Foundation for Iberian Music at The Barry S. Brooks Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center is hosting an international symposium on nonsense, cacophony, tumult, queerness, race, and the dancing body in New York on October 16, 2018.  Selected conference papers will be published as an anthology.

From pre-modern Christmas pageants all the way through to Jordan Peele’s “sunken place”—a place where, as Simone de Beauvoir has written, the subjectivity of “sovereign and unique” beings “is crushed by the dark weight of other things,” Whiteness and Blackness have been conjoined in a series of negative correlations.[1] Purity and pollution, harmony and dissonance, over and under, order and disorder, Christian epiphany and damning confusion have limned the edge distinguishing freedom and personhood from enslavement and abjection. Yet in these paradigmatic dyads one term always implies—indeed, defines—the other; in these relations there is never erasure, but rather evidence of white culture’s perverse fascination—envy, even—with the sonorous, dislocated, inciting, and infinitely suggestive products of black culture.[2] The impolite music and dance of cacophony, dissonance, and disorder vibrate with a fugitive, turbulent Otherness, hinting at the specters of alternate social, spiritual, and aesthetic orders. “What does it mean,” Fred Moten asks in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), “to call for disorder in the sovereign’s ‘native tongue?’”[3] We must attend to cacophony, Moten writes; we must “inhabit and maybe even cultivate…[the] place which shows up here and now, in the sovereign’s space and time, as absence, darkness, death, things which are not.“[4]

Stuart Hall has theorized diaspora as a “radical homelessness,” an expression of an “ethics of the self…attuned to the edges.”[5]  Flamencos, whose embodied and minstrelized Blackness is figured by the Spanish Roma, have always known this statelessness, have always adhered to this code. How, then, can flamenco illuminate theories of race and identity in performance? And, conversely, how can the theoretical tools developed in other fields help us better understand flamenco? How may we consider flamenco’s purposefully duplicitous roar, its nonsense, and its irony, in light not only of critical race theory but also of other approaches, such as ethics, or theories of gender, or of sound? And, regarding the purposeful ambiguity of calling for disorder in the sovereign’s tongue, why are some of the great theorists, such as June Jordan, and Fred Moten, poets? How can black poetics help us read, and explain to others, flamenco’s life blood, its verses? As VK Preston has wondered, when cultural wealth—verse, rhythm, or gesture, for example—is extracted, smelted, and rendered into the likeness of the oppressor, what of its animating spirit, what of its soul remains?[6] And, speaking of dancing in shackles, why do the footwork steps used in early modern Spanish depictions of ruffians dancing under the lash bear such an uncanny resemblance to the shuffle steps of African American dances?[7] That is to say, how can we posit, and argue for, genealogical relationships across the vast expanses of the African diaspora? And how may the codes of flamenco improvisation help us trace these?

We don’t need to be limited to flamenco, and we don’t need to be limited to these questions. We want with this gathering to reach out, find connection, and cross the border into what Jack Halberman calls “The Wild Beyond,” to make “common cause with the brokenness of being”— “a brokenness,” he writes, “that is also blackness.”[8]