Contagion and Electricity: Two Ways of Talking About Connection in Dance
“Es como electricidad / el mambo tiene la chispa” (Mambo is like electricity; it contains a spark): thus sang Afro-Cuban diva Celia Cruz in 1951, in Mambo del amor, which celebrated the thrills of this new dance and music genre. From the early 19th century onwards, it was commonplace to explain the connection produced through social dancing as ‘electricity’. But as the science of epidemiology developed through the 19th century, another metaphor also began to be used increasingly for that connection: ‘contagion.’ In this talk, Ananya Kabir spoke about the competition between these metaphors, and their relation to the formation of modernity’s social dances.
About the Literary Historian
Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. For her innovative work in the Humanities, she was awarded the Infosys Humanities Prize (2018) and the Humboldt Research Prize (2019). The author of ‘Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir’ and Partition’s Post-Amnesias’, she has researched the connections between dance, modernity, and creolisation through an ERC Advanced Grant. Her new research is on ‘Creole Indias’. In May 2020, she and the Franco-Tamil writer Ari Gautier co-founded the cultural platform Le thinnai kreyol.
