The Space of Salsa

Referencing the growing popularity of Salsa dance around the world, this article analyses the implications of the global appropriation of Salsa as a hybrid cultural movement. Examining Salsa’s historical inception as an amalgam of multiple influences, I point to the ways Salsa’s increasing global mobility complicates the assumed homogeneity of terms such as authentic and indigenous. My study draws on Arif Dirlik’s account of indigenism and the ‘politics of place,’ and Arjun Appadurai’s conceptions of globalization and ethnic identity. My scholarly work on Salsa is also predicated by my own experiences as an international, Latin dance performer and instructor. As a member of a professional cosmopolitan community who participates in a perpetual migration of Salsa instructors, I reveal how Salsa undergoes a unique transcription in local and transnational spaces. As Salsa continues to spread to diverse places, it is defined by new localities, fragmenting its own groundedness in Latin culture. In the confrontation between the global and the local, I contend that the paradoxical nature of Salsa as a ‘local which moves’ reveals contradictions which challenge the very foundations of the global/local binary. I conclude by examining the evolution of locality as a ‘forward-looking’ temporal conception

Art · Dance · Epistemology · Phenomenon · SALSA · Visual arts · Computer Science · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Philosophy