DANCEHALL POLITICS: MOBILITY, SEXUALITY, AND SPECTACLES OF RACIAL RESPECTABILITY IN LATE COLONIAL TANGANYIKA, 1930s–1961

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores the relationship between understandings of youth sexuality and mobility, and racial nationalism in late colonial Tanganyika through a history of dansi: a dance mode first popularized by Tanganyikan youth in the 1930s. Dansi's heterosocial choreography and cosmopolitan connotations provoked widespread anxieties among rural elders and urban elites over the mobility, economic autonomy, and sexual agency of youth. In urban commercial dancehalls in the 1950s, dansi staged emerging cultural solidarities among migrant youth, while also making visible social divisions based on class and gender. At the same time, nationalist intellectuals attempted to reform dansi according to an emerging political rhetoric of racial respectability.