Concert Dance, Race, and Identity in Argentina

FAIN: FT-259723-18

Victoria Fortuna
Reed College (Portland, OR 97202-8138)

Research leading to a book-length study on race and modern dance in Argentina since during the 20th century.

This project examines the role that concert dance forms—classical ballet, modern dance, and contemporary dance—historically have played in the construction and/or critique of Argentine racial exceptionalism. Racial exceptionalism names the pervasive academic and public discourses that have situated Argentina as exceptionally white and European among Latin American nations. Because of its relationship to Euro-American culture, concert dance offers a privileged site for examining the construction of Argentine whiteness. Argentina’s Centennial (1910) and Bicentennial (2010) celebrations, both critical crossroads in the imagination of national identity, bracket this study. My project joins a growing body of scholarship that centers racial politics in Argentina. Within the dance studies field, it aims to bring Argentine concert dance into dialogue with scholarship that documents how dance articulates histories of race and nation.