ReVistaReVista HARVARD REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICA • FALL 2007 Dance! Global Transformations of Latin American Culture DAVID ROCKEFELLER CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY Editor’s LETTER We were little black cats with white whiskers and long tails. One musical number from my one and only dance performance—in the fifth grade—has always stuck in my head. It was called “Hernando’s Hideaway,” a rhythm I was told was a tango from a faraway place called Argentina. The beat imprinted on my imagination, as did the lyrics: “I know a dark secluded place/a place where no one knows your face/a glass of wine a fast embrace/It’s called ...Hernando’s Hideaway...” So while I was preparing this issue on dance, in tribute to Harvard’s Humanities Center confer- ence “Tango! Global Transformations of Latin American Culture,” I decided to google the words to the song. Much to my surprise, I found the decidely non-Argentine word “olé!” A reference to casta- nets—normally associated with Spanish flamenco—led me to investigate the pan-Hispanic imagery. It turned out that “Hernando’s Hideaway” was from the Broadway musical—later a Hollywood film— “Pajama Game.” My childhood Latin dance associations—also including Ritchie Valens’ rendering of “La Bamba” and Desi Arnaz as the Cuban orchestra leader Ricky Ricardo in “I Love Lucy”—were inspired global transformations of Latin American culture. Many of the authors in this issue have also touched on their childhood experiences with Latin dance. Homi K. Bhabha recalls listening to his father’s scratchy tango records; Doris Sommer brings us back to her Brooklyn childhood and how master pianist Larry Harlow inspired “inter-ethnic bridges so wide that everyone is invited to dance.” Alba Barbería confesses, “My life probably started with a tango,” and Claudia Pineda relates how dance performance connects immigrant youth with their home culture and helps them adapt to their home society. In his article “Colombia’s Broken Body,” Álvaro Restrepo Hernández perhaps provides the expla- nation for this unintentional theme: “Children are masters of a powerful and unique instrument that is their body, their being, with which they can play, create, enjoy, transform and be transformed.” Dance is a truth engraved in the body: as Restrepo notes, “Everything passes through the body.” Thus, dance has the power of transformation and communication, linking the self and the other. Suddenly, I understood why it has been so hard for me as an editor to decide which articles went in which section of this ReVista. How we conceive of ourselves in terms of societies and religions— shaping identity—is intricately related with how we project ourselves as people—“beyond the tourist gaze.” These relations exist whether at home or abroad, as seen through dance in the diaspora, and in how we transform ourselves as individuals and cultures. Dance has the consistent ability to change, to mutate and to express. This issue was intended to be in black and white, drawing its strength for the power of dance movement. But as ReVista designer Kelly McMurray of 2COMMUNIQUÉ and I worked with the vibrant images in this magazine, we found it mutating into color. From time to time, ReVista will now be published in color, not every issue, but at least once every academic year. We celebrate the tango conference and the dance theme with color—a joy, a surprise, a dance itself. Enjoy! HARVARD REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICA • Volume VII, Number 1 ReVista Published by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies DRCLAS: Merilee S. Grindle, Director • Kathy Eckroad, Associate Director EDITORIAL STAFF: June Carolyn Erlick, Editor-in-Chief • Anita Safran, Maria Regan, Publications Team Grete Viddal, Dance Issue Intern Cover photograph 2COMMUNIQUÉ/www.2communique.com, Design • P & R Publications, Printer The tango-dancing couple illus- 1730 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA 02138 Telephone: (617) 495–3366 Facsimile: (617) 496–2802 trates the poster for the conference TO SUBSCRIBE: Email: <[email protected]> Website: <http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu> READER FORUM: <[email protected]> “Tango! Dance the World Around: Copyright © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. ISSN 1541–1443 Global Transformations of Latin American Culture.” Tango! Dance the World Around Global Transformations of Latin American Culture BY HOMI K. BHABHA am passionately interested in tango and profoundly ignorant different departments, disciplines, and about it. When I came to the Humanities Center at Harvard divisions of the university into conver- two years ago, I knew that at last I had an opportunity to sations that combine academic exper- I direct my passion towards overcoming my ignorance. This is tise with intellectual passion. the personal motivation behind “Tango! Dance the World Around: I thought tango would be a splen- Global Transformations of Latin American Culture”—our October did way of connecting the David 26 and 27 tango conference, co-sponsored by the Humanities Rockefeller Center for Latin American Center, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the David Studies, and the people who are associated with DRCLAS, with Rockefeller Center, with the generous support of the Consulate Radcliffe, with the Humanities Center, with the performing arts at General of Argentina. Harvard. We would also be able then to link up literary scholars, My first experience of tango was in Bombay when I heard it musicologists, urban historians, sociologists, dancers, and musi- on grainy, scratchy records. My father greatly loved tango, both cians. It is our great good fortune to have Yo-Yo Ma participate to dance to and to listen to, and he had purchased these records fully in this conference and be an advisor who sent us in many in the 1930s or 40s. I heard them as a child in the 60s, and I interesting directions, both intellectually and aesthetically. His was completely captivated. I can’t say precisely why, as I can’t conversation with the composer Osvaldo Golijov is no doubt a put myself back into the mind of a child, but I believe it was the highlight of the conference. music’s combination of strength and fragility. I couldn’t understand “Tango!” explores the issues I’ve discussed above, looking at the lyrics, but I could feel the music intensely. the local contexts of performance while, at the same time, posing Early in 2004, as the senior humanities advisor to Dean Drew larger questions of cultural transmissions. We are asking why tango Faust—now President Faust—I collaborated with Radcliffe in orga- has achieved such a remarkable success as a global metaphor. We nizing a conference on cultural citizenship. At that time, I remarked are looking at what gives it the capacity to infuse diverse national that we should do something together on tango because tango is and regional contexts across the globe with the spirit of Latin Ameri- an extraordinarily popular dance and musical form with a fascinat- can performance. To help us answer these questions, lectures and ing social and political history that is translated across the world panels will explore such topics as “Tango and Literature: Borges in a remarkable range of art forms and media. There is popular and Tango,” “Tango as a Cultural Form: Music, Dance, Film,” and dance tango; there are great art works that incorporate tango; “Tango as Politics: Gender, Class, and Urban Life.” there is cinema that focuses on tango; there is tango as classical The tango conference kicks off a program funded by the Mel- music—thanks in part to Yo-Yo Ma, who speaks at our conference; lon Foundation at the Humanities Center, which concentrates on there is tango in Paris, Tokyo, Bombay, and Boston as well as “the regional and the global.” Our hope is that every year we Buenos Aires—thus our title “Dance the World Around” and our will focus on a particular region, explore the arts, the culture, the subtitle “Global Transformations of Latin American Culture.” economics, the history of that region. We thought it would be Tango is about nostalgia, the nostalgia for one’s country, about wonderful to begin our engagement with Latin America with the migration. Tango is about emerging from lack of privilege and tango conference. Through the year, it will be followed by other expressing one’s passion for life in that context. Tango is about events focusing on Latin America. The tango conference from that gender. Tango is deeply embedded in histories of urban poverty, perspective is a gateway for a range of collaborative, interdisci- social marginalization, and masculine authority. plinary events on the Latin American region, on connections within I may not have conveyed all that information to then-Dean Latin America, and connections between Latin America and the Faust, but my enthusiasm appears to have been contagious. Radc- rest of the world. liffe every year stages a major conference. They did one last year For me, the tango is both personal and political, both regional on food. They’ve done one on war and another on money. They and global. I probably first saw tango performed in early films made eagerly signed on to “Tango!” about the life of Carlos Gardel, although I had heard the music That was the origin of a conference that addresses issues of already on my father’s records. Carlos Gardel, the most famous of gender, class, Latin American culture and its exportation to other tango artists, was born on the shore of Río de la Plata; both Argen- countries, translations and transformations of a vital cultural form. It tina and Uruguay claimed his birthplace. He died in a tragic plane takes up all those issues, puts them together, and gives them to us in crash in Medellín, Colombia.