Filmed, Felt, and False Rhythms: Dance Videos and an Embodying “Home” in Post-migration

Abstract

Drawing on an ethnography of the Parisian “afro scene” (2004–2014), this chapter explores how French young people of African origin navigate and complicate narratives of transmission and cultural memory, as these are reshaped by technological developments. It addresses, more specifically, the sensory and affective experience procured by filmed dance/music circulating within transnational music and dance circuits connecting artists and fans from francophone Africa and its European diaspora. As “communities of sentiment” (Appadurai, Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India, In Affecting Discourse: Anthropological Essays on Emotions and Social Life, ed. C. Lutz and L. Abu-Lughod, p. 94. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1990), these circuits emerge out of the public negotiations of “emotional participation”, its members not always meeting face to face, but instead through the medium of “haptic images” (Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, p. 2. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000). The embodied knowledge of rhythm and dance, both transmitted within families and gained through a mimetic relationship with filmed images, is a core theme in these public negotiations. This is examined in the analysis of a YouTube-mediated conflict between Afro-French artist Jessy Matador and Ivoirian artist DJ Arafat, ignited by the former qualifying the latter’s rhythms as “false”—which in French may mean “illusory”, “incorrect”, or “fabricated”. While this ethnographic example highlights the fundamental role of film as technology of memory, it also illustrates the importance of embodied practice for the constitution of cultural memory.