Dangerous Encounters, Ambiguous Frontiers

Dance balls, masquerades, and street carnivals functioned as frontier spaces of otherwise reprehensible encounters between people of different gender, race, and class. I examine dance as a dense point of contact in nineteenth-century Cuba by showing how dance served ruling elites as a disciplining instrument to enforce social and legal boundaries, and was simultaneously used by colonial subjects as a tactic of survival to navigate these barriers. Because dancing lent itself to situations of intimacy and mis-recognition, it challenged Cuban ruling elites’ efforts to police dancing bodies. Dance is offered as a useful methodological venue to illuminate the predicament of the colonial state in governing colonial subjects and bodies. I offer the case of colonial Cuba as a contribution to the study of contact zones and colonial intimacies in Latin America and the Caribbean, in a much-needed examination of the relationships between imperialism, sexuality, and the governance of dance.