摘要：The dance-music complexes known as “Salsa” and “Bhangra” have not been
subjected to any comparative academic scrutiny, despite clear parallels in their
respective histories as cultural processes born out of multiple ruptures and
conjunctions, including European colonialism, migrations during the postcolonial
period, and transnational cultural and commodity flows. While Salsa has resulted
from the movement of people, music and rhythmic cultures across Africa, the
Caribbean and the United States, Bhangra evinces their movement across the
partitioned space of the Punjab, the United Kingdom, and the post-Partition
nations of India and Pakistan. Both Salsa and Bhangra have, moreover, moved
beyond original regional ambits to become cultural signifiers (albeit often
contested as much as claimed) of wider Latino/a and Desi (pan-South Asian)
identities respectively. Undoubtedly, it is the academic and cultural embedding of
Salsa within a Hispanophone postcolonial paradigm, and of Bhangra within its
Anglophone counterpart, that has prevented serious comparative work between
these two musical expressive cultures which are equally but differently exemplary
of the complex relationship between music and migration. Yet across the world,
from Delhi to San Francisco, the two dance-music complexes increasingly meet
each other in the same space, particularly that of the dance floor. Drawing on such
evidence as well as on personal experience of dancing both the Salsa and the
Bhangra, I will advance in this article a theoretical framework for their comparison
as transnational musics, suggesting ways in which such a framework can illuminate
the circuits of pleasure and politics that traverse each of these dance musics as
embodied histories of a traumatic yet life-affirming postcolonial modernity.
