Transnational Identity and Corporeal Experience
Funded by: German Research Foundation (DFG)
Project Director: Professor Gabriele Klein
Research Assistants: Melanie Haller, Dipl.-Soz., Maren Witte, Dipl.-Theaterwiss., Elke Koepping, M.A.
Project term: 11/2004 – 6/2007
Overview
The research project ‘Transnational Identity and Physical/Sensory Experience’ is about examining questions of identity, experience and physicality in connection with Latin American urban dance culture, focusing on the forms tango and salsa, which involve dance techniques seen as emblematic of cultural transnationalisation and globalisation. The project thus looks at the hybridity of cultures in globalised societies from a structural theoretical perspective, focusing on processes of (re-) ethnicisation, the reinvention of tradition and the cultivation of nostalgia in and myths of origin about dance cultures.
Tango and salsa are also seen as examples of a trend toward an ‘aestheticising of life’ underway since the 1980s. The questions of in what way these transnational dance cultures may represent an ‘elevation of the everyday’ and the extent to which the physical/sensual experience of dance is relevant to the lives and identities of the local population are addressed from a micro-theoretical perspective of everyday life.
Project-based book publication:
Gabriele Klein: Tango in Translation. Tanz zwischen Medien, Kulturen, Kunst und Politik (transcript, Bielefeld 2009)