¡Habla! Embodied Code-Switching and Listening to Our Dances

• In Event: Performance as/in American Studies

Abstract

This paper presents some of the central ideas of my forthcoming book ¡Habla!: Speaking Bodies Dancing Our América, namely the concept of “embodied code-switching” and a call to approaching dancing as a sonically enmeshed as well as visual and corporeal practice. Overall, ¡Habla! examines the capacity of dancing to both incarnate and instruct towards a kind of survivance for people tethered to the conceptual axis of “our América,” defined as the lands of Abya Yala, its archipelagic companions, and those who make life in and move across and beyond
them. Using Afro-Puerto Rican bomba as a point of departure—a centuries-old drum, dance, and song practice defined by how the dancer’s movements are marked in precise simultaneity by the drummer—the book theorizes this mutual indebtedness between the sonic and corporeal. ¡Habla! (which in Spanish means to speak) thus argues that attending to dancing our América offers insight into how these bodies “speak” and engage in practices of “embodied code switching.” This “switch” refers both to a complex interplay between the linguistic and the embodied, as well as a re-routing from the logics encoded in the project of modernity toward an alternate set of codes found in practices like bomba.
This presentation reflects on how these practices of embodied code-switching and otherwise listening may be applicable in contending with the current fascist paradigm. The current moment has made clear the dangers of putting into words the contours of our needs and demands, leaving them vulnerable both to institutional cooptation and now exceedingly DOGE-able as AI scans our websites – using the search and find function to scan not for the ideas themselves but for the words they think encapsulate them. What lessons can we find about how we encode knowledges, how we operate on and off the radar, when and how we switch the codes and when and how we call on the visual, the sonic, the corporeal and the rhetorical to dispatch our necessary communications. Beyond a simplistic, let’s just dance while the world burns, or what has even in some cases become a necessary “politics of joy,” how might this also be a reminder to differently attune ourselves – indeed listen, with our bodies, making ourselves porous to receiving and delivering other communications. How can we continue to route the counter-knowledges that are such a vital force in our future survival and thrivance, away from the strictures of DEI programs? What movidas can we make to continue to be insurgent, fugitive and off the radar of capture even as we pour into each other to sustain, grow, build?

Author

• Jade Power Sotomayor, University of California-San Diego