| This dissertation examines urban sociality and political-economic change through the lens of expressive culture in the Republic of Guinea, where dance and music have long been entangled with politics. During Guinea's socialist period (1958-84), the state instituted a vast system of recruitment and competition, resulting in a dance form called "Guinean ballet" that became a symbol of the young nation. The socialist state also violently appropriated rural performance practices as key media of postcolonial nation building, capitalizing on the power these art forms commanded in the countryside. Thirty years after the end of socialism, despite the virtual disappearance of state funding for the arts, Guinean ballet is thriving in the capital city of Conakry, deployed by individual actors navigating a liberal capitalist economy.;This dissertation uses the social and expressive configurations found in Conakry's dance community to examine the complex cultural afterlife of Guinean socialism,and to investigate what it means to live in a contemporary African city. It focuses ethnographically on a network of performing artists in Conakry working in troupes or "ballets," whose practices were profoundly shaped by socialist cultural policy. More specifically, it engages a city-wide network of private ballets that were founded in the wake of state socialism, and the improvisational strategies that practitioners employ in dance and daily life as they navigate the uncertainties of a postsocialist, post-Structural Adjustment urban existence. Private ballets, while dismissed by the state, constitute the infrastructural bulk of Conakry's contemporary performing arts scene, and have effectively replaced the elaborate state-structured system that existed for training artists during the Revolution. These troupes exist at the margins of the state, yet are central to an emerging African urbanity and vibrant youth culture in Conakry.;Generational divides articulated in speech and dance throughout the study illustrate how political-economic transformation maps into changing social dynamics. While elder artists trained during Guinea's socialist period understand dance as intimately connected to rural origins and socialist values, postsocialist youth in Conakry are developing expressive forms that both reflect and perform new circumstances and possibilities. They dance, as their elders did, in formal troupes and social ceremonies, but the troupes are no longer part of a nationalist political program, and the ceremonies invite individual improvisation that transgresses former norms of propriety and gendered movement, and questions ethnically inflected modes of constructing belonging. These young dancers, however, are not performing quintessential neoliberal subjecthood. The practices and perspectives of young dancers can be socially transgressive, but are also deeply marked by legacies of socialism. Contemporary ballet dance in Guinea, forged through the socialist Revolution, is a unique affective medium which both signals connection with the socialist past and performs an aspirational version of African modernity.;In this ballet community, transnational migration is a distinctly postsocialist phenomenon and is shaping the landscape of possibility around professional dance in Conakry. When socialism ended in 1984, economic liberalization and Structural Adjustment meant a loss of state funding for the arts and spurred the privatization of troupes and mass migration of performers in the 1990s and 2000s. The recent outmigration of the country's best artists, motivated by changes in political regime and economic policy, is provoking a cascade of social transformations in Conakry's dance community, which I investigate along structural, aesthetic, and imaginative axes.;The practice of Guinean ballet is richly textured with a long history of political and social significance, and this history, I argue, has imbued this art form with a sense of cosmopolitanism that is finding new expression among youth in a vastly transformed political economy. This dance is ideally situated to connect three major themes in anthropological scholarship which are usually treated separately: African urbanism, postsocialist studies, and transnational mobility. In so doing, it raises theoretical questions about creativity in authoritarian settings and about the nature of contemporary African urbanity, and asks how new configurations of power, wealth, and interests After the Cold War are understood and put in motion through both dancing and migrating bodies. |
