HUMA Doctoral Seminar Series

Speaker: Laura Steil (École Pratique des Hautes Études, France)

Drawing on two decades of ethnographic and personal engagements in Parisian urban dance scenes, this presentation explores how French young people of African origin navigate and complicate narratives of transmission and cultural memory, as these are reshaped by ongoing technological developments. It addresses, more specifically, the sensory and affective experience procured by filmed dance/music circulating within transnational music and dance circuits connecting artists and fans from francophone Africa and its European diaspora. As “communities of sentiment” (Appadurai, 1990), these circuits emerge out of the public negotiations of emotional participation, its members not always meeting face to face, but instead through the medium of “haptic images” (Marks, 2000, p. 2). The embodied knowledge of rhythm and movement both transmitted within families, and (re)enacted through a mimetic relationship with filmed images, is a core theme in these public negotiations. In an age where social media platforms play an increasingly important role in the cultural “traffic” of dance, this presentation is intended as a conversation-starter on ethnographies (of dance) in an interconnected and mass-mediated world.

Laura Steil

About the speaker: Laura Steil holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Paris, France (2015). Her doctoral thesis focused on the (re)mediations and appropriations of “afro dance” by the diasporic sons and daughters of African immigrants in the Paris region. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), examining 1960s dance halls in working-class Luxembourg as part of the PopKult60 project. Laura approaches popular dance practices and environments from an embodied ethnographic and historiographic perspective. She is particularly interested in the construction of social distinction and cultural memory and looks at contexts in which generational, social, or spatial ruptures have complicated traditional modes of transmission and remembrance. She investigates how embodied reenactments, such as dancing to a YouTube video, may act as technologies of memory, suturing individuals into larger collective histories and producing deeply felt recollections about, and meaningful identifications with, the past.