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This article draws on an ethnography of the transmission of Senegalese sabar dancing in France and Switzerland to discuss how the religious pathways of sabar enthusiasts bear witness to many modes of adoption or rejection of Mouride and Baye Fall aesthetics. I focus on several portraits of students in order to highlight three modalities of the relationship with Baye Fall aesthetics, faith, and religious knowledge, ranging from the dissociation between dance and religious meaning to conversion and immersion into Baye Fallism. I defend the importance of elaborating post‐exotic anthropological tools – such as the ideas of ethnophilia or religious conversations – in order to grasp the nexus of affects, embodied experiences, and intimate relationships that are conducive to and mediate the religious pathways of sabar enthusiasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic research within the salsa, bachata and kizomba (SBK) scene of Cape Town, this article examines the values and narratives of personal development that Cape Town's adepts of Afro-Latin dance elaborate around the emic notion of "connection." I describe how this multisensory experience is informed by an ethic of personal development and self-transformation, which at the same time reflects the influence of global neoliberal entrepreneurial paradigms — together with the hopes, values and hampered dreams of Cape Town's post-apartheid middle classes. Narratives and descriptions of the hapticscape and multisensory knowledge built through the search for connection highlight how these encounters give shape to intimate spaces where salsa amateurs can imagine, materialise and embody the multiple injunctions they navigate and can reconfigure the boundaries of intimacy, identity and otherness in the post-apartheid city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay recounts both the intertwined history of the hip-hop appropriation and the identification to the figure of Michael Jackson in Gabon, from the 1980s to nowadays. It questions how transatlantic musical dialogues have provided the African youth with a way of representing a black subject freed from (post)colonial complexes. Drawing on historical and ethnographic data, this paper focuses on several imitators of Michael Jackson, and mainly on the case of Michael Anicet, a dancer who built his career and his fame on the imitation of Michael Jackson choreographies. It describes his pathway, his performances and how he transformed Michael Jackson's dances in order to 'gabonize' it, focusing mainly on his reception and appropriation of the song and choreography of the track 'They don't care about us'. This essay finally proves how the identification to global black icons has constituted the lever for an identity construction which combines nationalist claims and connections with a transnational blackness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sheds light on an unsung part of Gabonese history: the construction of national performance and 'spectacle' culture. It is based on long-term ethnographic and historical research on Gabonese music and dance groups and on an analysis of two music and dance genres created during the one-party rule. While the first one (cultural animation groups) has represented a national unity project and a masculine dominance of the state in a period of 'Renovation', the second (the National Ballet) has used local initiation rituals on stage as emblems of the Nation in a period of heritage-making and the construction of cultural policies. This paper shows how, in the case of Gabon, dance and music ensembles have not only been used by the single party to produce ordinary consent; they were also employed by popular classes to assert their agency, despite the domination of the single party. It highlights how the micropolitics and negotiations of some have shaped local 'traditions' to become part of a 'national culture' in public performances. This unknown history of two national dance and music genres ultimately adds innovative elements to the existing literature on culture, politics, gender, and initiation societies in Gabon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]