Black Feminist Aptitudes

Chapter 2 takes dance pedagogy as a point of entry into how Black women theorize their movements and the relationship of those improvisations to broader structural constraints. It explores how rumberas experience, understand, and navigate their uniquely raced and gendered position in the market vis-à-vis fellow rumberos, state administrators, private business owners, and tourists. The conscious rehearsal of and improvisation within essentialized tropes of Black womanhood sedimented in slavery prompt the consideration of rumba as a technique of dissemblance, situating its choreographies of seduction and refusal within a Black feminist tradition. Sacred epistemological and choreographic repertoires become critical tools for negotiating power, mitigating risk, asserting self-worth, and demanding compensation.