CONSECUENCIAS EPISTEMOLÓGICAS DE LA MUERTE DE DIOS

[T]hey dance and move their feet, as it were in a Moresco, with great gravetie and sobrietie.141

To qualify, or legitimate, imagined dancing bodies as embodied sources of danced knowledge means to analyze movement, in writing, for evidence of what happened, how it happened, and who made it happen. As a reminder, Diana Taylor develops the terminology of repertoire to specify how dances can carry and transmit remembered knowledge of past practices into performance. Danced repertoires entail rehearsed and routine movements and rhythms. Repertoires are comprised of the routines executed within dance performances, the rhythms and steps, spatial configurations and timing. She notes that repertoire, “enacts embodied memory,” and “Embodied and performed acts generate, record, and transmit knowledge.”142 _{Rhythms and steps, timing and gesture, bring} knowledges of past movement into the present, onto the dance floor or the dancing ground, for possible transmission into the future and to other cultures or people groups. As sources of knowledge, then, imagined dancing bodies bring forth memory and transmit their versions of those

141 _{Duarte Lopes and Filippo Pigafetta, “A report of the Kingdome of Congo, a region of Affrica,” in Pvrchas his}

Pilgrimes …, trans. Abraham Hartwell and ed. Samuel Purchas, Vol. 2, bk 7, chap IIII [sic], 986-1026 (London: Printed by

William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625) 1018–1019. 142 _{Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 20, 21.}

remembered knowledges over the course of a performance event. They generate past knowledge brought into a present time for an unforeseen but potentially anticipated future.

At particular issue in this chapter, is how interdependence affects the capability of imagined dancing bodies to belong as embodied sources of knowledge. Trouillot cautions, “As sources fill the historical landscape with their facts, they reduce the room available to other facts.”143 _{Simply adding} sources to the historical process will not necessarily lead to “a more accurate reconstitution of the past.”144 _{Namely, “Even if we imagine the landscape to be forever expandable, the rule of} interdependence implies that new facts cannot emerge in a vacuum.”145 _{Historians establish facts in} relation to other facts. Individual traces of the past may mean within their written report or document, but they may not mean anything when placed up against other sources of the time, or scholarship about the particular time and place. In effect, facts, “will have to gain their right to existence in light of the field constituted by previously created facts.”146

Moreover, because of how interdependence operates within the historical process, “sources occupy competing positions in the historical landscape.”147 _{New facts, when qualified and} legitimated, “may dethrone some of these [previously established] facts, erase or qualify others.”148 So then, our task is to ascertain how the Lopes and Pigafetta report competes with and diverges from the prevailing historical landscape, “the field constituted by previously created facts.”149

143 _{Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) 49} 144 _{Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 49}

145 _{Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 49} 146 _{Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 49} 147 _{Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 49} 148 _{Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 49} 149 _{Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 29, 49}

Attempting to incorporate new facts may inevitably shift the legitimated historical landscape, and likewise shift the parameters for future historical narratives. Qualifying a new fact, as I am exploring here with Lopes and Pigafetta, has the potential to disqualify previously legitimated narratives and facts in the historical landscape.

Put differently, we are exploring how prevailing narratives of Black dance, in relation to African American theatre, African Diasporic performance, and European court dancing, exclude and silence the imagined Black dancing bodies in the sixteenth-century Kongo court from qualifying as embodied evidence of a moresca performance in West Central Africa. As a reminder, I am explicating this performance based on the first step of Trouillot’s process: “the moment of fact creation (the making of sources).”150 _{If the imagined Black dancing bodies do not qualify as embodied} sources of what happened in the Kongo court, then the performance does not qualify as a fact or event for the purpose of writing historical narratives. Disqualifying, or silencing, the imagined Black dancing bodies in this Kongo performance will effectively silence and disqualify the performance as an event available for the second step of Trouillot’s process: “the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives).”151 _{Exposing and analyzing silences reveal ontologies of being as process of} belonging, where and when and how a person or event is allowed to exert influence in historical narratives.

Based on how imagined dancing bodies are written and documented through movement, historians (ideally) know what dances occurred and how they occurred. Moreover, historians (ideally) know where the dances and dancers came from, and how the dancers learned or acquired the embodied knowledges necessary for performance. To qualify the imagined Black dancing bodies as

150 _{Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 26} 151 _{Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 26}

embodied sources, who danced repertoires like a moresca “with gravetie and sobrietie,” would thus make claims on previous moments when West Central African performers learned and rehearsed these repertoires. To claim that dancers, located within and from West Central Africa, performed repertoires like a moresca in the Kongo court, also claims the potential for prior acquisition of the embodied knowledges necessary to execute steps to evoke a moresca for a Portuguese traveler and Italian humanist. So, for instance, if we could qualify the imagined Black dancing bodies as embodied sources of danced knowledge, then this Kongolese performance could become an event. We could discuss where and how this Kongolese moresca influenced concurrent or subsequent events in dance history, including moresche and morris dances in sixteenth-century Europe and West Central Africa, and those dances known, carried, and transmitted by enslaved sub-Saharans to the Americas.

In this chapter, I continue negotiating how and why the Lopes and Pigafetta source cannot yet attain legitimacy, based on “the field constituted by previously created facts.”152 _{I reveal this} impossibility, or failure of Lopes and Pigafetta to cohere, based on how narratives of Black dance relate to trans-Atlantic coercion in African Diasporas and African American theatre, and how Black dance further relates to narratives of European court dancing. I use prevail for its connotations of power, reign, and conquest. Gurminder K. Bhambra, in applying Trouillot to postcolonialism and modernity, observes, “Note that what is not being said here is that [the historical process] makes some narratives more ‘true’ than others, but rather, more powerful.”153 _{It may, in fact, be true that} Kongolese dancers performed a moresca in honor of Lopes as a representative of Portugal. But, the prevailing narratives of sub-Saharan influences in trans-Atlantic circulation, and of European court

152 _{Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 49}

153 _{Gurminder K. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Basingstoke,} Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 10

dancing in relation to the moresca and morris, do not yet allow this trace of the past to achieve factual legitimacy. The historical landscape prohibits this trace from emerging as a fact or event available for inclusion in archives and in narratives. Moving forward, I define the prevailing historical landscape and negotiate the qualification of Lopes and Pigafetta’s report, as well as the imagined Black dancing bodies within.