ABSTRACT
The stubborn persistence of the ‘primitive’ and ‘erotic’ African stereotype provides rich terrain for ongoing explorations and interrogations. ‘[T]he stereotype’, Homi K. Bhabha declares, ‘is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place’, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’ (1994: 66). Bhabha’s concept has proven immensely useful as a means of excavating the anxiety that underlies the perpetuation of the ‘duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual license of the African’ (66). This postcolonial framework, however, does not account for the proliferation of cultural stereotypes in the domain of African popular culture, where the colonial gaze presumably does not need to be affirmed. In my first encounter with Tanzanian ‘traditional’ dance in 1996, I was immediately faced with such stereotypes, even though I was exploring urban popular culture in Dar es Salaam instead of tourist performance ‘on safari’ in the Serengeti plains. Despite my own anxiety to question and deconstruct these initial images, the stereotypes seemed at first impervious to theoretical tools.
