ABSTRACT

Afro-Cuban dancer Carlos Acosta exemplified ballet’s newest expression of cosmopolitanism, which references diasporic multiculturalism in a context of globalization, during his tenure in London’s Royal Ballet. The distinctive feature of this new cosmopolitanism is the presence of the subaltern subject–deemed a racial and cultural other–in troupes across Western Europe and North America. The mobilization of Acosta into an object of desire underscores the propensity in the Global North toward hedonistic consumption of dancing bodies marked as diverse. In this capacity, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism could be a platform for staging comforting spectacles of what Ahmed deems “feel good” diversity. In a regime of repressive tolerance, hedonistic multiculturalism rings most hollow when it coalesces around cosmetic diversity that exploits bodies of color as ornaments, ostentatiously showcasing them to conceal what might be their actual underrepresentation in organizations. The demand for the subaltern in the economy of diversity empowers these dancers to reappropriate their otherness and capitalize on it.