ABSTRACT
In “How to Write About Africa,” Kenyan-born writer Binyavanga Wainaina ironically instructed, “keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular … Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls.” When it comes to dance, a correlation with Africa does not imply a relationship with African women. For girls and women of African descent in the United States, an African origin myth of twerking can be a refuge from the customary symbolic annihilation and stigmatization from misogynoir on the Internet, but what does it mean (how, why, and for whom) to maintain an imagined sense of ethnic affiliation through twerking that is not rooted in reality? This chapter explores how dozens of different dances featuring hip gyrations from across the African diaspora are mislabeled or explicitly tagged as “twerking” on YouTube. It examines how those results can perpetuate an internalized hatred/fear of non-American Blacks reinforcing xenocentrism – a preference for anything but one’s own culture – through romantic and unparticular stories about twerking as African. YouTube has a tendency to reify ethnic boundary markers, enabling binary thinking about cultural contexts and performances of dance that are NOT the same. Using critical discourse analysis, YouTube twerking is differentiated from various Caribbean and African styles of dance to show how unfinished migrations of ethnicity are structuring “deep but loose” connections that may fracture the possibility of actual deep organizing between and among American, African, Caribbean, and Brazilian Black women within the United States and across nations.
