ABSTRACT
This chapter puts the focus on the couple dance called kizomba, its iterations and reformulations, and the kind of effects these have generated among practitioners in Lisbon. The couple dance popularly known as kizomba became fashionable in the 1980s in Portuguese-speaking African communities who lived in Africa and Europe, connected through transnational ties. The chapter describes how, during the financial crisis, while many discos of Lisbon went into bankruptcy, the kizomba craze bloomed instead of fading away. It argues that we can only understand this phenomenon through analysing the social meanings of the encounter at the commodified kizomba dance floor: the need to find conventional ways of recuperation from the social suffering produced by the financial crisis. The chapter explores how the participants produced a specific context, where the social order was inverted by reproducing the rules of an imagined and idealised ‘African culture’.
