UO professor talks about new book on Senegalese dance

A longstanding hub of African performing arts, Senegal was at the forefront of the explosion of contemporary dance across Africa at the turn of the twenty-first century. In her new book Dancing Opacity: Contemporary Dance, Transnationalism, and Queer Possibility in Senegal (University of Michigan Press, 2025) Amy Swanson, assistant professor of Dance Studies, Theory, and History at the University of Oregon, chronicles the ways in which contemporary dancers in Senegal navigate the global contemporary dance circuit while challenging heteropatriarchal ideologies at home. 

Swanson will give a book talk on Friday, October 24, 2025 at 3 p.m. in 352 Gerlinger Annex. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research, Swanson demonstrates how Senegalese choreographers and dancers contend with entrenched racialized prejudices about Africa outside the continent, while pushing back against repressive regulations of gender and sexuality within Senegal. 

Swanson employs the concept of opacity, defined as a refusal to adhere to the colonial logic of transparency for dominant gazes and argues that artists create work with multiple layers of meaning that are not meant to be immediately transparent to all viewers. By doing so, these artists evade cultural norms that govern gender and sexual expression in Senegal, while challenging their international audiences to expand their perceptions of African dance. Dancing Opacity highlights the artists’ accounts of their pedagogies, performances, aesthetics, and lived realities, as well as Africanist conceptions of gender, sexuality, and queerness that have yet to be applied to contemporary dance. 

Bamba Diagne, a Senegalese artist and dancer whose work Swanson writes about in the book, will give a performance relating to the book’s overarching topic of choreographic experimentation with gender and sexuality. 

This event is cosponsored by the OHC’s Endowment for Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities. For more information contact Amy Swanson, aswa@uoregon.edu