During the Cold War, the West imagined the Eastern Bloc as a closed-off, insular region lacking the attractions of cosmopolitan popular culture. However, many socialist governments in fact prioritized “proletarian internationalism” – the Eastern counterproposal to Western cosmopolitanism – as a key facet of cultural policy, so that music and dance from all over the world indeed flowed through and behind the “Iron Curtain.” These flows gave rise to a Second World music culture whose international circuits, hybrid sounds, and embodied practices have so far been little studied.

This paper explores one avenue for embodying and performing socialist internationalism: Latin/American dances and dance music in East Germany ca. 1958-1978. Throughout this period, East Germans practiced internationally popular Latin dances like mambo and chachachá, enthusiastically learned “new dances” of the Cuban revolution like mozambique and pilón, and even created their own new dances based on Latin American rhythms in order to help form the “new socialist personality.” Through this selective embodiment of Latin American dance culture, GDR dancers, musicians, and music listeners encountered an alternative modernity, negotiated East German values, and performed ever-changing interpretations of socialist solidarity. In this way, they and their counterparts around the Eastern Bloc also played a role in establishing the Second World as a Global East and a cultural region whose traces endure to this day.

Salsa dancing is a relatively recent phenomenon in China. It started in Beijing in the early 2000s and has been gradually spreading to other cities without a connection to a large Latino immigrant community. Chinese salsa fans are usually professionals in their mid-20s–40s, who take lessons at dance studios and practice their new skills at salsa parties organized in bars and nightclubs. They also attend salsa congresses, both within and outside China, aiming to show off and improve their salsa moves in workshops taught by international instructors. Some challenge themselves by dancing in competitions and staged show performances. Chinese’ reactions to salsa trigger several questions: Why is salsa dancing appealing to a particular segment of the Chinese population? Why did salsa dance appear in China much later than in other East and Southeast Asian countries? Do Chinese salsa fans associate salsa with Latin American culture? Finally, what meanings does salsa dancing convey to them? This question is particularly important in a culture that has been shaped by Confucian moral values and Mao’s communist ideology. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2014, I will examine the origins and development of the salsa dance scene in Beijing and Shanghai. I argue that the emergence of salsa dancing in reform-era China responds to the search for new gender role models and identity markers by urban middle-class professionals who wish to express a sense of modernity and cosmopolitanism in amid China’s rapid urbanization and economic reforms.

Tango first entered Japan in 1914 through the transoceanic North American and European social dance networks, quickly establishing a Japan-Argentina connection via tango from the late 1920s through Japanese musicians’ embrace of Argentine tango repertoires. Since then, Japanese musicians, dancers, aficionados, and the wider public have approached and digested tango as a new vehicle of expression, entertainment, and academic pursuit. Through tango, many Japanese tango musicians and music aficionados have also sought to rebel against Japan’s national ethos, which significantly preferred Euro-American cultures in the Japanese embrace of modernity at various points of the twentieth century. Today, Argentine tango is widely performed in classical concert venues, tango Milonga parties, and in bars and restaurants dedicated to offering tango music played by Japanese tango bands every night.

By focusing on tango in Japan, this paper considers this Japan-Argentina nexus as one way of mobilizing geopolitical modifiers such as “East Asia” and “Latin America”. While mutual musical imaginings between “East Asia” and “Latin America” go back to the emergence of the idea of world regions as “cultural areas” since the early twentieth century, the study into East Asia-Latin America cultural connections in recent years are increasingly moving away from the “area” approaches while recognizing the continuities and differences within the marginal “Global Easts” (Kim 2017; Lim 2022). By building on these recent studies, this presentation engages with the Japan-Argentina musical connections to reconsider transcultural desires and the tensions of cosmopolitan endeavors away from the gaze of the Euro-American West.

The links between the Eastern Mediterranean and Latin America are myriad, complex and rich, yet tragically understudied and under theorised. There is increasing academic interest in the migration between the Levant and the Americas but the cultural aspects of this century-and-a-half of transatlantic entanglement has rarely been a subject of enquiry. In this paper, drawing on my own positionality as a tango dancer, DJ and teacher and, as a literary historian of the Middle East, I offer some preliminary thoughts on how such a field of study might be developed. In order to focus my discussion, this paper studies the example of the earliest professional works of the great Lebanese singer Fairouz. These were a series of tangos performed in 1951 (and later recorded) with Eduardo Bianco’s Orquesta Argentina on the Lebanese Radio Station, which gave rise to several more hybrid works created by Fairouz and the famous Rahbani Brothers, founders of the Baalbek cultural festival. Drawing on considerations of the internal self-orientalisation of the Argentine tango imaginary, and on Fairouz’s performance of words to a poem by Khalil Gibran as lyrics to a famous tango melody, I explore some of the implications of this blend of tango and Arabic cultures for future thought about the encounter and entanglement between these two cultures, and for notions of south-south solidarity and transnational translations of music and dance.