How to Release Your Inner Native

         

After an exhausting day at work, nothing could be more refreshing than a dose of energetic folk-dancing, courtesy of Youtube. The two clips shown here come from very distant traditions. Bhangra is traditional Punjabi dancing, while Stavros Flatley & son are fusing Irish and Greek dance forms. But what they have in common is the humour, energy and sheer comic intensity of the performance.

What also connects these links is that the dancers are in each case subverting a very proper and restrained British set of bodily dispositions. Living, as I do, in a in a postcolony, I really appreciate how the Bhangra dancers start off by reproducing a typically British upper-class colonial conversation on the verandah about some exotic ritual one of them claimed to have observed; only to gleefully let rip by erupting into a very energetic folk-dance after a minute or two. In this way they allow their "inner native" to break through the facade of colonial civility and celebrate their freedom from the dominance of British manners and the imperial power plays they allow. 

I notice very similar patterns of behaviour in Malta, where a rough car mechanic dressed in a grimy sweater and jeans would obsequiously address an upper-class male client in English, saying: "do you understand, dear?" while delivering a complicated technical monologue in Maltese, which he knows is quite unintelligible to his client. Having symbolically feminized the client and eliminated the power/status gap between his working class dress and language and the other's neatly tailored suit, he then feels free to over-charge him on the basis that the client clearly belongs to a superior class and thus, while he could afford to pay for a good service, he could not possibly have the time to waste discussing the technical innards of a car. 

The 'Garaxx': Still the true inner sanctum of the Maltese male

Instead of being a simple expression of cultural goodwill, I see this as the skillful appropriation and reversing of imperialist nostalgia by the subaltern, who seeks to subdue and dominate his former master. By comparison, Stavros is an economic migrant in the colonial metropolis. By emphasizing the comic aspect of the dance, he is practically compelling the British audience to laugh at his ability to enact and transcend their stereotypes about hirsute, passionate and tactile Greek men. Yet showing how well he can understand and live up to their stereotypes also indicates that he cannot be confined by them. He thus makes his audience laugh in surprised acknowledgement of their own casual stereotyping and also gains the upper hand in the situation: