2026 began with a crisis of xenophobia. Consistent news reports revealed masked ICE agents abducting immigrants, separating families, malnourishing detainees, and killing protestors. Protestors, activists, and intellectuals hit the streets in the frigid Midwest cold. Yet, a surprising site of resistance would appear: the Super Bowl halftime show held in the Bay Area. This year’s performer was Bad Bunny, who, if you could not tell from his stage name, is from Puerto Rico. Anticipation of a confrontational performance intensified after he made the polemical statement "ICE OUT" after winning his Grammy award a week prior. How would a globally beloved artist from a colonial island of the United States respond to anti-immigrant actions of the US government?  

The show opens with young man standing before tall sugar canes while holding a guitar and donning a pava, a straw hat worn by field workers called jibaros. With a smile he says, “Que rico es el latino. Hoy se ve!” Today you see how sweet, how lovely, how good it is to be Latino. For the next thirteen minutes, we see images of sugar fields and jibaros shift to scenes of dancing, eating, family bonding, playing, laughing, and living in community. This public performance of dance and music was not merely entertainment; it was an invitation to celebrate people enjoying activities of everyday life. Facing a crisis of state-sanctioned xenophobia, this celebration became critique; this invitation to celebrate became resistance. 

During my time at the Stanford Humanities Center, I have been writing about portrayals of dance as an intellectual act in early 20^th century Black writing. A poem that pulls me is “The Negro Dancers” by Jamaican writer Claude McKay. “The Negro Dancers” was first published in July of 1919 for The Liberator, a socialist newspaper.[1] Comprised of three stanzas, the poem portrays an intellectual’s observations of couples dancing in a dimly lit basement to the sound of fiddle, drums, and clarinet. The scene is not a public arena with countless people watching, but a hideaway location (perhaps Harlem, perhaps Brooklyn, perhaps Chicago, perhaps D.C.) that offers respite from spectatorship and surveillance. 

In the first stanza, the intellectual sees the dancers as “vacant-eyed” and “laughing puppets” who dance to forget “their world of shadows” (13-15). In the second stanza, the intellectual decides to behold the dancers with empathy and attentiveness.

Tis best to sit and gaze; my heart then dances
To the lithe bodies gliding slowly by
The amorous and inimitable glances
That subtly pass from roguish eye to eye. (16-19)

Here, our seated intellectual sees subtle shifts in the dancers’ eyes that are no longer “vacant” but “roguish.” A rapturous recognition occurs: “For them the dance is the true joy of life” (28). By the start of the third stanza, the seated intellectual realizes how profound and political this expression of joy is in this dimly lit basement.   

And yet they are the outcasts of the earth,
A race oppressed and scorned by ruling man;
How can they thus consent to joy and mirth
Who live beneath a world-eternal ban? (29-32)

Outcasts of the earth. African Americans returned from fighting abroad as soldiers defending the United States in WWI only to find themselves needing to fight against the very citizens and government they had fought for.[2]

A race oppressed. The summer of 1919, the year “The Negro Dancers” was published, was called “The Red Summer” on account of the fatal violence against African Americans that exploded across twenty-six cities. Lynchings increased; mobs attacked African Americans in city streets; race riots lasting for days destroyed homes and displaced families.[3]

A race scorned by ruling man. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson (the top ruling man of the government) screened D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation on the White House lawn. The film visually cast free African Americans as politically corrupt, civically dangerous, and sexually violent. Imagine a president using the most cutting-edge media technology of the day to propagate dehumanizing visual images against Black people and people of color to justify violence, exclusion, and animosity against them.

How can they thus consent to joy and mirth? The intellectual even concedes that no faith is theirs and no shining ray of hope except that death will liberate them from this oppressed condition. And while a very real resignation appears to reign at the absence of an answer to this question, this intellectual continues to analyze the dancers’ eyes and sees that their eyes no longer carry vacancy nor roguishness but poetry. Listen to this epiphany:

But, oh! they dance with poetry in their eyes (37)

As the poetry in their eyes evokes, their dance is not empty-minded merriment, but emancipatory movement. In the crisis of “The Red Summer,” this intellectual has no definitive answer as to how these dancers consent to joy and mirth—in a way, their right to opacity remains honored. Yet, when faced with the limits of comprehension, this intellectual celebrates the dancers’ intellectual acts to consenting to joy and mirth in the face of a perpetual crisis. In a time of crisis, to create consent for joy and mirth is intellectual work. To celebrate is intellectual work. And intellectuals are called to the task of inviting others to celebrate whenever we witness these creative acts of consent to rejoice in a crisis. 

Every day, even now, in various places, people continue to create consent for joy and mirth even dealing with the crisis of being outcast, oppressed, and scorned. We may not comprehend how consent for joy and mirth happens, but it remains worthy intellectual work to celebrate it when it does. And it matters for intellectuals to heed the call for celebration when it resounds. I’ll close with a poem by Lucille Clifton that invites this celebration.[4]

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Notes

[1] https://www.harlemshadows.org/supp_mckay_the-negro-dancers.html

[2] https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/21-world-war-i/w-e-b-dubois-returning-soldiers-may-1919/

[3] https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/about-wwi/red-summer; https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/wwi/red-summer

[4] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50974/wont-you-celebrate-with-me