‘Sicily Implies Asia and Africa’

The passage or translatio between bodies of knowledge and geographic terrains prompted the transformation of the choreomania concept from mildly quaint to dangerously exotic, in a context of rising anti-colonial revolt. This chapter introduces part II of the book, which emphasizes the transformation of ‘choreomania’ on colonial shores. Considering the rise in comparative literature and medical geography, as well as performative reconstructions of ancient Greek attitudes, this chapter shows how travellers, translators, and anthropologists contributed to expanding the archival repertoire of choreomanias with cases and marginalia emphasizing the exotic South and East. Tarantellas, in particular, imagined as gateways to Greece and Africa via Sicily, appeared to reach back not only to medieval and ancient Europe but also across to present-day Abyssinia. The tigretier, an African ‘variant’, and further apparent variants in Nigeria, made of the ‘dancing disease’ a feminine and soon, too, a typically colonial figure of duplicity and deceit.