Lester Tome, Smith College and Five College Dance Departments.
Interracial Cheero-erotics of the Cuban Revolution: Ballet, Social Taboo and the Postracial Hyperreality.
Lester Tomé is an associate professor in the dance department and an affiliate of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies Program at Smith. He is also a faculty member in the Five College Dance Department. He teaches dance history and ethnography, cultural studies and research methods. His recent courses include European and U.S. Concert Dance Since 1900, Dance and Culture, Critical Studies in Latin American Dance, Salsa in Theory and Practice and, at the graduate level, Philosophies of Contemporary Dance and Literature of Dance: Theory and Cultural Studies.
In 2013–14, he was the Peggy Rockefeller Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. During 2014–15 he was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and affiliate researcher at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute, at Harvard. These awards supported his research for The Body Politic: Ballet and Revolution in Cuba (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). The book illuminates developments in Cuban ballet as a result of the Cuban Revolution’s ideology and cultural policy. It examines questions of political agency, class, labor, nationalism, race, gender, and sexuality. It also elucidates the links between ballet performance and other performances of the Revolution’s ideology—e.g. the performance of militarism in parades, of labor in sugarcane fields, of machismo in everyday life, of interracial romance in the public sphere.