In this article I employ modern dance pioneer Martha Graham's memoir Blood Memory (1991) to complicate understandings of autobiography. Following a deconstructive perspective (Buse and Stott 1999; Derrida 1994) and taking up feminist critiques of both autobiography (Benstock 1988; Chanfrault-Duchet 2000) and the effects of embodiment (Phelan 1997; Albright 1997), I theorize autobiography as a haunting interstice between writing and the body. I suggest that while the written account is an important means to chart a life, there are forms of autobiography that remain unrepresentable in the frame of writing. This impossibility is most poignant in Blood Memory as Graham struggles to represent the autobiographical significance of the embodied performance yet is haunted by the inability to fully articulate in writing its significance for her. I argue that in encountering the written autobiography we should not disavow this haunting but rather acknowledge its importance as a means of encountering that life.

To trouble tacit assumptions about written autobiography, I ask, How might written autobiography be understood as haunted? And how might dance serve to illustrate its haunted state? Lastly, what are the possible effects of understanding written autobiography as haunted? To address these questions I first consider the unsettled encounter with Graham's Blood Memory. I theorize the effects of this encounter as stemming from the shadowy but persistent presence of Graham's danced oeuvre as an alternative form of autobiography and argue that this oeuvre could also be considered an autobiographical text. Then placing the “proper” written autobiography in dialogue with the danced autobiography, I posit the haunted status of autobiography itself–as always already troubled by multiple and alternative textual productions of self that can be both bodily and written in form. Finally, I suggest the possible effects of considering autobiography in this way.

In everyday thinking art is very often linked to emotion and, more generally, to a kind of emotional and spontaneous way of relating to the world that contrasts with the rational and controlled intellect that, for example, science is understood to cultivate. Emotion is also commonly linked, via bodily existence, to femininity and the private sphere—the home (see, for example, Heinämaa and Reuter 1994; Sihvola 1999. These conceptualizations reveal a tendency toward typically Western dichotomies between art and science, emotion and reason, body and mind, private and public, and woman and man (see also Domagalski 1999; Sandelans and Boudens 2000).

Furthermore, working life and emotion have long been seen as separate; only emotion-free employees and institutions have been perceived as being efficient because emotional control, self-restraint, and rationality bolster stability and predictability in working life. Thus, emotions belong somewhere else. In fact, Lloyd Sandelans and Connie Boudens (2000, 48) note that we have had the habit of building special quarters for the exercise and display of emotion such as concert halls, movie theaters, football fields, and therapist's offices. This does not mean, however, that emotions can be eliminated from working life, as many studies on emotion at work have shown (Ashkanasy, Hartel, and Zerbe 2000; Fineman 2000, 2003; Hochschild 1983).

Every year, for hundreds of thousands of tourists, seeing “real Hawaiian hula” in a hotel or in a packaged lū'au setting is standard fare. Commonplace too is receiving one's introduction to hula through any of the many competitions that take place annually in Hawai'i and, with increasing frequency, throughout the world. Still others find hula marketed for its exercise benefits, peddled as the latest fitness fad in gyms and malls across the country. But is hula the allure of exotic dancers evoking prurient responses from tourists, one moment tantalized by undulating hips only to be teasingly chastised the next to “keep your eyes on the hands”? Is it the crisp, impeccably synchronized movement danced before panels of judges at the several hula competitions that mark the year for many hula hālau? Is hula the movement, the meaning conveyed through the movement, or the full context out of which movement casts itself into an art form that inspires passion and perpetuates a traditional way of living?

For Mary Kawena Pukui, credited with helping to bring the rich traditional context of hula into the present, hula is “a general name for many types of Hawaiian folk dances” (1942/1980, 70). Pukui's laconic description says everything, and nothing. Everything because hula is the unique dance of the Hawaiian people. Everything because despite the homogenizing influence of hula competition, which has brought only a limited range of the vast hula repertoire to the public's attention over the past thirty-five years, hula encompasses many different styles and types of dances. But it says nothing because hula simply cannot be reduced to Hawaiian folk dance. Hula is a moving encyclopedia inscribed into the sinews and postures of dancers' bodies. It carries forward the social and natural history, the religious beliefs, the philosophy, the literature, and the scientific knowledge of the Hawaiian people.

Over the last century perennial surges in the popularity of Latin American couple dance genres such as tango and rumba in the United States have served as lightning rods for debate on issues of morality, performance, and identity. These “crazes” have fueled the collective American imagination, reinforcing a type of Latin American exotica that prevailed throughout the twentieth century and into the next. Consequently, they have also fostered an entirely new style of performance as white Americans borrowed—or perhaps better stated, appropriated—these genres for their own. For instance, the two styles of tango performed by ballroom dancers today, some one hundred years after its introduction to American audiences in theaters and exhibition performances, is sufficiently distant from its Argentine roots to be considered an entirely different dance employing different movements, rhythms, and musical accompaniment.

This article explores this particular brand of cross-cultural borrowing through an ethnographic accounting of a salsa dance formation team in central Illinois. Salsa is the latest of the Latin dance crazes, and since the earl. 1990. the genre has experienced increased attention from mainstream American audiences who have invested significant resources in order to learn to dance salsa. Formation teams are presentational performance ensembles, in this case combining salsa; ballroom; and staged, theatrical dance, and generally draw their enthusiasts from ballroom dance circles.

It's a Tuesday night in Belfast. Christina and Leanne are running their salsa class in Mercury's basement dance room. Afterwards, Christina has arranged to go dancing at the Hairy Hound with her friend Annabel, who is attending Christina and Leanne's class. Leanne will go home and prepare for her school teaching the following day. Christina wants to forget the illnesses and stresses back home for the night and needs no preparation to be at her reception desk the next day. Annabel is in her mid-fifties. She won't go to any classes, or she won't go out, alone. It's not healthy, seemly, or the done thing in her mind. This attitude makes it difficult for Annabel. She's been a widow for nearly thirty years, and now that the children have grown up, her time to herself has to be carefully coordinated with others. She loves to dance but she is fearful that she might appear single, desperate, alone, and looking for a mate beyond the three-minute dance partner. She sits in the Hairy Hound with Christina, who is more youthful, in her thirties, dressed to attract attention, but in a married way. For Annabel, the salsa nights are a night out rather than a night in alone. They are a chance to move to the music she loves and to gossip and socialize and catch up with her female friends. For Christina, the salsa night is an opportunity to dance after the salsa job and a chance to show off how attractive she still is before going home to the husband she so dearly loves.