Abstract
Dances and dancers from African cultures and communities are still grappling with the historical forms of colonial and racially-inspired marginalization and objectification. Suffering from legacies of colonialism and slave trade, African dance practices are still treated as low art and exotic fetishes in some circles of the Western scholarly establishment. In the realm of global education, research and practice these dance practices are treated as peripheral subjects that are subservient to Euro-American artistic traditions. Inside the African continent, indigenous dances are not accorded value within the academic contexts where Euro-American educational cannons are held as the basic standards. One of the sites through which marginalization of dances and dancers from African cultures has been projected is the concept ‘African dance’. In this paper, I draw on extensive reading on available literary sources to problematize this concept. I unearth the historical developments that informed its coinage and theorization. The study further highlights the implications of this concept on the dignity, ontologies, and epistemologies of the dances and dancers from African cultures. The paper reveals the tensions that exist as a result of the misidentification of dances through theoretical homogenizations, which is perpetrated by teachers, institutions, media and practitioners in the global north. This paper adds to the existing discourses, which seek to liberate dances and dancers from African cultures and position them as valid and valuable knowledge in their own right.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus - Voices from the Edge: Negotiating the Local in the Global
KEYWORDS
AFRICAN DANCE, COMMUNITIES, HOMOGENIZATION, CULTURES, HISTORY, INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
