Beautiful (Poetry Performance)

• In Event: Performance and culture keeping

Description for Program

This proposal is a poetry performance titled “Beautiful.” It is a first-person ode to the subject's beauty, representing Black bodies, with counter-narratives of the features that would be considered flaws based on Eurocentric beauty standards. While academic conferences are often saturated by empirical and critical analysis in the Eurocentric scholarly tradition, performances context the hegemony of Western ways of knowing, replicating the Afrocentric ways of communicating and knowing cadence, movements, rhythm, and tones.
The poem and performance invite the audience to reconsider conceptions of beauty, to interrogate which bodies have been ignored, dismissed, or devalued as not beautiful, to the features typically considered undesirable or unattractive based on Western patriarchal beauty standards. Aligning with the subfield of “Streams of music: converging musical genres,” this performance fuses music with poetry with an alternative soul musical introduction and conclusion.
Name: Faith Ebiere Eguolo Odele
Institution: Texas A&M University

Author

• Faith Odele, Texas A&M University