Embodying Dissent: Transgressive Genealogies of Afro-Diasporan Dance

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Talk Format

Abstract

Within the African Diaspora, histories of anti-black racism have provoked creative responses from people of African descent to ensure their physical, psychic, and cultural survival. This panel considers ways in which teachers, performers, and carnival revelers choreograph, embody, practice, and transmit dissent from such historical legacies through the use of Afro-Diasporan dance. It highlights four physical locations—New Orleans, New York, Trinidad, and Haiti—whilst mapping the affective, historical, cultural, and political forces that both connect and distinguish these praxes and ideologies of dissent. In effect, these papers analyze how these dance forms are both embodied and transmitted, creating a repertoire of dissent that is then taken up by future generations.

Rachel Carrico’s “Do-Watcha-Wanna: Pedagogies of Dissent in the New Orleans Second Line” looks at the language of the “natural” to argue that when African American New Orleanians insist upon their natural dance abilities—even while learning, rehearsing, and teaching others the form—is an act of “opacity” (to borrow from Édouard Glissant) that resists colonialist knowledge production. Joanna Dee Das’ “The Katherine Dunham School of Dance in New York: A Radical Pedagogy of Dissent,” examines how choreographer and educator Katherine Dunham challenged pedagogical norms of the dance studio in mid-twentieth century New York by making both the philosophy and physical practice of African diasporic dance forms the center, rather than periphery, of dance education. Adanna Jones’ “Practicing Jametteness: The Transmission of ‘Bad Behavior’ as a Strategy of Survival” looks at winin’ in both public (Carnival processions) and private (the home and studio classes) spaces in order to analyze the transmission and performance of “getting on bad” at Trinidadian-style Carnivals. In so doing, she works to recuperate the radical traditions of dissent established by the nineteenth-century jamette figure. Lastly, Mario LaMothe’s “The Vodou Doll and AIDS in America: An Exploration of Assotto Saint’s Bitchiness,” explores how LaMothe himself can keep alive choreographer Assotto Saint’s repertoire of dissent. Through his performative talk, LaMothe channels Saint’s use of effeminacy and bitchiness to challenge destructive paradigms of masculinity and contest negative images of Haitian Vodou. Taken together, these papers trace a vibrant geography of the African Diaspora in which people use their dancing bodies to dissent from anti-black racism and/or sexual oppression. The panel highlights examples of diasporic knowledges regarding survival, self-determination, history, and power, whilst critically considering dance as a radical tactic by which such embodied knowledges are imparted, circulated, remembered, and even withheld.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Raquel L. Monroe, Columbia College Chicago

Individual Presentations

• Do-Watcha-Wanna: Pedagogies of Dissent in the New Orleans Second Line - Rachel Carrico, Colorado College

• The Katherine Dunham School of Dance in New York: A Radical Pedagogy of Dissent - Joanna D Das, Washington University In St Louis

• Practicing Jametteness: The Transmission of “Bad Behavior” as a Strategy of Survival - Adanna K Jones, University of California, Riverside

• The Vodou Doll and AIDS in America: An Exploration of Assotto Saint’s Bitchiness - Mario J. LaMothe, University of Illinois at Chicago