LatinX Dance & Performance

EMR 183 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

We will trace the histories of a variety of dance traditions to gain new understandings about agency, erasure, hegemony, and refusal in the Americas. In particular, our class will focus on understanding the body and the ways it is racialized, gendered, and sexualized as an important
site for the inscription of modernities and colonialities. LatinX Dance & Performance introduces students to the fields of performance and LatinX studies through a trans-Atlantic and hemispheric approach.
 

We survey the following: ceremonies performed by Indigenous peoples and the descendants of enslaved Africans; folkloric traditions that emerge from transculturation, creolization, and racial mixture; diasporic festivals in the U.S. that draw from the Americas, such
as the Guelaguetza; and dances, such as reggaeton, dancehall, and hip-hop, that rehearse diasporic choreographies within urban contexts in U.S. cities as part of vibrant nightlife. Across this survey, we will pay attention to how choreographies at times become part of nationalist
projects as well as at other times serving as mediums for resistance to gendered, queer, and racial exclusion. At all times, the class will discuss how attention to embodiment allows us to uncover epistemologies that otherwise would be ignored if we considered written and archival aesthetic
practices the only valuable sources of knowledge.