“I Bet You Won’t Get Crunk” PEDAGOGICAL POTENTIALS AND LIMITATIONS OF WEST AFRICANIST DANCE TRADITIONS IN DIASPORIC CONTEXTS

Abstract

In the face of widening distance between the material and imagined freedom of black bodies, this thesis considers the relationship between West African dance traditions and the sociocultural change they might engender. Here, “West African dance” is a set of words attempting to describe an extremely diverse and overlapping set of movement traditions which cannot be neatly encapsulated. Tracing a particular thread of this tradition from dance-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, to cultural artist Terrie Ajile Axam, to African Dance Professor Kikora Franklin, and finally to myself, I advance the argument that black dance traditions hold immense practical and theoretical weight for reimagining world.