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Walking with the Self: Zab Maboungou's Interventions Against Eurocentrism Through Contemporary African Dance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 August 2017

Melissa Templeton
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Abstract

This article examines how choreographer Zab Maboungou uses philosophical themes about the “self” positioned in time and space to reappropriate subjecthood through a contemporary African dance vocabulary. I suggest that in deploying such methods—which I describe as an “embodied Africanist metaphysics”— Maboungou challenges the rhetoric of the European Enlightenment that continues to influence constructions of race today. Maboungou's choreography and pedagogy effectively undermine implicit assumptions that align whiteness and European aesthetics with universal subject-hood and creates a productive space for the presentation and development of contemporary African dance in Montreal (and North America more generally).

Keywords

contemporary African danceCanadian danceembodimentmetaphysicsrace
Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , August 2017 , pp. 44 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2017 

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