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Title Following FESTAC '77 - A Dance Critical Event
Full text https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3d83631r
Date 2024
Author(s) Eloi, Colette
Contributor(s) Johnson, Imani K; Kedhar, Anusha
Abstract This dissertation examines dance at FESTAC '77 - The Second World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture. This dissertation is a historiography of FESTAC '77, a significant festival that has been shrouded. Using theoretical frameworks on the body from Critical Dance Studies and on precolonial African dance from anthropological research, the dissertation forwards the conception of the body, a body of culture filled with divine sovereignty. FESTAC '77 enabled the sovereign body. From the '60s through the '70s, long after the experiences of chattel slavery and colonialism, Black and African people were still confronted with stereotypes, and, in Africa, many countries had just gained independence and sought acceptance in the international sphere. FESTAC '77 served as a critical way for Black and African people to peacefully convene and address ideological anti-Blackness. FESTAC '77 created a space that would enable the sovereign body, an agentive body at the center of its own reality. This dissertation also considers the way the festival was a dance-critical event in which dance was used as a vehicle of diplomacy, and an archive of identity, and Indigenous African epistemologies. African-rooted dances placed identity in situ during the oppressive eras, and FESTAC harnessed them. My methodology was multi-pronged and involved oral history interviews from US dance delegates who attended FESTAC '77, video archives of FESTAC '77 dance performances, anthropological archival scholarship of precolonial cosmologies of African diaspora dance, and information from African-rooted dance and drum specialists. As an embodied researcher, having been an African and African Diaspora dancer for over 25 years, I enter this inter- and multi-disciplinary work from an emic understanding and with personal immersion in several African and Diaspora cultures that are discussed in this dissertation. This dissertation also celebrates the US dance delegates who attended the festival, as they have become progenitors of African-rooted dance as we know it today in the US. The topics discussed are relevant not only to Dance Studies but also to many Humanities sub-fields like Black Studies, African Diaspora Studies, Gender Studies, and a wide variety of international audiences.
Subject(s) Dance; African studies; International relations; African Diaspora; Africanity; dance-critical; Festival; Pan-African; precolonial
Language en
Publisher eScholarship, University of California
Type of publication etd
Rights CC-BY-NC-ND
Identifier qt3d83631r
Repository Berkeley - University of California
Added to C-A: 2024-05-06;09:31:06