Dance at Swarthmore College – Virtual – Moving for Justice: What is this “African” in “African Dance”

Speaker: Jasmine Johnson

This talk explores the historical and embodied politics of “West African dance.” Often treated (from a Global North perspective) as a discreet movement genre, this talk enters this presumed category as an unstable movement, aesthetic, and historical one. Anchored by ethnographic fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City and Conakry, Guinea, I consider the ways in which “African dance” sits at the intersection of dance, commerce, consumption and tourism.

Jasmine Johnson is a scholar and dance practitioner based in Philadelphia. Her work explores the politics of Black movement including dance, diasporic travel, and gentrification.