So why Do that Dance?

Abstract

This chapter responds to the perceived tensions between Race and Indigeneity. It locates its arguments on unsettling the competing essence of Indigenous and anticolonialism. There are many valid entry points for anti-colonial intellectualism, each dependent on the body and the particular politics, conversant of the saliency of different histories and identities, the situational and contextual variations in intensities of oppressions, and the knowledge that as scholars we each engage/enter discourses from either our privileged or oppressed positions, etc. (see Dei 1996). So a question like “how do we engage the anticolonial from a privileged stance?” is relevant. As scholars, activists, and students, we acknowledge and work with the “historicity of race” as over-determining of life chances for Black bodies. In addition, we must hang on to the possibilities and limits of a “radical inseparability” of race and Indigeneity. Blackness works with a reinvention of Africanness (even in a Diasporic context), a consciousness of the saliency of skin color and what it means to be Black in the global world. This recognizes the question of race as a key/salient factor and a central organizing principle of society. Race cannot be subsumed under any other identity (e.g., class), notwithstanding the intersections of gender, class, sexuality, ability, and other identities. A poetic treatise (discourse) about colonialism must bring a historical materialist approach and interpretation to European colonization (see Cesaire 1972). We must connect colonization and civilization in anticolonial and decolonial conversations. The re-articulation of Blackness is part of a desire to mount a counter intellectual attack (a sort of “why write back”), which responds to the deliberate anti-Blackness and de-compartmentalization of Black lives and African histories, such as the excising of Egypt from Africa, and devaluations of Indigenous African inventions and Black peoples’ contributions to science, mathematics, and global knowledge as a whole. The correlation between Indigenous communities and Indigenous subjects, particularly the falseness of separating race and Indigeneity.