Teaching African Dances in the Caribbean: Horizontal Interpenetration and Afrocentricity in Jamaica

Abstract

This article examines how pedagogy of African dances can act as a site where issues of Afrocentricity and horizontal interconnection can be activated, negotiated, and embodied. I draw on the selected reflections of the participants in dance workshops and my experiences as a teacher of Ugandan dances in Jamaica to demonstrate how pedagogy allowed the learners to embody, deconstruct, and conceptualize kinaesthetic, storied, and musicalized dance material as valued and valid knowledge that is anchored in the worldviews, dignities, and ontologies of indigenous Ugandan communities from where the dances originate. The article frames pedagogy of the dances as an epistemological and ontological framework through which the learners sought to know, think, do, question, connect, and become. For people of African descent, partaking in teaching and learning processes of the dances created possibilities for cultural connections through experiential, imaginative, participatory, and reflective dance activities. The analysis further reveals how teaching dances from African cultures, a subject that is treated as insignificant within academic and artistic thought, positioned me to en/counter, rationalize, and address the challenges, dilemmas, and anxieties surrounding Black dance scholarship. It is hoped that this article can expand discourses on how African dances can be engaged as valued and valid epistemological and ontological domains in scholarship and practice to pluralize creative and cultural thought and empower communities and liberate their bodies of knowledge that have been dispossessed by Western hegemonic epistemological canons.