This Is Not a Book About African Dance

Abstract

This chapter outlines the methodological trajectory for the book and considers contemporary African dance theatre aesthetics in the context of material phenomenology, whiteness and the gaze. With a focus on white spectatorship, the book presents an experiment in phenomenological un-suturing of white fragility to interrogate the possibilities of dance to deconstruct and problematize the all too often unacknowledged violence of the white gaze and its systemic racism at work programming African contemporary dance theatre on the Western festival stage.