The global popularity of the award-winning song-dance “Naatu Naatu” from the South Indian film RRR (2022) lies in its vibrant spectacle that intertwines cultural history, political themes, and gender expressions within the framework of Indian musicals. Using textual analysis, this paper investigates how the semiotic and performative aspects of “Naatu Naatu” created a new cultural appeal in the West by representing the postcolonial and nationalist Indian subject in an ultra-modern post-globalized environment. It reveals how the dance sequence’s entertainment value can overshadow its deeper cultural significance, illustrating the tension between global appeal and cultural authenticity.

This article renders a history of Haitian folkloric dance that accounts for its “ghostly matters,” meaning the haunted legacies still hovering around transmissions and performances of folkloric dance. Focusing on the dance’s mid-twentieth century formation, this analysis weaves together scholarship with the author’s own archival, ethnographic, and oral historical research. The construction and codification of “Haitian folkloric dance” emerges through the labor and knowledge of Haitian actors—Lina Mathon Blanchet, Jean-Léon Destiné, Emerante de Pradines, Louinès Louinis, Pierre Desrameaux, Viviane Gauthier—combined with the influence of Katherine Dunham, Lavinia Williams, anti-Vodou and colonial Eurocentric ideologies, Western aesthetics, social scientific study, tourism, urbanization, and transnational migration.

Colonialism resulted in millions of Africans being forcibly transported from the coasts of Africa to the Caribbean. A legacy of this trans-Atlantic slave trade has been an indissoluble connection between Africa, the ancestral motherland, and her diaspora offspring. This article explores the author’s pedagogical experiences of re-crossing the Atlantic Ocean and teaching the Caribbean Bélé to second year students at the University of Cape Town. What happens when Caribbean dances return to Africa? In this paper I argue that Caribbean dances in higher education dance curriculum in South Africa carry a decolonial potential to evoke joy, wholeness, and healing.

This paper examines Trinidadian and Caribbean dance pedagogy adapted to classes in The United States. My pedagogical methodology utilizes “Rhythmokinetic Accenting,” a concept by Thomas Talawa Prestø, that links language prosody to movement in Africana dance. I use the concept of “Accenting Dance” to emphasize cultural fluency and fluidity, while bridging cultural gaps, and offering a respectful and technically rigorous model to engage multiple dance vocabularies. Key themes include narrative-based teaching, experiential learning, and student-centered practices while addressing cultural appropriation. My examples illustrate how this method encourages critical inquiry, fostering culturally responsive dancers and educators in a global context.

Scholars have written extensively about Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s creative use of the “scribal/oral continuum” and his “Sycorax video style,” which ground his poetics of “nation language” through oral and visual media. This paper gives an account of how Brathwaite’s poetics of choreography and movement—his kinetics—were inspired by Rex Nettleford’s performance of Kumina at Carifesta 1972 and by Marina Maxwell’s Yard Theatre. The “scribal/kinetic continuum” in his work bridges the act of writing and the performative arts by approximating a state of possession in Afro-Caribbean religions. In his writing, Brathwaite experimented with the possibilities of print media not just to approximate “nation language” and orality, but also to (re)stage dance and performances.