Sankofa & memoria: Archiving - Finding your history in order to go forward

Course Description

Summary

In this course, we will be uncovering, re-positioning, and affirming historical legacies and traditions that stand the risk of being lost forever, and explore how to use them to fight discrimination, racism and hate today. We will do so using Sankofa, a quest for knowledge through critical examination, patient investigation, and learning from the past and Memoria, a process of knowing the past that helps us to think critically about our history and which were the forces that triggered war, racism, apartheid, civil war, dictatorship or political oppression.

Using these two traditions, one coming from Africa and the other one from Latin America, we will focus on how specific dance practices intersect with systems of race, ethnicity, and national identity. We will see how African Dance and American Black Modern Dance are deeply connected. We will focus further on how dance expresses and intervenes in systems of power and oppression, including nation, race, gender, and class. We will explore how globalization across geographic, political, commercial, and digital domains has shaped the evolution of dance practice, performance, and community.

We will explore what is our cultural, historical and group responsibility,

• in the sense of belonging to a group that was responsible for colonization and oppression
• in the sense of belonging to a group that was colonized and oppressed with the aid of people from the same group

How much of that (colonization/oppression) is still happening?

What can you do personally?

What can you do as a member of a group?