Black women performers have made, and continue to make, contributions to the U.S.-avant-garde performance canon and Black performance traditions that go largely unaccounted for in academic studies. Research has shown that across temporalities, Black women performers have mobilized experimental avant-garde aesthetics to disrupt and refuse essentialized notions of Blackness in...
This dissertation elucidates the contemporary dance studio and stage in twenty-first century Senegal as privileged sites of knowledge production about gender and sexuality. Entangled within local and global dance lineages, funding structures, and modes of circulation, contemporary choreographers perform their bodies in ways that challenge predominant narratives, both those imagined...