Suffering Bodies, Dance and Transcendence in Caribbean Literature, Jacqueline Couti (University of Kentucky)

In Gisèle Pineau's Macadam Dreams, through the shifting metaphors of the drum and the cyclone, which signify not only sexual crime but also purification and healing, the instable identity of Creole subjectivity emerges. Many characters are in pain. Yet, in the mighty drumbeat of the tambour-ka lurks a power that can make an old and broken woman dance as if her life depended on it. This presentation examines the motif of the dancing body and explores dance as a contemporary site of resistance and healing in traditional and contemporary genres such gwo-ka. Such an approach intends to constitute an archeology of representations of dance and dancers as the expression of creolization and awareness of self in in French and Francophone Caribbean Studies.





Liminality of the Dancing Suffering Body, Gladys M. Francis (Georgia State University)

Liminality of the Dancing Suffering Body is an analysis of painful lived experiences expressed through Caribbean traditional dance performances that present cultural, political and memorial strategies, in addition to interpersonal relations. This presentation focuses on the works of contemporary Black Diasporic filmmakers who challenge traditional gendered spaces and politics while contextualizing the body's states of loss, its displacements, methods of transmission and resistance through innovative representations of the dancing body in pain. "Liminality of the Dancing Suffering Body" introduces the gwo-ka and bigidi dance aesthetic, both explored as a counter-point of history and a Maroon space of (modern) history. It is through the dancing body that I will expose transgressional identities shaping cartographies of pain that distort the perceptions of cultural formations, Creolization and globalization, and problematize notions of self-dependence, self-organization, choice, autonomy, and agency through class, gender, race, and locality.

Thanks to the movie Milk, we all associate Anita Bryant's late-1970s antigay work in Dade County, Florida, with the concomitant campaigns in California. But Middle America has lots to teach us about Bryant and the bourgeoning conservatism she symbolized. At a time in which Christian businesses and Cold War apocalypticism were sweeping through Bryant's home state of Oklahoma, she emerged as a moral entrepreneur who embodied the wholesomeness of white femininity that connoted the American heartland and exemplified the national ideal of womanhood. It was this unspoken norm of whiteness that undergirded fighting for "our" children. It was this projected purity that a newly nationalized gay activism sought to sully, most famously with a banana cream pie thrown in Bryant's face. Theories of the abject, histories of colonialist agribusiness, and homespun humor merge in this heretofore-untold story of Bryant's rise and fall in Middle America.

Laura Dudley Jenkins is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati.  Her research and publications focus on social justice policies in the context of culturally diverse democracies, especially India. She was a Fulbright New Century Scholar in South Africa and India and co-edited with Michele S. Moses the forthcoming book Affirmative Action Matters: Creating Opportunities for Students Around the World (Routledge 2014). 

In her articles, she analyzes religious freedom and conversion, competing minorities’ claims for affirmative action, colonial and contemporary government anthropology, the role of social science in anti-discrimination law, and reserved legislative seats for women. Her book chapters include her research on religious family law systems, mass religious conversion as a route to social mobility, and comparative affirmative action. In addition to two Fulbrights, she has received fellowships from the Dartmouth Humanities Center and the United States Institute of Peace. For more information see www.Lauradudleyjenkins.com

"Las Voces de los Apalaches" will be an evening to help celebrate the "Year of Mexico!"  First will be a dramatic presentation in Worsham Theater, beginning at 7 p.m.  To follow the dramatic presentation is the band Apalatin.

Dr. Parson is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at SMU. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist,  interested broadly in the relationships of gender, violence, the state, and health, in global perspective. Her interests also include migration, social determinants of health, globalization, and narrative analysis.

La Dr. Parson es profesora de Antropología en SMU. Sus estudios y áreas de interés incluye una perspectiva global en relación a la violecia, el estado y la salud de sociedades. También tiene un interés en lo que abarca la migración y determinantes sociales de globalización y salud.

African American & Africana Studies Social Science Speaker Series. 

Tracy Fisher is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. Her teaching, research, and activist-scholar commitments are situated at the intersections of Women’s, Gender and Feminist studies, critical Race and Ethnic studies, African Diaspora studies, and critical Anthropology. She has published several articles in edited volumes and in journals such as, Small Axe, Social Justice, and Critical Sociology. She has also received fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. Professor Fisher is the co-editor of Gendered Citizenships, Transnational Perspectives on Knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). Her book, What’s Left of Blackness: Feminisms, Transracial Solidarities, and the Politics of Belonging in Britain, was published in the Comparative Feminist Studies Series by Palgrave Macmillan Publishers in 2012. 

Fisher explores 1970s Britain by specifically drawing attention to the ways in which black women in Britain understood their experiences, identities, and social activism in relation to other black women throughout the African diaspora and to other women of color within and outside of Britain. By extension, black women created new solidarities and engaged in an active political struggle—one grounded in the material reality of entrenched forms of discrimination and exclusion.

Co-sponsored by AAAS and Anthropology