A talk by María Regina Firmino-Castillo (University of California Riverside, USA)
Part of the Centre for Comparative Literature’s ‘Body-thoughts’: The CCL Postcolonial Dance Series, 2025.
Critically revisiting my 2016 article “Dancing the Pluriverse: Indigenous Performance as Ontological Praxis,” I engage with the article’s afterlives and exercise epistemological responsibility for its unintended consequences. Two interrelated phenomena compel this auto-critique: the incomplete turn toward decoloniality in dance and performance studies, and a postcoloniality that remains deferred through the near-global normalization of colonial violence, extractivism, and genocide as status-quo.
Tracing praxis to its origins in ancient Greece, where it denoted the political activity of an elite citizenry and was distinguished from poiesis—the corpo-material labor of non-citizens and the enslaved—I examine how this praxis/poiesis dichotomy continues to haunt our fields. When praxis is applied to dance as a signifier of worldmaking, yet divorced from the corpo-material (i.e., poietic) processes that underlie ontology, dance risks becoming a mode of ontological extraction and annihilation cloaked in decolonial discourse.
I reflect on the implications of this haunting, drawing from examples in the Americas, and elsewhere, to conclude with a contrasting case.
The talk will be chaired by María Estrada Fuentes (Royal Holloway University of London), and Arabella Stranger (University of Sussex) will be respondent.
Registration fee
Free (booking is necessary to receive a link to attend)
Contact for futher information
[email protected]
