“Racing” in “Place”: Dance Studies and the Academy

In this lecture, Dr. Brenda Dixon Gottschild draws on her experience as an artist, scholar of dance, and anti-racist cultural worker to attempt a theoretical and practical intervention into dance studies. Analyzing texts written by Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates Jr., she meditates on disciplinarity and critiques current discourses of post-disciplinarity. She concludes by reflecting on the harmful division between the practice of dance and dance studies, and on the discrimination that Black performance scholars experience in the academy. She also describes the organization she has founded, the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving.