Description: Shows how African dance serves not only as performance but as a potent instrument for cultural resilience, social coherence, and economic empowerment, contributing substantially to the broader objectives of decolonization and the promotion of African excellence.
Brief description: Eric Awuah is a Ghanaian researcher, performer, choreographer, and consultant, and is a PhD (ABD) Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the University of Alberta, Canada. With a background in Dance and Theatre studies from the University of Ghana and an M.A in Dance Heritage from Erasmus-Mundus Choreomundus, his expertise spans Dance Anthropology, Intangible Cultural Heritage, and performance of heritage.
Review Quotes:
"Grounded in ongoing community learning and embodied experience combined with thoughtful intellectual framing, this book brings to the fore a unique Pan-African personality and cultural revitalisation movement in dance scholarship. Through historical and ideological discourse, the book reimagines dance from the African continent as an intellectual, spiritual and political praxis linked to multi-cultural heritage and cultural sovereinity. Awuah highlights reflective transformation anchored in community-based artistic-doing, learning and unlearning, and diasporic cultural formation-a wholistic creative awakening that revitalises decolonial discourse by challenging pre-concieved norms that quietly inhabit societal inequalities." --Ronald Kibirige, Associate Professor of Arts Education, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
"Revitalizing Decolonization Through Dance Scholarship: Dancing the African Personality offers a bold and timely intervention into dance studies, African studies, and decolonial scholarship by centering embodied Pan-African voices and performance traditions. The book compellingly positions dance as both an intellectual and cultural practice through which identity, memory, knowledge, and the African Personality are embodied, theorized, and continually renewed." --Emmanuel Cudjoe, Assistant Professor of Dance, Ball State University, USA