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Fitting (Out-Fitting) In
March 29, 2022 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am
As part of our #BlackAfterFeberuary series CCIES invites you to:
“Fitting (Out-Fitting) In”
Abstract
How does one go about de-colonizing a mind, starting with one’s own? This is a question the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o himself wrestled with. Part of his solution was to go back to writing in his own indigenous tongue, where I believe he felt more embodied in the rhythm, syntax, metre, colour, and tone of the language. But where is wa Thiong’o now? At a US University in California. Perhaps the way for us who have been deprived of our indigenous languages to resist the dominant forms of discourse that continue to foster popular contemporary and historic biases must take place in the spaces between the verbal and the non-verbal. And if so, the arts must play a key role in these initiatives. How, then, do we get the relevant bodies to help de-colonize the physical spaces of the institutions we are hired to teach in, and how can we permeate the strategic “barriers” that have been erected to protect disciplinary domains? And how can we react to the rhetoric of a dominant discourse that continues to shape the minds and bodies of those we are charged to educate?
About the Speaker:
Henry Daniel, PhD is a Distinguished SFU Professor, Professor of Dance, Performance Studies and New Media Technologies, scholar, performer, choreographer, and Artistic Director of Full Performing Bodies, Daniel’s research concentrates on strengthening notions of Practice-as-Research (PaR) and Research/Creation in Canada. He leads a group of artists and scholars who help define new parameters for excellence in these areas. He has a professional background in dance, theatre, and new media with a career that started in his native Trinidad & Tobago and continued in the USA, Germany, the UK, and Canada. His current research project “Contemporary Nomads” takes it inspiration from what cultural theorist Stuart Hall called “the prototype of the modern or postmodern New World nomad, continually moving between centre and periphery” (Hall in Rutherford, J. 234:1990).