Event overview
A talk by Jeleel Ojuade (Ojaja University, Nigeria), part of the Centre for Comparative Literature’s ‘Body-thoughts’: The CCL Postcolonial Dance Series, 2025.
This paper explores the evolution and significance of dance as a critical postcolonial tool in Africa, highlighting its role in reclaiming cultural identity, resisting colonial narratives and promoting national consciousness. Postcolonial dance in Africa is not merely an artistic expression; it is a powerful site of memory, resistance and sociopolitical commentary. Drawing from both traditional and contemporary practices, African choreographers have reimagined movement vocabularies to interrogate histories of subjugation, celebrate indigenous heritage and respond to modern realities.
African dance, once suppressed or misrepresented during colonial regimes, has been revitalised in the post-independence era as a means of self-definition. Through case studies from regions such as Nigeria and few other west African countries, Southern Africa, and the Horn of Africa, the paper highlights how choreographers, dance scholars and performers use the body as an archive of ancestral wisdom and a voice of political agency. We'll also engage with the theoretical frameworks of postcolonialism, embodiment and cultural hybridity to situate dance within broader discourses on decolonisation and identity reconstruction.
In reclaiming dance as a living, dynamic form of cultural communication, African societies continue to challenge the lingering effects of colonialism while embracing innovation and transnational dialogue. Postcolonial dance is ultimately positioned as a vital part of Africa’s intellectual, artistic and political resistance, an embodied language through which histories are contested, futures are envisioned and identities are constantly negotiated.
Sola Adeyemi (U. of East Anglia) will chair.
THE SERIES
Since 2022 the CCL has hosted an annual series of talks on postcolonial performance; this year’s focus is on dance. Embodied performance arts are central to examining questions of decoloniality, given that bodies marked by enslavement, discrimination or occupation can both express and resist these oppressions. Dance becomes a creative practice and a form of thinking.
If colonial ideologies have historically devalued, even eradicated the cultural practices of colonized subjects, rhythms and movements can be stored in and replayed by the performer’s body. Inherited cultural practices like dance can re-enact past histories. Dance becomes a system of learning, storing, producing and transmitting knowledge: ‘body-thoughts’, to borrow the words of Black British choreographer-performers Alexandrina Hemsley and Seke Chimutengwende.
We shall discuss postcolonial dance from geographical areas which, while varied, share a common interest in resistance to oppression and/or occupation; the revival of indigenous or inherited practices; and the interrogation of fluid identities in a postcolonial world. These areas are Africa, South Asia, Latin America and Palestine.
More information on the talk, the speakers and the series
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 13 May 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm |
Accessibility
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