Revitalizing Decolonization through Dance Scholarship

Situates the Black dancing body as a locus of intellectual labor, historical memory, and resistance, challenging logocentric paradigms that marginalize embodied knowledge.

1963 marked a pivotal moment in Ghanaian intellectual history with the inauguration of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, accompanied by Kwame Nkrumah’s “African Genius” speech, in which he extolled the African Personality. Revitalizing Decolonization through Dance Scholarship revisits this moment to theorize the African Personality not as rhetoric but as an epistemological framework enacted through performance.

Critically engaging with the Ghana Dance Ensemble’s neo-traditional experimentations, Eric Awuah shows how African dance-musicking operates as archive, pedagogy, and theory. Awuah extends his taxonomy of Ghanaian movement culture to Traditional, Professional, Academic, and the Amateur, arguing that these categories function as a kinetic continuum rather than fixed hierarchies. This framework underscores dance as a site of cultural sovereignty where African Genius is realized in ways that resist the fragmentation of body, mind, and spirit. And extending beyond Ghana, the study interrogates West African higher education institutions of dance-music and diaspora associations as arenas where decolonization is negotiated in motion. Case studies of diasporic practices illustrate both resilience and transformation of heritage across transnational contexts.

While African Genius may be regarded as the culmination of excellence rooted in creative freedom, African Personality functions as the conduit through which that excellence is embodied in dance-music. This book argues that African dance-music is a vital decolonial practice safeguarding heritage, empowering communities, and envisioning freedom across generations.