Editors’ Residency: Moving in the Midst: Critical Indigenous Dance Studies

Maria Regina Firmino-Castillo
Dance
UC Riverside

Jacqueline Shea Murphy
Dance
UC Riverside

Participants

This project builds upon three years of work on an exciting – and vitally needed — collection of essays produced in the thick of persistent forms of settler colonial and imperial violences against Indigenous persons, their bodies, homelands, and world-making ways. This anthology centers dance, which refers to embodied movement from the quotidian to the extraordinary, spanning the private to the public, and including the staged and spectacular. Given dance’s collective, political, and radical “promise” to “continue moving” within the “unknowable and irreducible,” and the epistemologies of radical relationality it physicalizes and enacts, it is a key modality for engaging the state of ecological, political, and social uncertainty in which most of the planet now lives, and in which Indigenous peoples have survived for centuries. This project and the essays in it address how “dance” in Indigenous contexts activates a world beyond that which coloniality registers as having worth and value.