“Capoeira cannot be played alone”: Dancing Dialogues Around the World and on the Page

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Notes

1 Practitioners’ names are listed in conjunction with an extensive glossary of Brazilian and capoeira terminology at the end of the book.

2 Wesolowski cites Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Landes, Ella Cara Deloria, Katherine Dunham, and Pearl Primus as her feminist, embodied, self-reflexive anthropologist forebears (p. 12).

3 Perhaps I am projecting my own sentiments onto this reading as a fellow American-born ethnographer who works with diasporic dance communities.

4 Katherine Dunham spearheaded a personal-reflective ethnographic approach in Dances of Haiti (1947) and later in her ethnographic memoir, Island Possessed (1969), about her fieldwork in Haiti. Brazil has been a rich site that called forth dancerly research and reflection on the page, including by Alma Guillermoprieto, Samba (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), Barbara Browning, Samba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), and more recently, Tamara LaDonna Williams, Giving Life to Movement (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2021). Halifu Osumare’s dance memoir writing is also crafting pathways for such approaches (Dancing in Blackness, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018; Dancing the Afrofuture, forthcoming, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2024).

5 TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) is a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries. The book was made accessible through support from Duke University.

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Notes on contributors

Dasha A. Chapman

DASHA A. CHAPMAN is an interdisciplinary dancer-scholar whose research, teaching, curation, and performances engage a nexus of African diaspora and Caribbean theory, critical dance and performance studies, ethnography, and queer/gender studies. Dasha’s in-progress monograph, Grounding Practice: Dancing Haiti on Tè Glise, centers the community-[re]building work of Haitian dancers following the 2010 earthquake. Her other writing appears in Americas: a Hemispheric Music Journal, The Black Scholar, Journal of Haitian Studies, The Dancer-Citizen, Dance Chronicle, Performance Matters, Theatre Journal, and Women & Performance. Dasha co-convenes the Haitian Sexualities Working Group, Afro-Feminist Performance Routes, and Un/Commoning Pedagogies Collective. Artistically, Dasha collaboratively develops place-based performances with Haitian and American artists that activate histories, spaces, and dis/orientations. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies and an MA in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University. Currently, Dasha is Assistant Professor of Dance Studies at Kennesaw State University, and previously taught at Davidson College, Five College Dance/Hampshire College, and Duke University.