Fundamental worries about “Decolonization is not a metaphor”

Dancer, musician, and researcher Juan Felipe Miranda Medina will join the Department of Performance Studies in a coversation about the well known piece by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang “Decolonization is not a metaphor”. The most fundamental one is their lack of a proper account of transformation as a central concept from the point where colonization took place until today. Suck a lack, Miranda argues, is no doubt connected to their misreading of Plato, Black feminist poet Audre Lordre and Latin American thinker and educator Paulo Freire. As a case study on decolonization the presenter will address key chapters of Peruvian political history, including the fall of the Inca empire, the revolution of Túpac Amaru II and the rather recent elections in Peru. The talk will conclude by opening a question that is perhaps the most important one we face today: what can we do?

Juan Felipe Miranda Medina - is a musician, dancer, and researcher from Arequipa, Peru. His artistic and scholarly focus is Afro-Peruvian music and dance, specializing in the Afro-Peruvian step dance zapateo. Miranda holds a doctoral degree in engineering, and a master's from the Choreomundus international program in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage, from which he graduated with distinction with the master's thesis entitled “Contrapunto de Zapateo: Alterity and Gesture.” His research interests include semiotics and its application to traditional music-dance forms, the relation of philosophy to performative practices, as well as Afro-Peruvian music and dance forms. He is currently a lecturer at the Department of Mechatronics at Universidad Católica San Pablo, in Peru. Besides several publications in topics that range from engineering to philosophy, Miranda has been awarded numerous honors such as a grant from the Peruvian Ministry of Culture and a gift by the Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research at the British Museum.

This event was curated by M.A. Candidate and Graduate Assistant Leila Mire.