Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ

The Africana Studies Program presents a lecture by Dr. Maya J. Berry, Associate Professor of African, African American & Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

In "Defending Rumba in Havana," anthropologist and dancer Maya J. Berry examines rumba as a way of knowing the embodied and spiritual dimensions of Black political imagination in post-Fidel Cuba. Historically a Black working-class popular dance, rumba, Berry contends, is a method of Black Cuban struggle that provides the community, accountability, sustenance, and dignity that neither the state nor the expanding private market can. Berry’s feminist theorization builds on the notion of the undercommons to show how rumba creates a space in which its practitioners enact deeply felt and dedicatedly defended choreographies of reciprocity, refusal, sovereignty, devotion, and pleasure, both on stage and in their daily lives.