Moving Temporalities

Catalog description

Taught by GTU. "...in employing modern historical consciousness we think of a world...that is already disenchanted. Gods, spirits, and other 'supernatural' forces can claim no agency in our narratives" (Chakrabarty 36). This course is designed to question what Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies as "modern historical consciousness", which discounts, or at the very least cannot account for, narratives that exceed secular thought. Temporality as a concept in this course will be grounded in the movement of the body, in particular in the generative capacity of dance. We will explore how intercultural and transnational dancing bodies access the spiritual, the ecstatic, and the religious as a means of practicing and negotiating both transcendence and immanence. Additionally, we will conceptualize how the dancing body challenges notions of the "post' - in particular the post-colonial and post-modern - recalibrating understandings of modernity and progress. Students will be asked not only to read about these ideas and practices, but to witness and enact them through media and live performance. By exploring these ideas in our own bodies, we can begin to understand the limitations of contemporary histories and the potentiality of lived experience.