Afrocentric epistemologies in the academy: challenges concerning a dance professor selection

• Autor(a) principal: Falkembach, Maria
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Baptista Carle, Claudio, Leite Domenice, Eloisa
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Arte da Cena
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.ufg.br/artce/article/view/70438

This work presents an Ethnographic essay on the experience of a public competition for effective professor of Afro-Brazilian dances placed at a brazilian federal university. The text describes the singularity of the event, characterised by the epistemological clash between the Afro-centred knowledge and the Eurocentric academic tradition, presenting how the examination panel, constituted by the authors of this text, forged an anti-racist posture against a structurally racist system. The present essay takes perspectives from Performance Studies and Exuneutics to describe the candidates' performances and practices in Afro-Brazilian dances, whose principles profoundly collide with academic dances based on rationalist models of systematization and diffusion. Among these principles, it was identified that the connection with ancestry is one of the basic elements of the Afro-centred perspective. The text analyses the competition explicitly as a crossroads, where the panel constructed a conduct in which the roles of ethnographers and evaluators overlapped, while listening and defining criteria was woven in real time. The article concludes that this competition constituted an exemplary situation in which academic criteria needed to be readjusted to accommodate epistemodiversity.