Because nothing is sufficient, we must use everything.

Part 1 of 4 in our series on "Academia/Activism and other (unnecessary) binaries"

Danica Savonick, CUNY Graduate Center

Danica Savonick is a doctoral student in English and Research Fellow with the Futures Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is also a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Queens College and a HASTAC Scholar. She is writing a dissertation on pedagogy and social justice

“Because nothing is sufficient, we must use everything,” Rebecca Fullan recently remarked, which is how I’ve come to understand the relationship between academia and activism. Since beginning my Ph.D. program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, I’ve struggled with the relationship between academic institutions and the grassroots, community-based, activist work that takes place on the streets (and other spaces). Instead of allowing a feminist interpretation of a text to substitute for, rather than inspire, political action, I want to ask how activism and academia can mutually inform one another without collapsing the meaningful differences between the two. How, for instance, is a class on African-American literature different from the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and how might the two work in tandem to take down the capitalist, white supremacist heteropatriarchy? In addition to troubling the activism/academia binary, I also want to emphasize that talking about feminism, antiracism, and material conditions of inequality from within a classroom will never be enough. I honestly hope that when students leave my class they feel uncomfortable and upset about our present, but also eager, desirous, and capable of changing it.

Here are several ways we can complicate the activism/academia binary.

First, by remembering that opportunities for women and people of color to receive an education are themselves the products of activism. Recently, I had the opportunity to teach City University of New York (CUNY) students about the history of black and Latino student activism on their campuses:

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At this hour-long workshop we discussed the 1969 student strike in which black and Latino students and their allies shut down the South campus of City College for two weeks, and set up Harlem University in its place. Their demands included student governance, changes to the Anglo-American, Eurocentric, white supremacist curriculum, and changes to admissions procedures so that “that the racial composition of all entering classes should reflect the Black, Puerto Rican, and Asian population of the New York City high schools” (Tomás-Reed 49). “What do you demand from your education?” I asked groups of students who attend various campuses throughout the CUNY system.

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I can’t be sure whether students left that workshop eager to organize a campus shut-down, or feeling empowered to improve their modest facilities. However, these histories show students that things like free public education, affirmative action, and in the case of CUNY the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) program, are both desirable—many students have been taught to think otherwise—and the hard-won victories of community organizing and political struggle.

Second, inspired by Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory,” I want to suggest that there is work to be done within academia to help bring about a more just, equitable, and pleasurable future. Christian’s essay taught me that while the discipline of English privileges a narrow canon of white, male literary theorists, people of color have always theorized, though it hasn’t gotten to count as theory. This idea, compounded with the social, grassroots historical narratives I was exposed to in graduate school, but that had been entirely absent from my earlier education (from the Haitian Revolution to the Watts rebellion) convinced me that people of color have always been integral to the historical production of our present, though their participation is often erased, and particularly through education. This knowledge of education’s complicity in producing a racist, sexist status quo now informs everything I do in my teaching and research.

The third way we can trouble the activism/academia binary is by looking to both for spaces in which minoritarian (queer, feminist, antiracist, decolonial, etc.) knowledge production can flourish. Towards the activist end of the spectrum we find examples like the Free University of NYC and on the academic end, organizations like Mentoring Future Faculty of Color (MFFC), started by Dr. Kandice Chuh, which seeks to address conditions of institutional racism and sexism and to support diversity as an epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical project. Two others that I’ve recently become involved with are HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) and the Futures Initiative, both of which create spaces for challenging the structures of power that have produced the injustices and inequalities of our present. HASTAC and the Futures Initiative operate according to the principle of “collaboration by difference,” which I understand to mean that any task, project, or conversation will be drastically more complex, nuanced, and robust (i.e. better) if we seek, from the very beginning, to include multiple, diverse perspectives, and especially those that are most silenced by the status quo. This means people of color, women, people who identify as queer, transgender, or gender non-conforming, people who may be differently abled, and in the context of classrooms, it can also mean students.

Recently, I was invited to kick off The University Worth Fighting For, a year-long series of workshops that tie student-centered pedagogical practices to institutional change, race, equality, and social justice. As a way of continuing this conversation about activism and academia, I invite the readers of critical ethnic studies to contribute to our forum, Towards a Pedagogy of Equality, which explores what a classroom informed by activist principles of participatory governance, intentional space-making, and inclusivity might look like.

Works Cited

Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory.” Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 51–63. Web.

Tomás Reed, Conor. “‘Treasures That Prevail’: Adrienne Rich, The SEEK Program, and Social Movements at the City College of New York, 1968-1972.” ‘What We Are Part Of’ Teaching at CUNY: 1968-1974. 2 vols., edited by Iemanja Brown et al. New York: The

Adrienne Rich Literary Estate, 2013. 36-65. Print.

This is an old story: Mauna Kea and moʻolelo

Part 4 of 4 in our series on 'Resistance at Mauna Kea' 

To read Part 1, click here. To read Part 2, click here. To read Part 3, click here. 

Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 

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Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada believes in the power and potential of ea, of life, of breath, rising, of sovereignty, because he sees it all around him, embodied in the ʻāina, the kai, his family, his friends, and his beautiful community. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, focusing on translation theory. He is currently editor of the journal Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being, and works as a Hawaiian-language editor and translator.

If some of the anti-Mauna folks[1] writing editorials are to be believed, my Polynesian ancestors were amazing astronomers (who settled a land area equal to one third the state of New York, if it was crumpled up and scattered across 10 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean, by the way), but were too ignorant for their deep spiritual beliefs that were interwoven with and undergirding that “astronomical” knowledge to still be taken seriously in this day and age. In this ongoing fight over the telescopes atop both Mauna Kea and Haleakalā, proponents of the telescopes often try to offer us insights about our history and culture to explain why we should give up and just let them build the damn things.

So many of the anti-Mauna folks want to educate us about our history and our culture, but they have little to no clue what they are talking about. Kiaʻi mauna are often described as uneducated (google “uneducated” and “tmt” to see what I mean), but the anti-Mauna people have no problem spouting off about Hawaiian culture and history or even dismissing it without bothering to do any sort of research. 

A good example of the kinds of stories they try to tell can be seen in how the TMT publicity machine has been trying to co-opt the stories of our own monarchs to use against us. A quote that the anti-Mauna folks keep bringing up is by Liliʻuokalani, our beloved queen, who according to them, said, “The ancient Hawaiians were astronomers.” Period. As if she were making a statement about astronomy. The quote actually comes from her translation of the Kumulipo, our cosmogonic genealogy that traces our relationship through a coral polyp and into the blackness of fertility and creation from which everything came. And it is actually just an introductory clause to a longer sentence, with the preceding sentence having bearing as well:

I have endeavored to give the definition of each name as far as it came within my knowledge of words, but in some cases this could not be done because the true signification has been lost. The ancient Hawaiians were astronomers, and the terms used appertained to the heavens, the stars, terrestrial science, and the gods.

What she was referring to is the fact that there were so many terms throughout the 2,000 line chant specific to certain lineages of knowledge that she didn’t know how to translate them all.

Liliʻuokalani is trying to present this information to an audience who is not Hawaiian and who has not shown itself to normally be open to Hawaiian belief except as quaint folklore. How do you explain a kilo hōkū or a kilo ʻōuli or a hoʻokele to people who are still at that time writing about how “kahunaism” and the continuation of Hawaiian beliefs are some of the main reasons for the decline of the Hawaiian people? Many in this audience didn't even think our people were human a few generations prior!  For this audience, she has to equate Hawaiian practice with Western science to claim a legitimacy that proponents of Western science never gave it, except when it benefited them (see the characterization of Polynesian voyagers as astronomers above).

Her brother Kalākaua, who held the throne before her, is also a great favorite of the anti-Mauna people because he was avowedly pro-Western science. And I agree that he was. He seemed to delight in all of the wonders of technology. He visited the Lick Observatory (which was 25ft in diameter and two stories high, if you were wondering), where they set up the telescope for him to look through even though the building wasn’t completed yet. He wanted an observatory for Hawaiʻi (and bought a permanent telescope that was put not on a mountaintop, but at Punahou School in Mānoa Valley). He proposed a trans-Pacific cable. He even built a model of the Nautilus from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. What the TMT people don’t mention, or likely understand, is Kalākaua’s staunch commitment to Hawaiian traditional practices. He was a keen supporter of hula, which was still being touted in his time as one of the reasons for the decline of the Hawaiian population by people like Sereno Bishop. He had traditional mele performed at his coronation, which resulted in a court case over obscenity in the printed program. He granted licenses for traditional healers to practice lāʻau lapaʻau, for which he was also critiqued by the horrified Western medical establishment.

One of the more controversial moves he made was to dare to combine and reconcile Western scientific knowledge and Hawaiian cultural and practical knowledge in the society known as the Hale Nauā. The Constitution of the Hale Nauā, made up of men and women, a rarity at the time, stated that “the object of this society is the revival of Ancient Science of Hawaii in combination with the promotion and advancement of Modern Sciences, Art, Literature, and Philanthropy.” What that meant in practice was that they recorded and tried to revive traditional Hawaiian arts and practices that were disappearing, studied genealogy, and kept up with breakthroughs in Western science and tried to reconcile them with Hawaiian values and beliefs. They put on lectures and exhibits about traditional culture and corresponded with other scientific associations around the world. Most rational people would probably view these acts as that of an educational and beneficent society, yet Kalākaua’s detractors interpreted all of this to mean that the society was “an agency for the revival of heathenism, partly to pander to vice, and indirectly to serve as a political machine. Enough leaked out to intensify the general disgust that was felt at the debasing influence of the palace.”

Hawaiians attempting to revive and practice their own traditions, blending them with what they wanted from Western science and literature was so threatening to the established order, that some even felt the Hale Nauā was one of the reasons for the overthrow in 1893. The criticisms of the Hale Nauā also changed distinctly in character over time. Before the 1930s, critics only made fun of the society’s aims, but after, they derided the Hale Nauā for its scientific shortcomings in regards to the geologic age of the planet. What strikes me as funny is that, yes, the Hale Nauā miscalculated the age of the Earth in 1886, but Western science hadn’t figured it out either until 1926, and their previously accepted guesses were off by several orders on their own!

Having said all this, I hope it might be a little clearer how egregious an act of appropriation it is for the anti-Mauna people to have bandied back and forth the following quote from Kalākaua for years. You can even see it below on their “informational” website specifically focused on Mauna Kea and the TMT.[2]

What the quote is referring to is Kalākaua’s excitement about the 1874 expedition that had arrived in Hawaiʻi for the transit of Venus. It is meant to show that Kalākaua’s support of the expedition and the telescope that they brought with them would translate today into support for the TMT on Mauna Kea.

If we do even a little research, we can find this picture of the telescope that George Tupman, a Captain in the Royal Marine Artillery and the expedition's leader, used to observe the transit, and...well...it's little.

It was set up with all of their other equipment in what was essentially a backyard adjoining a house rented from Princess Ruth Keʻelikōlani in ʻĀpua, an area just seaward of Kawaiahaʻo Church, where the shoreline used to be (Chauvin 195). There were also two small supplemental observation stations, one in Waimea, Kauaʻi, and one in Kailua, Kona. The TMT, on the other hand, is proposed to be 184ft tall and is going to cover 1.44 acres just with the buildings, and a 5-acre footprint when completed.

But Hawaiians trying to make their way through a rapidly changing world while still remaining Hawaiian is not what the anti-Mauna people want to tell. They want the story where the words of Kalākaua will enlighten the ignorant Hawaiians of today about the importance of “progress.” This same story has echoed throughout our time: How Tupman referred to Kalākaua and the other members of the royal family as "savages" and "intolerable nuisances" for wanting to have the telescope opened up to the public to look through, with Kalākaua even offering to send down the Royal Hawaiian Band to play (Chauvin 212). How present day astronomers channel Tupman when they refer to the kiaʻi mauna as a lying “horde of native Hawaiians,” a remark straight out of the nineteenth century. How in 1874, 12 marines and a sergeant were stationed around the observatory compound to maintain silence and keep the curious public out, hundreds of whom had come out in their finest clothes to witness Venusʻs transit (Chauvin 214), how in 2015 kiaʻi mauna bearing lei and mele and reverence are met with handcuffs and body armor and militarized police.

We are experts at the same old story that developers, government agencies, and scientists never tire of telling, the same old story that depends on us getting out of the way of their progress, whether it be sugar, pineapple, the Puʻuloa drydock, Kahoʻolawe, Waikīkī development, Hoʻopili, every ancestral bone dug up to build a Wal-Mart, every place built on sacred land, every single telescope on the mountain. This story has had too many sequels. Too many echoes. It’s time for for more listening from them and less talking. Our story is the one where the land is our elder sibling. Our story is the one where progress isn’t progress if it is built on the backs of others. Our story is that you have much to learn from us. Our story is that we have a great fight ahead of all of us, and that each name of our ancestor we remember, each word of our language we speak, each aspect of our culture, we practice will give us strength to keep going. So if you want to tell us about our history and our culture and you don’t know our story, you better start paying attention.

endnotes

[1] I am using “anti-Mauna folks” here to refer to the people pushing for the TMT project to move forward. I freely admit that this is purposefully and unfairly essentializing their arguments, but I think it’s equivalent to us constantly being characterized as “anti-science” and “anti-progress.”

[2] The site was subsequently changed and the quotes are no longer featured prominently, which I’d like to think was due to people pressuring them about their appropriation of these quotes, which may have been bolstered by a Facebook post I wrote on April 13, 2015, and a subsequent post by Kristin Momoa on Civil Beat a month later that seems to have been based on my initial post.

A practice of doing nothing

Part 3 of 3 in our series on "What I am working on this summer"

To read Part 1, click here. To read Part 2, click here.

Christofer A. Rodelo, Harvard University

A first-generation queer scholar of color, Christofer A. Rodelo is a first year in the American Studies program at Harvard University, pursuing a secondary field in studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. His research traces feelings of authenticity as constructed in the materiality of 20th and 21st century multiethnic literature and culture. In his free time, he enjoys binge-watching Shondaland shows, finding joy in fast-food restaurants, and hiking. 

"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare"  -- Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light (1988)

When a close mentor asked me what I wanted to do this summer, I found myself at a loss for words. 

Usually, I would have a carefully crafted recitation ready to go, the "I'm going to be at X doing Y for Z amount of time." Like clockwork, people would reply with "Oh, that's interesting" or "good choice" when I detailed my research goals or study abroad excursions. This mode of being was familiar to me. I was an self-made expert at creating tightly-woven summer plans, prizing their efficiency from my first year of high school. I imagined my summers as links between major events in my life, strengthening the bonds intrinsic to the calculus of my success. The nods and exclamations of approval cemented my plans as correct, proper, and aligned with my long-terms goals.

When my mentor repeated his question, my body did not fail me. My hands began their usual gesticulatory dance, my vocal cords tightened as I prepared to respond. But nothing came out. The mechanisms of my mind, normally hard at work churning out lists and goals, stopped. I fumbled out a meager "still working on it" and we continued our conversation, the spectre of my inaction flickering incessantly throughout my head.

As I walked home, despondent from what had occurred, a germ of a thought imbedded itself within my consciousness: "You don't have to do anything." Immediately, I pushed away the wayward notion, falling back on my automated desire to stay productive. With each step I took, however, I felt a warmness creep upward through my body. As my legs gained momentum, my mind buzzing with the kinetic energy of that singular thought: “You don’t have to do anything,” “you don’t have to do anything!” The buoyancy of my revelation carried me to my house in a daze, sweat and tears parting ways at the half-moon of my smile. I lied down on my bed and let the nothingness commence.

I share this story in order to better explain the “what” of my summer, and perhaps more importantly, the “how” of those few months. In making the decision to go straight from undergrad to a Ph.D. program, I spent countless hours—and make countless lists—on the pros and cons. Financial concerns, location and nature of program—all these were variables in the formula that determined my next steps. What I couldn’t include in those deliberations, what I didn’t understand until that moment with my mentor, was the way I worked and lived. True, I had read with gusto Audre Lorde’s ardent demand for our well-being, nodded with approval when my peers—in person and electronically-- shared their desire for a balanced lifestyle. I made time to spend time with close friends, logging countless hours on Netflix, Still, I saw myself as a body made full with emails and papers, a finely-tuned corpus made to achieve. The mechanization of how I saw myself made me uncomfortable. How could someone so invested in love and compassion as academic practice sustain themselves in an output-driven environment? What did that say about me as a scholar and teacher?

Going home for the summer, I told myself I’d do something eerily foreign, but ultimately necessary: do nothing.

I surprised myself by how easy it was. Returning to Southern California after four years on the East Coast, I expected to get restless. While I love my family and friends, the doldrums of suburban life always frustrated me. The monotony I perceived, the sameness that catalyzed my exodus to Connecticut, now was something I relished. This summer, I’ve spent hours sitting on my favorite spot in our living room, letting the faded couch remember my body’s form. Everyday, I listened to my siblings squabble and my mom describe her day at work, thankful to be included in their conversations.

Granted, I could never completely divorce myself from the need to be productive. I attended a conference, wrote a reflective piece for an anthology, and participated in a professionalization workshop. But these moments were the momentary breaks, the faults in an otherwise wonderfully wide expanse of free time. I took off the layers necessitated at college, the ones that kept me insulated and busy, and soaked in the rays of a care-free summer.

This summer, I gained a deep appreciation for the restorative powers of “doing nothing.” My definition of the term widened, exchanging my long-held skepticism for a more nuanced recognition of how I could be. I wish I would have known this sooner, that I didn’t wrap myself up so tightly with the need to be busy. I want these feelings to continue in graduate school. I am intentionally optimistic of their longevity.

When a friend from school asked my what I did this summer, I replied:

“I did nothing. And everything. It was great.”

References:  Lorde, Audre (1988). A Burst of Light, Essays. London; Sheba Feminist Publishers.

Technologies, Pedagogies, and Performances of Resistance

A'Keitha Carey, Texas Woman's University

This summer has been full of challenges. I recently ended a one-year contract at a university in the mid-West, worked on several essays and articles for publication, prepared for my qualifying exam for my PhD studies, presented at the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, and packed to prepare my three-day drive cross country to relocate to New York. It has been hellish!

For this blog, I will focus on my experience at the National Black Arts Festival as it serves not only the topic for this blog but also fosters great fuel for my both my academic and personal lives.  I presented CaribFunk, a dance technique and social movement that I developed as part of the National Black Arts Festival Symposium titled: “Dance Across the Diaspora: A Historical Lens on a Black Cultural Movement” developed and moderated by Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz, a dance historian, dancer, choreographer, and scholar. CaribFunk is a fusion of Afro-Caribbean (social and traditional), classical ballet, modern, and fitness elements and principles.

The experience as a participant was both validating and inspiring as the theme of each workshop and/or presentation was centered on: Survival, Identity, Cultural Integrity, “Black and U.S. Social Dance as Resistance,” and The Technologies of Indigenous People of Color in the Americas Revealed Through the Lens of Performance. Resistance in motion and embodied protest were illustrated throughout the day-long symposium. Each panelist shared their personal stories of how dance and Diaporic sensibilities and expression informed their articulation (physical and oral) of their particular narratives.

For ritual community members, the dance/music performances suggest myths and retell cultural stories, but most important, they charter and encourage social behavior in present everyday lives. (Daniel 2005, 1)

Each presenter discussed the “radical” social movements that were constructed through performance that functioned as a form of embodied protest, revealing “what the body knows, [and] what it is capable of” (Daniel 2005, 4-5). Dancers demonstrate a “resilient and exciting ritual performance [in this instance] dance and music embody memory and perseverance and, in the end, inspire and support survival” (Daniel 2005, 5).

Three examples of African communities that resemble survival, resistance in motion and embodied protest are Capoeira in Brazil, the Jamette’s in Trinidad, and Jamaican Dancehall. As I listened, observed, and participated in the symposium, I reflected on the history of each social movement and how elements of these cultural movements and performances could be traced in several of the presentations at the festival. To provide some context, I will proffer some historical background to support my declaration.

Capoeira in Brazil:  Capoeira, “An Afro-Brazilian art” premised on principles of resistance is a clandestine practice that was disguised as a dance.  This strategy was used to resist those who policed and prohibited Blacks them from performing the “martial arts technique and choreographic and rhythmic vocabularies [that] were brought from Africa” and allowed them to “practice their games in seclusion” (Browning 2001, 166).

Prior to their captivity and enslavement in Brazil, the people of the Kongo-Angola region practiced certain kicking games for sport and recreation … In Brazil, the games were prohibited for all too obvious reasons. (Browning 2001, 166).

Capoeiristas perform an embodied protect, a physicalized activism that functions as a “technique of resistance” (Browning 2001, 166). This system of movement is “outside of the [upper] class [expectations], status quo and aspirations,” signifying an oppositional stance in [Brazil’s] “race-class hierarchy” (Niaah 2004, 103).

Many of the panelists discussed the oppositional or the political resistance that they either performed or encountered and the Afro Diasporic traditions that can be traced in their research. This was particularly evidenced in dance scholar, Dr. Osumare’s presentation on “They Were BAAD: Black US Social Dance As Resistance” where she examined “Black Badness in Dance.”

The Jamette’s in Trinidad:

From the late nineteen to the mid-twentieth century, the poor black women who defied standards of propriety and retaliated against her dehumanizing position in society was referred to as the jamette. Although the jamette is no longer a symbol of disorder and licentiousness in Trinidad, her impact on the corporeal expression of the contemporary woman in Carnival is unmistakable. (Noel 2010, 60)

This ideology has certainly set the tone for women’s morality, administering and proscribing how they should perform in social spaces. The movements of the pelvis were abhorred and those that performed such movements were policed and vilified.

The 1980’s would be pivotal in respect to the way women moved during Carnival, with the majority of women masquerading by wining and gyrating without reservation. The disconcerted reactions to these public acts of transgression were immense, and the behavior soon became a moral and sociological issue on a national level. (Noel 2010, 61)

The dance technique CaribFunk is premised on the activism and embodied protest exhibited by the Jamette’s in Trinidad, focusing on the hip wine (circular rotation of the hip. CaribFunk locates “the politics of identity and subversion through the exploration of the hip wine (circular rotation of the hips) often found in the stylistic and virtuosic performances of Jamaican Dancehall and Trinidadian Carnival (Carey 2015).

Jamaican Dancehall:  Dancehall is considered by some to be a musical genre, social movement, and space.

It flourished in Jamaica around the 1950’s, and its name derives from the exclusive space, or ‘halls,’ in which dance events were held. It tells the story of a people’s [inner city and of lower socio economic backgrounds and culture] survival and need for celebration of the survival against forces of imperialism and systems of exclusion through dance, music, and attitude. Dancehall’s story is ultimately the choreographing of identity that critiques aspects of Western domination. (Niaah 2004, 103)

Panelist, independent artist, and international street dancer Storyboard P discussed his street dance technique which he defines as a “mutant style” which is a fusion of “bruka from Jamaican culture and ‘flexin’ in the streets where animation rules.” Storyboard P stated that his style was developed “from his pain and isolation of being beat up.”

… The movement is continuous, like the body must be constantly reminded that it is not in control.

… I said “I want to ask you about pain”
He said, “It’s funny that you say that, pain is the backdrop to all I do”

… And there you have it. (An excerpt of Onye Ozuzu’s reflection on Facebook 2015)

The day began with a participatory workshop in “CaribFunk” taught by myself and ended with a participatory workshop “Technology of the Circle” taught by Onye Ozuzu, the Dean of Fine and Performing Arts, Columbia College Chicago. Onye’s “Technology of the Circle” is a methodology used as a form of communication, to tell a story and to problem solve, very similar to how the roda functions in capoeira—the same circle formation that delimits all traditional Afro-Brazilian dance” (Browning 2001, 165).

The festival functioned as a technique of resistance providing meaning making and storytelling through embodied protest, allowing participants to become practitioners of the techniques taught. I left Atlanta with a sense of renewal and a calmness that was much needed as I prepare to venture into the next chapter of my life.

---

A’Keitha Carey is an independent artist/scholar originally from the Bahamas. She completed her Certificate in Women's Studies from Texas Woman’s University where she is currently working to complete her PhD (Dance). A'Keitha created CaribFunk™ technique, a genre fusing Afro‐Caribbean (traditional and social dance), classical ballet, modern, and fitness principles and paradigms. Using her island gal sensibility she writes about theories and topics in the areas of: Dance Studies, Feminist/Womanist Thought, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, Ethnic Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Browning, B. 2001. "Headspin: capoeira ironic inversions.” In Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, eds. A. Dils and A. C. Albright, 144-151. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 

__________. 1995. Samba: Resistance in Motion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Carey, A. 2015. CaribFunk: A Melange of Caribbean Expressions in a New Dance Technique. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics-Emisferica <http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj/carey>

Daniel, Y. 2005. Dancing wisdom: Embodied knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Niaah, S. S. 2004. Kingston’s dancehall: A story of space and celebration. Space and Culture 7 (1): 102-118.

Noel, S. A. 2010. De jamette in we: Redefining performance in contemporary Trinidad Carnival. Small Axe 14 (1): 60-78.

Ozuzu, O. 2015. Storyboard P Reflection. <https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=10234649&fref=ts&ref=br_tf> Posted July 19, 2015.