| This study explores women's contribution to maintaining folkdance as an embodied feminist practice. Women folkdance educators project a social consciousness from personal and public experiences, a knowledge that stems across a variety of spaces and performances that serve to politicize ethnic cultural identities. The survival of Carnival, theatrical events, and school competitions depend on grass roots resistances to preserve ethnic solidarity, assert economic compensation, and negotiate meanings between personal, regional, and national symbols. The underlying messages reveal a complex historical past, a nostalgic past where traces of race, class, and gender oppression are overturned as symbols of liberation through dance and through women's voices. Social action thrives through a collective solidarity pulled together by a union of African, Native, and European cultures. The plural contexts of embodied counter memories reveal a mutual need to express social equality and human integrity projected as a sacred inheritance of knowing lands, navigating oceans, and celebrating community. This research focuses women's ability to cross timespace boundaries using past and present recreate and contest modern tendencies of selling folkdance spectacles as a global commodity.;The various uses of folklore as a patriarchal concept reify nationhood that differentiates "first" and "third" world knowledge. The lack of feminist perspectives in this area of study leads to the absence of critical "third world" feminist interpretations as a foundational lens that validates folkdance as corporeal liberation. Folkdance as oppositional to male dominated histories focuses on an appreciation of the body linked to an epistemology of Earthbound consciousness as a substantive approach to a critical fokdance pedagogy as a conceptual framework. A critical folkdance pedagogy is a dialectic between revolutionary tendencies of Carnival theory, and a reinterpretation of dance as staged history, culminating as praxis in the classroom.;A folkfeminist methodology meshes qualitative/interpretive analysis, "near native" reflexive ethnography and participatory dimensions throughout the research process. Barranquilla, Colombia South America, an Atlantic coast is the primary location for the study. Cross referencing a variety of textual literary sources provides evidence that validates women's voices as feminist practices. |
