Walking with the Self: Zab Maboungou's Interventions Against Eurocentrism Through Contemporary African Dance

I met Zab Maboungou on an unseasonably brisk morning in May 2011. I was on my way to my first class at her studio in Montreal when I recognized her in the crowd at the corner of Mount-Royal and St. Laurent. With her neck nestled in a light scarf, she looked up and smiled knowingly as the traffic light ahead turned green ushering forward a wave of pedestrians. I built up the courage and went to introduce myself, though I stumbled on the words, momentarily forgetting my French and the lines I had rehearsed on the Metro ride over. She smiled, patiently, and I tried again. In class that day, with the drums lined up along the wall (but no drummer to play them), the students practiced walking, uttering the syllables "lo-ké-to" with each step as Maboungou carefully watched and corrected our alignment. Engrossed in this very fundamental movement activity, I heard Maboungou explain that we were learning to stand again. She made comments throughout class that aimed to adjust not only our movement but also our conception of our bodies and surroundings. That day, she spoke poetically of the chest as a center that can be simultaneously proud and humble, of the difference between art that is about individualism and art that is about interaction, and of the importance of being attentive to the ground upon which we stand.¹ I left class in a haze, still thinking through the comments she had made. When I returned home, I opened my notebook and wrote a comment to myself: "This is how a philosopher teaches dance."

In his writings on African American conceptions of "beauty," Thomas DeFrantz (2005) brings together dance and philosophy in a way that resonates with Maboungou's teaching style. DeFrantz notes that articulating black beauty through philosophy allows him "to consider African American subjectivity within dance that might allow it to flourish on its own terms" (100) while also lending it greater weight in discourses of Western humanism (95).² Working in Canada, Maboungou similarly merges her background in dance and philosophy, using her artistic and pedagogical endeavors to pose fundamental questions about creativity, time, space, existence, and the self. Since at least the 1950s, however, alongside the emergence of decolonization movements across Africa, scholars like Frantz Fanon ([1952] 1967)³ have questioned the utility of the philosophical field of ontology, critiquing the paradoxes tied to articulations of race and subjectivity that it inevitably provokes. Much of the contemporary rhetoric surrounding academic notions of human nature, the individual subject, and a rational self, was developed during the European Enlightenment, a period that struggled to justify colonialism and slavery⁴ while creating many of the racial paradigms that continue to inform Europe, Africa, and the Americas today. And yet, though tangled and marked by imperfections, counterontologies can become important political tools in decolonization strategies. Gayatri Spivak speaks to this conflict in her critique of subaltern studies (1987) and suggests that productive gains can be made through a "strategic use of positivist essentialism" (205). By imagining an essentialized group consciousness (the subaltern), postcolonial studies can articulate a new historical figure and intervene in Western historiography (though not without some controversy).⁵ Considering Maboungou's own philosophical approach to dance, what might her work be able to offer in the creation of such counterontologies?

Montreal choreographer Zab Maboungou is an artist/philosopher⁶ whose work speaks to the paradoxical tensions within and between ontology and identity. Maboungou, who grew up in Brazzaville, studied philosophy in France, and migrated west to Montreal in the 1970s, has been a prolific dancer and advocate for African diaspora artists in Canada. Her current work, deeply personal and reflective, uses a movement vocabulary based on dances she learned in her youth in the Republic of the Congo as a lexicon for exploring metaphysical questions of self, identity, time, and place—questions that, on the one hand, are in tension with Fanon's distrust of ontology but, on the other hand, provide fertile ground for reimagining conceptions of subjecthood through contemporary African...