Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. A Ford Foundation Diversity Pre and Post-Doctoral Fellow, she earned her Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Her first book manuscript, Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora, is under contract with Oxford University Press. Her second book project is a cultural history of black American dance.
Tell us who you are. What are you about (beyond the CV/resume)?
I am an interdisciplinary scholar of Black dance, diaspora theory, critical ethnography, and Black feminisms. Movement occupies much of my focus in my writing and teaching. My research is motivated by an investment in: 1) the ways Black diasporic people move (dance), 2) the ways Black communities are choreographed by economic and political forces (diasporic migration, tourism), and 3) the ways that Black performance sensibilities circulate with or without Black bodies (aesthetics). My research takes the experiential seriously as a basic premise of critical ethnography and as a way of honoring the qualitative registers of Black life. In my work—from my book Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora ( Oxford University Press) to journal articles to museum exhibition catalogs—I write about the ways that dance, performance, and theater serve as practices through which race, gender, and sexuality are (re)made and expressed. But I’m also thinking about the gifts in applying Dance Studies to places where the arts may seem less foregrounded. Thinking choreographically helps me better understand discrete work like a staged performance, sure, but also Black diasporic movement and urban outmigration. In other words, I think about dances and I think dance as a way through which identities and communities are made.
What roles have the arts played in your journey to this point?
The arts have always been a treasured part of my life. I grew up in a bookstore in the San Francisco Bay Area that my family owns—Marcus Books—and there I was taught a deep regard for Black arts. Theater, literature, and music decorated my life. Confidence and pride in oneself were taught through reading and performance. (As children, my sisters, cousins, and I had to recite a newly memorized poem every Friday, for example.) I was always enchanted by dance, especially its capacity to convey a bounty with little verbal utterance—its subtleties, complications, and infinite designs. Although I had practiced West African and Afro-Caribbean dance throughout my life, I became a professional dancer through my ethnographic research and the embodied training that it necessitated. Becoming a scholar-practitioner of Afro-diasporic dance has invited its own gifts through performance. Whether I am teaching Intro to Africana Studies, or courses on histories of Black dance, the body is always centered, and my attention to movement is steady.
How did you arrive at the University of Pennsylvania? What does this place and its people mean to you?
I came to Penn after teaching in Africana, Performance, and Gender and Sexuality Studies Departments at Brown, Brandeis, and Northwestern. The arts at Penn are strikingly wide, with folks from nearly every neighborhood engaging the arts in interesting and necessary ways. I take inspiration from my colleagues across Penn’s campus who have and continue to make work that weds—often blurs—disciplinary boundaries. Their writing and teaching privilege performance as research itself, and I am always learning from the diversity of craft and expertise that they index.
What are you currently working on? What do you see as the potentials that may ripple out from this project?
I am currently working on a second book project about contemporary Black millennial choreographers. Here I am thinking about the ways they delight in the joy of Black assembly and turn perhaps surprising stages for dance (the boat, the traffic intersection, the public park) into spaces for tender and striking performance. I hope to expand our grammar for Black performance and to understand the alchemy of choreography more specifically. It takes a certain kind of attunement to write about performances that end; but I follow the field of Performance Studies which teaches us that a dance concluding doesn’t necessarily mean that it is gone.
