Colgate University’s Africana and Latin American Studies program (ALST) invited Deborah Thomas to speak as part of the Shirley Graham and W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture Series on Thursday, Oct. 30. Thomas is an author, filmmaker and professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the history and politics of Jamaica.
In her talk, titled “The Question of Bodily Sovereignty,” Thomas discussed what bodies reveal to us about the forms of sovereignty that structure Western political and social life and how to reframe notions of sovereignty around self-autonomy instead of colonialism.
After her first year at Brown University, Thomas committed herself to becoming a dancer. She danced in New York City with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and spent a year in Brazil working with contemporary dance programs. Eventually, she joined the Urban Bush Women, an all-female, Black-led dance company based in Brooklyn that uses performance as a means of addressing social justice issues and encouraging civic engagement. Thomas recalled the lasting impression that dance made on her body, with each sequence a part of her corporeal memory and each movement informing how she walks.
While Thomas pursued a career in academia, she decided to return to dance two decades later, in 2022. Thomas said she sought to rediscover the embodied feeling of the intellectual work she had been pursuing.
“Because of the ways I had been thinking about what sovereignty feels like, I needed to remember and to try to consciously experience what it means to know and to learn from the body,” Thomas said.
Thomas said her return to dance informed her understanding of what exorbitant sovereignty feels like. By taking listeners on a theoretical journey, Thomas articulated that the body is a medium for subjectivity, history and world-making. Bodies matter, Thomas insisted, because they are not only integral to the management of liberal promises of inclusion and citizenship, but also to the refusal of dehumanizing inscriptions of property. In particular, Black bodies reproduce local, regional and global forms of power, yet they have the capacity to unsettle these means of control.
Colgate first-year Rosalyn Lewis was in attendance at Thomas’s presentation and was intrigued by her discussion of the relationship of the mind and body through dance.
“I did not realize how sometimes the mind and the body can be perceived in such different ways from each other. I really like the idea that they are separate entities,” Lewis said.
Thomas continued by introducing the Myal complex, an African-based religious structure in Jamaica oriented toward healing and deliverance from the ontological degradations of slavery. One branch of the Myal religion is Kumina, which uses dance and drumming as ritualistic practices. Thomas’s understanding of bodies as sites of knowledge and resistance led her to create Tambu Fest in 2019 with her husband, anthropologist John L. Jackson Jr. Tambu Fest is a Kumina celebration that brings together discussion, performance and ritual practice in the Jamaican parish of St. Thomas to address contemporary social justice issues through dance and drum culture.
Attendees at Thomas’s lecture watched a clip from the 2019 festival showing community members moving in sync with drum beats in a dance circle in a visual demonstration of the embodied knowledge Thomas had been describing.
Colgate Professor of Anthropology and ALST Michelle Bigenho said she appreciated how Thomas bridges scholarship and practice.
“I appreciated how [Thomas] brought her expertise on the Caribbean to think about forms of knowledge, politics and refusal that are deeply embedded in embodied practices between human and spiritual worlds,” Bigenho said.
“Four Days in May,” the experimental documentary, which Thomas co-produced and co-directed, was also shown at Tambu Fest 2019. The film features residents of Kingston after the 2010 Tivoli Gardens Incursion, where 70 civilians were killed in a drug search operation.
“If Tambu Fest is a living community space that honors the past, present and future resources of a community, then it is also a way to move practice toward an exorbitant sovereignty,” Thomas said.
