Abstract
This chapter explores what it means to craft an identity. It begins with the idea of identity itself, referencing James Baldwin’s and Emmanuel Levinas’ crucial work on identity. Acts of imagination are shown to be central to the crafting of identity. The terrain of aesthetic consciousness follows. A dance program dedicated to the development of a self is discussed, contextualized within a discussion of race issues in America as they collide with social issues and with aesthetics followed by a discussion of a variety of identity oriented African-American dance approaches. These are explored in the light of Raymond Williams work on hegemony and its relationship to identity politics. In the last part of the chapter, the dance program itself, designed for African-American middle schoolers in Durham, NC is presented as an alternative approach to identity construction that is political in a way consonant with discussion of politics in other chapters in the book but differing from conventional identity politics.
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Blumenfeld-Jones, D.S. (2022). Identity, Self, and Liberation. In: Reimagining Curriculum Studies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9877-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9877-4_8
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