Using Stephanie Batiste’s theory of kinetic affect and Sara Ahmed’s framework of the Orient, the paper seeks to center the experience of the Filipino body---both national and diasporic bodies--- as it moves through the affective space of ambivalence in relation to the conversation of race-making in dance. The paper hopes to open possibilities for corporeal negotiations that do not only refute the haunting of the silhouettes of White supremacy in the Filipino’s engagement with Philippine folk dance but also uphold a space where bodies can encourage each other to ‘move’ despite the ‘truths’ claimed by the project of race.
Anonymous, "JEMUEL JR. GARCIA, "Circling Through the Space of Affect: When a Filipino ‘Dances’ with Filipino-Americans" ", contributed by Kaitlyn Rabach and Danielle Yorleny Tassara, Center for Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 5 February 2020, accessed 3 May 2024. http://www.centerforethnography.org/content/jemuel-jr-garcia-circling-through-space-affect-when-filipino-‘dances’-filipino-americans
Critical Commentary
Jemuel Jr. Garcia is a third year Ph.D. student in Critical Dance Studies at the Department of Dance, University of California, Riverside (UCR). His research/choreography engages to flesh out the dynamics of the transnational Filipino dancing body as it navigates the physical/textual spaces of performance. As a Filipino interdisciplinary movement storyteller whose movement practice weaves his passion for dance, comics, magic, poetry, and theatre, he is passionately working on the body as a restless archive of histories, memories, and futurities.