Twerk Talk
Alizeh Agnihotri, BA Development Studies
Twerking is a dance form popularized through mass media and an act that went unnoticed in my daily life. I paid no attention to the repercussions it caused towards the African community.
When I sat for the “Twerk Talk”, not only was I blown away by new perspectives, but I left the seminar with a whole new level of respect for a dance form that I had ignored.
The speakers of the seminar, Prisca Vungbo, Kelechi, Sarah Nwafor, Ama Josephine Bundge and Siana Bangura, all unique in their own way, took us through the history and origin of twerking gracefully, informatively, and with a little sprinkle of sass.
Nwafor started the seminar by setting out a spectrum– Nicki Minaj versus Miley Cyrus. She brought up the fact that even though twerking is a dance form taken from African culture, the world often denotes it as a Miley-dominated dance.
She also criticized the popular feminist musician Lily Allen for demeaning girls who “shake their ass,” in her song Hard Out Here. However, due to the media it has been historically misrepresented.
Kelechi, also known as Cocoa, is a twerk instructor amongst many other talents. Due to what is perceived of twerk, she often had to hear multiple criticisms about her dance not being correct. “They wanted me to change my classes name to ‘Tribal Twerk,” she said. “The students I was teaching were apparently not being taught what they came for.”
Even though she was teaching the correct form of dance, her students assumed it to be incorrect as they were only interested in the sexualisation of twerking.
While speakers spoke passionately about their personal experiences with cultural misrepresentation, it came down to this main focal point: cultural appropriation versus cultural appreciation.
The cherry picking of African culture is taking only what could benefit White counterparts, repackaging and reclaiming it, and trashing the rest away. This creates this caricature of black women in order to economically benefit dominant white figures such as Lily Allen and Miley Cyrus, who are trying to show us that they care about African society when they have no idea what they’re doing.
It comes down to this question: do black women really own their own bodies?
