Indigenous and Diaspora Dance Evolution traces the circulation of African diasporic dance practices and their role in contemporary Indigenous Pacific contexts.


Highlighting new artistic dance practices and worldviews that have emerged during transplantations within Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia, Ojeya Cruz Banks examines how Black liberation and Pacific sovereignty are entwined. She traces the influence of movements born from projects of Black liberation on Indigenous creativity in Aotearoa and Guåhan, exposing the dangers of erasing patterns of Black dance histories in the Pacific.

Grounded in family histories, ancestral cosmologies, and the sacred relationships to ocean, land, and sky, this book uncovers the social histories of dance by illuminating how Black dance worldviews get transplanted on Indigenous Pacific soil, and how dance has evolved over time. The chapters reveal the connections between haka, Michael Jackson's Moonwalk, Poi, Beyoncé, Polyswag, dancehall, Aotearoa/ New Zealand, Guåhan/Guam, and more.

The author calls for a deeper scholarly and artistic engagement with Black Pacific dance, fostering the need for ancestral intelligence, to garner a better understanding of respectful exchange, co-authorship, and cultural responsibility.