"Through Dancing Bahia: Essays on Afro-Brazilian Dance, Education, Memory and Race, Lucía M. Suárez, Amélia Conrado, and Yvonne Daniel have created a field-establishing volume that examines the interstices of artistic practice and political activism in Afro-Brazilian dance works. Grounding research in the lives of Black people living at the center of the Black Atlantic, this volume locates Salvador da Bahia as a powerful nexus of dance practice and black activism, and wonderfully argues for its significance as one of the world’s epicentres for conversations on race, cultural memory, belonging, and human rights advocacy. With wonderful insights from a range of contributors on dance’s role in race relations, education and emancipation in Brazil, this book importantly contributes new Afro-Bahian knowledge to the field of dance studies."

Special citation for the 2019 Dance Studies Association de la Torre Bueno Award | Dance Studies Association

"Offers the English-speaking reader a fruitful avenue to understand the cultural significance and the political dimensions of African matrix dance as practiced and taught in contemporary Brazil. . . . The book provide[s] a multifaceted, first-hand account of inspiring initiatives aimed at preserving and honoring African heritage, promoting social inclusion, and combating stereotypes. . . . The initiatives discussed in the book go beyond the artistic field. By reenacting the traumatic history of the diaspora and exalting the Afro-descendant body, the cases examined represent very needed acts of political defiance, collective strength, and personal empowerment. Richly researched and theoretically sound, the articles in this volume provide a valuable historical background of the struggles of blacks in Brazil from colonial times to present days. . . . Dancing Bahia also broadens the vocabulary and the canon of dance studies and alerts unsuspecting readers to the vibrant dance scene that exists in Brazil well beyond Carnival."

Carlos Cortez Minchillo, Latin American Theatre Review

"This wide-ranging, empirically grounded volume draws together the work of researchers, dancers, community activists and educators engaged in investigating, teaching and performing Afro-Bahian dance to consider how, in a context of pervasive prejudice and marginalisation, dance works to create and sustain critical spaces of education, memory and political possibility. . . . It will be of interest to dance scholars, scholars of Brazil and others looking to think about race, memory and education from a postcolonial, bodily perspective.'

Sofie Narbed, Journal of Latin American Studies