In Knowing as Moving, Susan Leigh Foster theorizes how the act of moving in and through the world creates the potential for individual and collective bodies to connect. Starting from the assertion that knowing takes place through bodily movement, Foster moves away from the Western philosophical traditions of dance, critiquing the Cartesian mind/body duality and its colonizing politics. She draws on Native and Indigenous studies, ecological cognitive science, disability studies, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore how knowledge is neither static nor storable. Thinking is a physical action and the product of an entire neuromuscular system with its mobile postural and gestural configurations, perceptual systems, and brain activity. Foster outlines how reading, examining, talking, and remembering are all forms of moving and contends that any process of knowing establishes one’s identity and relationality. By focusing on the centrality of bodily movement to thought and self, she contributes a decolonial critique of the study of knowledge and being. In so doing, Foster replaces the Cartesian colonial “I think therefore I am,” with a decolonial “I move and therefore I know.”
Setting Out by Looking Back ix Essaying 1 Walking as Place-Making 13 Being, Knowing, and Acting 36 Embodying the Decolonial 56 Remembering Dancing 78 Dancing’s Affordances 97 Continuing On . . . 121 Notes 123 Bibliography 139 Index 151
Susan Leigh Foster is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author, most recently, of Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion.
“Susan Leigh Foster demonstrates the superb bounty of thinking-as-moving in connectedness to the worlds that surround us. Knowing as Moving elaborates how continued engagement with study reveals worlds beyond worlds of ways to be with ideas in motion. Shimmering with insights gleaned from an exquisite ability to move ideas toward each other, Foster proves again that dancing supports the being-in-time that humans must engage in to participate in the urgent processes of life.” - Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor of Performance Studies and Theatre, Northwestern University
"Susan Leigh Foster is preeminent in dance studies and one of the germinal architects of the field’s successful emergence. Knowing as Moving will count among one of my personal favorites in Foster’s incredibly impressive oeuvre for the bravery and grace with which she takes on the task of thinking ever more laterally through and away from the very same Western philosophy and movement traditions in which she has come up. A broad, beautiful, smart, and timely book.” - Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
