Daniel Coleman
Assistant Professor Africana Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies- Education
PhD in Communication Studies (Performance Studies), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017
MA in Theatre Arts (Performance Studies), San Jose State University, 2011
BA in Latin American Studies, California State University, East Bay, 2008
- Biography
Dr. Daniel Coleman (he/they) is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Affiliate Faculty Member in Africana Studies. Dr. Coleman is a performance artist, dancer/choreographer, poet, and transdisciplinary artist-scholar who prioritizes both performance mediums and written scholarship. Prior to joining Georgia State, he was an Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Dr. Coleman’s current art practice and research query the colonial limitations of the ontological and epistemological foundations of the Human in the hemispheric Americas (after Sylvia Wynter), with an emphasis on the United States and Mexico. He is invested in how colonial forces, from the onset of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Native/Indigenous genocide, have used colonial and eugenicist racial and gender logics to exclude Black, Native/Indigenous, women, queer, and trans people from its Human project. From this groundwork, he asks questions about creative and activist projects born of spiritual-political otherwise formation and led by women, queer, and trans people, that require us to reckon with the absented universalizing cosmologies that underwrite the exclusionary Human project. In this reckoning, Dr. Coleman’s work expands the growing body of scholarship about the pluriverse and how other cosmologies access many worlds.
Dr. Coleman's present book project, For Life! Pedagogical Lessons from the Pluriverse, uses the theoretical and methodological frameworks of decolonial pedagogies and lineages of Black, decolonial, and trans feminisms to demonstrate how creative and activist projects in Southern Mexico (Chiapas) and the Southern U.S. (North Carolina) exist in and/or carve open access to the pluriverse. He also utilizes elements of performance praxis (practice and theory) to think, sense, and theorize from each location. Utilizing four “case studies” that bring these souths into local-global relation, he thinks with Afro-diasporic and Black and Native/Indigenous thought/cosmologies to listen to the spiritual-political work of Black and Native/Indigenous people refusing certain modern/colonial violences as world-making work. In so doing, Dr. Coleman also theorizes the onto-epistemic openings these pluriversal projects create for Black and Native/Indigenous peoples in the project of the Human and its notion of a singular world.
Dr. Coleman’s publications appear in Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic, Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose, Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose, The Black Trans Prayer Book, and forthcoming (2023) in The Black Scholar, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Queer Studies and Communication, and Geographies of Us: An Ecosomatic/s Reader.
Academia.edu page: gsu.academia.edu/DanielColeman
Research Interests
- Black, trans, and decolonial feminisms, Black trans studies
- Performance studies, oral history performance, Performance As Research, cultural studies, ecosomatics
- Ontology, epistemology, and Afro-diasporic and Native/Indigenous metaphysics
- Africana thought in the Americas
- Decolonial pedagogies
- Native/Indigenous cosmologies in Southern Mexico, Afro-diasporic cosmologies, Africana Esoteric Studies (AES)
- Political and artistic movement work for/by women, queer, trans, Black, and Native/Indigenous people