ABSTRACT
The most recent essay reprinted in this volume charts what for me is the future of embodied research: its engagement with critical race theory and the politics of decolonization. Building on my prior definitions and reworkings of embodiment, I put forward a concept of embodied arts that embraces not only performing arts but also martial, healing, ritual, sexual, and other “arts” as fields of knowledge and practice. The middle part of this essay is intended as a kind of primer or brief literature review in decolonial theory for embodied researchers grappling with their own postcolonial and neocolonial positions. The final section points to the decolonization of white bodies as a contradictory obligation facing all of us who work in predominantly white institutions. I close with a call for artistic and embodied research to learn more from cultural studies, black studies, indigenous studies, and other fields in which the notion of embodiment may be equally central but very differently understood. 1
