Guilaine Kinouani
Guilaine Kinouani is the director and founder of Race Reflections. She is a psychologist and clinician with over 15 years of experience working with issues of equality and justice in the fields of community development, research, management, organisational consultancy, training and psychotherapy. As an educator, Guilaine has taught critical psychology and black studies to undergraduates and widely shares a scholarship through various mediums.
Guilaine’s first book Living While Black: The essential guide to overcoming Racial Trauma (Ebury: Penguin Random House) is a powerful exposé of the lived experience of various manifestations of racism and their impact on the mind and body through arresting case studies, eye-opening research and effective and innovative coping techniques.
For her PhD, she hopes to pursue her scholarship on whiteness, coloniality and racial trauma focusing on how the clinical encounter may become a vector of racialised violence and resistance.
For Africana people music is a deeply spiritual practice. Throughout the centuries we have used music to share stories, transmit heritage, sustain community and resist oppression. Our musical practices and the way we move our bodies to rhythms are deeply connected to African philosophical assumptions concerning cosmology, ontology, axiology, and epistemology. In this musical intervention, I will seek to use Congolese music and dance to illustrate these points and make the case that the rhythms of the Congo, are a rich source of creative and erotic energy with the potential to disrupt the disembodied, dissociative and individualistic ways of being-in-the world that lie at the core of the colonial project and which sustain racialised world orders. As such, it is my claim that engagement with these rhythms has the potential to help connect psychosocial methodologists with alternative imaginaries and ontological practices.
Guilaine’s first book Living While Black: The essential guide to overcoming Racial Trauma (Ebury: Penguin Random House) is a powerful exposé of the lived experience of various manifestations of racism and their impact on the mind and body through arresting case studies, eye-opening research and effective and innovative coping techniques.
For her PhD, she hopes to pursue her scholarship on whiteness, coloniality and racial trauma focusing on how the clinical encounter may become a vector of racialised violence and resistance.
Abstract
For Africana people music is a deeply spiritual practice. Throughout the centuries we have used music to share stories, transmit heritage, sustain community and resist oppression. Our musical practices and the way we move our bodies to rhythms are deeply connected to African philosophical assumptions concerning cosmology, ontology, axiology, and epistemology. In this musical intervention, I will seek to use Congolese music and dance to illustrate these points and make the case that the rhythms of the Congo, are a rich source of creative and erotic energy with the potential to disrupt the disembodied, dissociative and individualistic ways of being-in-the world that lie at the core of the colonial project and which sustain racialised world orders. As such, it is my claim that engagement with these rhythms has the potential to help connect psychosocial methodologists with alternative imaginaries and ontological practices.