Search Results

This chapter investigates Katherine Dunham’s book-length ethnographies, Journey to Accompong (1946) and Island Possessed (1969), as autobiographical narratives that document the origins of her cross-cultural artistry. These texts recount Dunham’s experiences as a dance anthropologist in mid-1930s Jamaica and Haiti, shortly before she postponed her academic training to pursue a career on the stage and screen. Like Baker’s narratives, both works are highly reflexive and ambiguous and thus deserve recognition within an African American women’s autobiographical tradition. They position Dunham as a self-conscious narrator who immerses herself physically in the cultural practices that she has been assigned to record. Both texts therefore shed light on a much wider lifelong project, namely, Dunham’s attempt to legitimize Caribbean cultures by incorporating their dance rituals into concert dance.

This chapter examines Dunham’s work on Botta e risposta (1950) and Mambo (1954) to highlight the substantial creative freedom that midcentury European cinema granted to a Black woman choreographer. The Dunham company’s portrayal in these films suggests that her troupe’s fame in postwar Europe was filtered through the same crude ideas about Black cultures that informed Baker’s career. And yet within such a framework, Dunham was afforded authorial control over her dance scenes to an extent not possible in Hollywood and, like Baker, used these scenes to present a culturally complex vision of Black womanhood that countered racist misconceptions. The chapter establishes Dunham as a coauthor of Mambo by showing that her choreography is central to its artistic vision.

This chapter examines Dunham’s interventions in World War II-era U.S. cinema. Focusing on three of Dunham’s Hollywood films, Carnival of Rhythm (1941), Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), and Stormy Weather (1943), the chapter recovers Dunham’s groundbreaking contribution as a Black woman choreographer to midcentury U.S. cinema. Establishing that Dunham was the first Black choreographer to gain onscreen credit for her work in Hollywood, it shows how her performances represented a negotiation of studio-era racial codes but also how she mediated such codes and was able to assert her authorship by presenting a vision of Black dancing womanhood in Hollywood that was pioneering its open engagement with sensuality, cultural diversity, and choreographic allusions to ballet and modern dance.

This book explores Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham’s contributions to the page and screen to shed new light on their intellectual interventions as Black women artists in midcentury transatlantic culture. Cinematic and literary spaces were for Baker and Dunham sites of mediation and marginalization in which they frequently shared authorship with white men. Yet they are also rare visual and textual records of Black women dancers’ midcentury artistry and authorship. On the page, they voiced the challenges of navigating interwar global spaces as young Black women, and their narratives shed vital light on the origins and purpose of their art. On the screen, they claimed the right to stardom while at the same time retaining some artistic autonomy and even shaping their films’ aesthetics.

“The Unofficial Ambassador of Diaspora: Performing Abroad” examines how Dunham navigated Cold War politics as she toured the globe between 1947 and 1960. Though the US State Department denied her the opportunity to be an official US cultural ambassador, in large part because she performed the anti-lynching ballet Southland (1950) in Chile and Paris, she served as an unofficial ambassador of the African diaspora. She exposed international audiences to an aesthetic of modernity rooted in Africanist culture and forged relationships with leading black intellectuals, politicians, and artists in the countries she visited. In its embrace of Africanist and indigenous cultural heritages, her company was a model for the national dance companies that would emerge after decolonization. She also spoke out against discrimination. In Brazil, for example, her protest against the Esplanada Hotel for refusing her a hotel room led to the passage of a national anti-discrimination law.

“Race and Representation During World War II” examines the choices Dunham made about racial representation both onstage and off during World War II. In 1941, Dunham settled in Hollywood to make films such as Carnival of Rhythm, Star Spangled Rhythm, and Stormy Weather. Hollywood gave Dunham national exposure, but also gave critics fodder to accuse her of cheapening her artistry. Her 1943 show Tropical Revue was a major hit on Broadway and subsequently toured the country for eighteen months. The show set off debates about whether Dunham was an artist or entertainer, debates that revealed racialized assumptions about black women dancers. The company faced rampant discrimination on tour as they struggled to find hotels and restaurants that would serve them, leading Dunham to take a more public and vocal stance against segregation. The chapter also discusses the political ramifications of Dunham’s relationships with white men, including husband John Pratt.

Katherine Dunham is revered as one of the great pillars of American dance. Her world-renowned dance company exposed audiences to the diversity of dance from the 1930s-1960s and her New York school brought dance training to a variety of populations. As an anthropologist, her research brought works of performance ethnography to the concert and commercial stage. Dunham’s anthropological emphasis and creative investment in African Diasporan culture and traditions positioned her as an antecedent for the emergence of many dance and music traditions including the evolution of jazz dance. Importantly, in the 13 years of its existence, Dunham’s school in New York aided in the evolution and dissemination of a basic jazz dance vocabulary. Her style of jazz dance, known as “Dunham Jazz” flourished with the evolution of Dunham Technique, and her work as an educator positioned her as a pioneering force in the evolution of jazz dance.

This chapter reflects on enrichment, frustration and a feeling of being made humble that has come across from long-standing academic connections to Haiti and Haitian studies. The chapter aims to engage anthropology and the arts in the context of the ‘modern’, as these have factored in Haiti's perception in the wider world. The chapter describes the traces and stakes of a personal scholarly path — and Haiti's role therein — by offering a reading of Katherine Dunham's 1969 memoir and ethnography Island Possessed. It analyzes Dunham's critique of the discipline of anthropology, an explicit evocation of emotion — and of love in particular — and attentiveness to both the limitations of a anthropological practice of intimacy as well as the singular opportunities presented by indeterminate status vis-à-vis both race and gender norms. The chapter also considers Dunham's choices as an African-American performer and ethnologist, paying attention to the strategies and the risks underlying her pioneering practice of dance anthropology.

“Living Diaspora in Haiti and Senegal” analyzes Dunham’s years spent living in those two nations as an investigation into fashioning a diasporic life. In 1949, Dunham purchased Habitation Leclerc, an estate on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. She made plans to start a school, library, museum, and research institute on her property, but none of these came to fruition. Instead Leclerc became a resort hotel, causing dissatisfaction with some local residents. She continued to advocate for Haiti even when living in the United States, going on a hunger strike at age eighty-two to protest against the treatment of Haitian refugees. Dunham also lived in Senegal from 1965 to 1967, where she caused friction in her roles as a Special Ambassador to the Dakar Festival and consultant to the National Ballet. The chapter raises the question of what it means to live in and act in solidarity with another country.

The introduction explains the book’s main premise that Katherine Dunham was an important intellectual and activist in the long black freedom struggle of the twentieth century. It argues that she made two primary contributions to this movement. First, she made dance a part of the fight for racial equality, asserting that embodied expressive culture was an important tool of liberation for people of African descent. Second, she emphasized the international dimensions of the movement, conceptualizing the African diaspora as the sphere for political activism against racism and oppression. The chapter delineates the various strategies Dunham employed, both onstage and off, to pursue her social justice goals. The introduction also acknowledges the dilemmas she poses to scholars who write about her, namely, her insistence on using the word “primitive” to describe her choreography and her conflicted feelings about the category of “black dance.”

“Becoming a New Negro in Chicago” delves into Dunham’s childhood and young adulthood in order to understand her artistic and intellectual foundations. Her early years in the Chicago suburbs were filled with family trauma, but also taught her how to navigate race, class, and colorism divisions. When she moved to the city in 1928, Dunham joined the University of Chicago anthropology department, the New Negro Movement, and Chicago’s dance community. The chapter analyzes how she brought these three worlds together to articulate a place for dance in the fight for racial equality. Her first effort, the Ballet Nègre with Mark Turbyfill, folded quickly. Her second, the Negro Dance Group with Ludmila Speranzeva, was more successful, but Dunham felt that her knowledge of Africanist culture practices was lacking. She turned to anthropology to fill in the gaps and thus achieve her dream of presenting black dance as an art form.

“Aesthetics as Politics” discusses how and why Dunham decided that her primary strategy to fight racism would be to create beautiful choreography rooted in Africanist aesthetics. After returning from the Caribbean in 1936, Dunham initially struggled to figure out her career path. She pursued a master’s degree in anthropology while also starting her own dance company, all during the difficult days of the Great Depression. From 1936 to 1939, she experimented with various modes of artistic expression, including ballet, agitation-propaganda Popular Front dances, and performed ethnographies based on her Caribbean research. During this time she met her husband, John Pratt, who would become the company’s primary designer. Ultimately, Dunham settled on an aesthetic of fusion that had Afro-Caribbean dance as its foundation. The chapter analyzes her dance L’Ag’Ya (1938) and revue Tropics and Le Jazz “Hot” (1940) to illustrate what she achieved and what remained illegible to her audiences.

The Epilogue examines Dunham’s influence as an artist, activist, and intellectual. It discusses efforts within the dance world to preserve her legacy, namely, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s 1987–88 performances of The Magic of Katherine Dunham, disputes over licensing her choreography, and difficulties that the Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities (KDCAH) and Institute for Dunham Technique Certification (IDTC) have faced in promoting her technique. The Epilogue considers how her influence resonates beyond the dance world and concludes that she is a role model for how to be an artist committed to social justice.

“Finding a Politics of Diaspora in the Caribbean” examines how Dunham’s ethnographic research trip to the Caribbean transformed her perspective on the political potential of black dance. While in Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, and Haiti, Dunham broke with existing methods of anthropology by rejecting her mentor Melville Herskovits’ recommendation merely to observe rituals, participating in them instead. Haiti had a particularly strong influence on her. Her initiation into Vodou gave her an understanding of the spiritual importance of cultural connections to Africa. She began to believe that liberation from racial oppression was inextricably intertwined with defining oneself as part of a global majority of people of color. The chapter briefly investigates the relationship between Dunham and another American ethnographer, Zora Neale Hurston, and concludes with an analysis of Dunham’s never-performed ballet Christophe to gain insight into how she theorized the relationship between dance and political revolution.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s key arguments. It reflects on the significance of Baker and Dunham’s memoirs and films in revealing the limitations of their roles as midcentury Black women artists and also their authorship despite such restrictions and their important contributions to literature and cinema. Baker and Dunham’s memoirs show how they each used dance to engage self-reflexively with pseudo-ethnographic tropes and to contest dehumanizing attitudes to Black Atlantic cultures and identities. Such texts reveal the origins of their antiracist philosophies and call attention to their international contributions to the civil rights and Black Arts movements. Equally, their screen careers expand our understanding of African American film history by revealing key moments of early Black female stardom and authorship beyond the realm of Hollywood.

This chapter examines how Erich Fromm became involved in progressive causes in America. In 1932, Wilhelm Reich, who, like Fromm, was also attentive to the extreme danger posed by Adolf Hitler, presented the paper The Mass Psychology of Fascism to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. To some extent, Fromm’s Escape from Freedom elaborated on the argument of Reich’s book. Although Escape from Freedom focused more on the social psychology of freedom and the threats of conformity and authoritarianism than on the particulars of the Hitler regime, Fromm was deeply apprehensive about the state of German politics. Fromm decided to emigrate in May 1934, living for a time in Switzerland before traveling through Paris to Southampton and from there to New York. This chapter looks at how the Culture and Personality movement provided an important backdrop for Fromm while he was writing Escape from Freedom in America, as well as the people who played important roles while he was writing his book, including Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, Margaret Mead, and Katherine Dunham.

Page’s first large-scale ballet, La Guiablesse, is most famous for its casting of a twenty-three-year-old Katherine Dunham. Produced for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, A Century of Progress, the ballet featured Page as the She-Devil, opposite an otherwise all-black cast. Later, Page asked Dunham to assume the title role and to restage the ballet for the Chicago Grand Opera; then, the mentor turned the performance rights to the ballet over to her mentee. La Guiablesse was quite a feat of intercultural communication: a Martinique folk tale recorded by Lafcadio Hearn, an immigrant European American folklorist; envisioned as a ballet scenario by Page, a globe-trotting Midwestern choreographer; given life as a ballet score by William Grant Still, an African American composer with classical and jazz roots; and made into choreography in a process that blurred authorship between white choreographer and black performer and her troupe. This chapter “re-choreographs” the ballet through an intertextual reading of the original folktale, the music score and recording, the ballet scenario, the choreographer’s notebook, and Chicago reviews and press coverage, considering the subtext of the ballet within the frame of what each of the collaborators brought to the project. Page’s previous excursions into world dance, Hearn’s cross-cultural studies of folklore, Still’s trajectory as a composer who strove to fuse musical classicism with African American idioms of the blues and jazz, and Dunham’s education and early successes figure into the picture, as do the contexts of the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago jazz scene of the period.

The cast of the original production of On the Town included six African Americans (four dancers and two singers). This chapter uses On the Town as a lens to explore the struggle for racial equality in performance during World War II. A cluster of case studies offer perspectives on the era’s mixed-race performance. They include early productions of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (1937-38) which employed a mixed-race chorus and a black choreographer (Clarence Yates); the so-called “collaboration” of the black choreographer Katherine Dunham and her white colleague George Balanchine on the choreography of Cabin in the Sky (1940); the production of Black Ritual (Obeah) (1940), employing African American dancers and choreographed by the white dancer Agnes de Mille for Ballet Theatre’s inaugural season; and the temporary closure of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom (1943), which famously featured mixed-race dancing. The chapter also analyses the racial dynamics onstage in On the Town.