Josephine Baker And Katherine Dunham

Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham were the two most acclaimed and commercially successful African American dancers of their era and among the first black women to enjoy international screen careers. Both also produced fascinating memoirs that provided vital insights into their artistic philosophies and choices. However, difficulties in accessing and categorizing their works on the screen and on the page have obscured their contributions to film and literature. Hannah Durkin investigates Baker and Dunham’s films and writings to shed new light on their legacies as transatlantic artists and civil rights figures. Their trailblazing dancing and choreography reflected a belief that they could use film to confront racist assumptions while also imagining—within significant confines—new aesthetic possibilities for black women. Their writings, meanwhile, revealed their creative process, engagement with criticism, and the ways each mediated cultural constructions of black women's identities. Durkin pays particular attention to the ways dancing bodies function as ever-changing signifiers and de-stabilizing transmitters of cultural identity. In addition, she offers an overdue appraisal of Baker and Dunham's places in cinematic and literary history.

She believes that dancing involves the development of an entire person and that the rituals and traditions of dance are integral to the study of culture. Throughout her career she has been a living model of the socially responsible artist working to wet cultural appetites and combat social injustice. Building on Dunham's published memoirs. A Touch of Innocence and Island Possessed. Joyce Aschenbrenner's multifaceted portrait blends personal observations based on her own interactions with Dunham, archival documents, and interviews with Dunham's colleagues, students, and members of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. Integrating these sources, Aschenbrenner characterizes the social, familial, and cultural environment of Dunham's upbringing and the intellectual and artistic community she embraced at the University of Chicago that laid the groundwork for her development as a dancer, anthropologist, and humanitarian.

Alien Bodies is a fascinating examination of dance in Germany, France, and the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Ranging across ballet and modern dance, dance in the cinema and Revue, Ramsay Burt looks at the work of European, African American, and white American artists. Among the artists who feature are: * Josephine Baker * Jean Borlin * George Balanchine * Jean Cocteau * Valeska Gert * Katherine Dunham * Fernand Leger * Kurt Jooss * Doris Humphrey Concerned with how artists responded to the alienating experiences of modern life, Alien Bodies focuses on issues of: * national and 'racial' identity * the new spaces of modernity * fascists uses of mass spectacles * ritual and primitivism in modern dance * the 'New Woman' and the slender modern body

Charting the intersection of technology and ideology, cultural production and social science, Fatimah Tobing Rony explores early-twentieth-century representations of non-Western indigenous peoples in films ranging from the documentary to the spectacular to the scientific. Turning the gaze of the ethnographic camera back onto itself, bringing the perspective of a third eye to bear on the invention of the primitive other, Rony reveals the collaboration of anthropology and popular culture in Western constructions of race, gender, nation, and empire. Her work demonstrates the significance of these constructions--and, more generally, of ethnographic cinema--for understanding issues of identity. In films as seemingly dissimilar as Nanook of the North, King Kong, and research footage of West Africans from an 1895 Paris ethnographic exposition, Rony exposes a shared fascination with--and anxiety over--race. She shows how photographic "realism" contributed to popular and scientific notions of evolution, race, and civilization, and how, in turn, anthropology understood and critiqued its own use of photographic technology. Looking beyond negative Western images of the Other, Rony considers performance strategies that disrupt these images--for example, the use of open resistance, recontextualization, and parody in the films of Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston, or the performances of Josephine Baker. She also draws on the work of contemporary artists such as Lorna Simpson and Victor Masayesva Jr., and writers such as Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin, who unveil the language of racialization in ethnographic cinema. Elegantly written and richly illustrated, innovative in theory and original in method, The Third Eye is a remarkable interdisciplinary contribution to critical thought in film studies, anthropology, cultural studies, art history, postcolonial studies, and women's studies.

A collection of essays concerning the black body in American dance, EmBODYing Liberation serves as an important contribution to the growing field of scholarship in African American dance, in particular the strategies used by individual artists to contest and liberate racialized stagings of the black body. The collection features special essays by Thomas DeFrantz and Brenda Dixon Gottschild, as well as an interview with Isaac Julien.

American Society for Aesthetics Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award Dancing in Blackness is a professional dancer's personal journey over four decades, across three continents and 23 countries, and through defining moments in the story of black dance in America. In this memoir, Halifu Osumare reflects on what blackness and dance have meant to her life and international career. Osumare's story begins in 1960s San Francisco amid the Black Arts Movement, black militancy, and hippie counterculture. It was there, she says, that she chose dance as her own revolutionary statement. Osumare describes her experiences as a young black dancer in Europe teaching "jazz ballet" and establishing her own dance company in Copenhagen. Moving to New York City, she danced with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company and took part in integrating the programs at the Lincoln Center. After doing dance fieldwork in Ghana, Osumare returned to California and helped develop Oakland’s black dance scene. Osumare introduces readers to some of the major artistic movers and shakers she collaborated with throughout her career, including Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Jean-Leon Destine, Alvin Ailey, and Donald McKayle. Now a black studies scholar, Osumare uses her extraordinary experiences to reveal the overlooked ways that dance has been a vital tool in the black struggle for recognition, justice, and self-empowerment. Her memoir is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist who has boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a black woman.

This project investigates the international film careers and writings of African American dancers Josephine Baker (1906-1975) and Katherine Dunham (1909- 2006) as dynamic sites of identity construction to illuminate the conflicting ways in which individual performances complicate categorisations of "race" and "gender." By exploring the ways in which these two artists mediate popular constructions of black women's identities, my investigation interrogates widely held conceptions of authorship and artistic hierarchies. It provides insights into intercultural identity formations by positioning black women's physical performances as sites on which historical struggles over cultural meanings have been played out and contested. Consequently, this study examines transatlantic struggles for control over pre-Civil Rights era cultural embodiments of black womanhood and seeks to establish these representations as not only diverse, but also deeply complex and polysemous. The thesis turns first to Baker and Dunham's writings. Chapter One analyses three of Baker's co-authored autobiographies, Voyages et aventures de Josephine Baker (1931), Une vie de toutes les couleurs (1935), and Josephine (1978); Chapter Two examines Dunham's anthropological memoirs, Journey to Accompong (1946) and Island Possessed (1969). I argue that these texts complicate contemporaneous racial ideologies and shed light on the autobiographical and intellectual underpinnings of dance performances that were, and continue to be, dismissed as exotic entertainment. Indeed, as with their dance performances, this thesis argues that Baker and Dunham's writings were acts of self-invention and re-invention, as they challenged rigid racial frameworks. I then turn to Baker and Dunham' s films to evidence the contrasting ways in which their performances were translated and received on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapters Three and Four scrutinise Baker's diverse performance strat~gies in French cinema, first as a silent performer and then as a glamorous "star"; Chapter Five considers Dunham's intervention in Second World War-era Hollywood racial codes and Chapter Six compares her representations with her reception in European post-war cinema. Together, Baker and Dunham' s films demonstrate that they sought to intervene in frequently demeaning cultural frameworks by adopting black diasporic dance formations as vehicles for artistic experimentation. Although their creative intentions were complicated by audience interpretations, I show how Baker and Dunham used dance performance to both engage with and contest contemporary racial and gender representations.

Just as surely as Haiti is "possessed" by the gods and spirits of vaudun (voodoo), the island "possessed" Katherine Dunham when she first went there in 1936 to study dance and ritual. In this book, Dunham reveals how her anthropological research, her work in dance, and her fascination for the people and cults of Haiti worked their spell, catapulting her into experiences that she was often lucky to survive. Here Dunham tells how the island came to be possessed by the demons of voodoo and other cults imported from various parts of Africa, as well as by the deep class divisions, particularly between blacks and mulattos, and the political hatred still very much in evidence today. Full of the flare and suspense of immersion in a strange and enchanting culture, Island Possessed is also a pioneering work in the anthropology of dance and a fascinating document on Haitian politics and voodoo.