Katherine Dunham : dance and the African diaspora /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Das, Joanna Dee author.
Imprint:New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2017]
Description:xi, 276 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Language:English
Subject:Dunham, Katherine.
Dunham, Katherine.
Dancers -- United States -- Biography.
Women dancers -- United States -- Biography.
African American dancers -- Biography.
Anthropologists -- United States -- Biography.
African American anthropologists -- Biography.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Entertainment & Performing Arts.
PERFORMING ARTS -- Dance -- Modern.
African American anthropologists.
African American dancers.
Anthropologists.
Dancers.
Women dancers.
United States.
Biography.
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11293407
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780190264871
019026487X
9780190264901
019026490X
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Review by Choice Review

Dee Das (Washington Univ., St. Louis) offers a smoothly written account of the challenges surrounding celebrity artist and activist Katherine Dunham (1909-2006). The author establishes "politics of diaspora" as an analytic mode to connect Dunham's research and political aspirations in the Caribbean--especially Haiti--to her work in Senegal and the US. Dee Das explores ways that race constrained and enlivened Dunham's creative process, and she includes lively descriptions of seminal ballets, including early works that were proposed but never performed. This is not a detailed biography, but rather an exploration of aspects of Dunham's achievement told with an eye toward her uneven record of success. The author asserts that a "tension between racial identification and class distinction" supported Dunham's self-fashioning as part of a global intellectual elite that imagined beyond race. Dee Das also notes difficulties presented by governmental interference in funding and social resistance to Dunham's bisexuality. She argues that Dunham explored "aesthetics as politics" and "sought to redefine who could represent universal human themes and be the face of modern embodied expression." An extensive account of financial challenges surrounding Dunham's public operations is included, but there is little detail of her personal wealth or its sources. A complete chronology of Dunham's creative life, travels, and commendations would have been useful. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. --Thomas F. DeFrantz, Duke University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), creator of the Dunham technique of dance, was talented, ambitious, intelligent, and determined to use dance as a way to embody and interpret the black experience. Although her dance companies, business partnerships, and schools had varying degrees of stability and longevity, her energy was unflagging as she traveled throughout the United States, the Caribbean, Haiti, Europe, and elsewhere, researching, teaching, and performing black dance and movement styles, beginning in the late 1920s. Dee Das (dance, -Washington Univ., St. Louis) uses previously unpublished material from several archives, as well as personal interviews with Dunham associates, published articles, and reviews to examine the artist's complex roles as dance ethnographer, choreographer, political activist, fundraiser, writer, mentor, and personal partner. Dunham exerted a powerful influence, particularly (but not limited to) how movement could interpret and express the African American experience from the 1930s to the 1960s. VERDICT This scholarly work links Dunham's intersecting influences in the arenas of dance, politics, and the quest for racial equality and understanding. Suitable for academic dance and performance collections.-Maggie Knapp, Trinity Valley Sch., Fort Worth, TX © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Choice Review


Review by Library Journal Review