Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham : dances in literature and cinema / Hannah Durkin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Durkin, Hannah, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Baker, Josephine, 1906-1975--Criticism and interpretation.

Baker, Josephine.

Dunham, Katherine--Criticism and interpretation.

Dunham, Katherine.

Baker, Josephine, 1906-1975.

African American women dancers--Biography--History and criticism.

African American women dancers.

African American women dancers--Biography.

Dance in literature.

Dance in motion pictures, television, etc--United States.

Dance in motion pictures, television, etc.

Biography.

Criticism and interpretation.

United States.

Dance in motion pictures, television, etc--Europe.

Europe.

African Americans in motion pictures.

Genre:

Biographies.

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xiii, 256 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2019]

Summary:

"This project examines the writings and international film careers of Josephine Baker (1906-1975) and Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), the two most critically and commercially successful Black women dancers of the twentieth century. Drawing on previously unexamined films and texts, Hannah Durkin maps the intellectual underpinnings and visual impact of their art. By examining the narratives and dance of Baker and Hunham, Durkin is able to shed new light on the ways in which the dancers were received on both sides of the Atlantic and how they engaged personally with dominant critical interpretations of Black performance as crude and innate. The project uncovers their self-reflexive narrative strategies and provides evidence for their path-breaking interventions in cinema as stars and choreographers who believed that they could use film to contest racist frameworks and imagine new aesthetic possibilities for Black women. By analyzing the methods by which these two artists mediated popular constructions of Black women's identities, the investigation interrogates widely held conceptions of authorship and artistic hierarchies. It provides insights into intercultural identity formations by positioning Black women's bodily performances as sites on which historical struggles over cultural meanings have been played out and contested. Finally, by tracing connections between Baker and Dunham's performances and their lifelong fights against racial injustice, Durkin recovers Baker and Durham as key figures in the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements and exposes the transatlantic struggles regarding control over cultural embodiments of Black women in a pre-Civil Rights era"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The dancer in translation : Baker's coauthored narratives

The dancer as translator : Dunham's ethnographic memoirs

Performing within primitivism : Baker on the French silent screen

Cinematic stardom : Baker and the 1930s French musical film

Cinematic segregation : Dunham in World War II Hollywood

Navigating primitivism's persistent gaze : Dunham in postwar European cinema.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-243) and index.

ISBN:

9780252042621

025204262X

9780252084454

0252084454

OCLC:

1096517883