Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham

This article situates Hurston's largely neglected theatrical presentations of West Indian folk dance alongside the better-known dance work of Baker and Dunham in order to trace shifts in the racialized meanings surrounding black vernacular dance stagings in the early decades of the twentieth century. A comparative survey of the three artists exposes an important if complicated historical transition from stereotypical representations of black primitivity to more nuanced representations of a black diaspora.