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Chapter6 Woman Dancing Culture: Katherine Dunham's Dance/Anthropology Like Sterling Brown, Katherine Dunham's youth and association with environs other than New York make her an unlikely subject to include in a study of a movement typically associated with Harlem in the twenties and thirties. While she was a young student at the University of Chicago between 1927 and 1936, however, Dunham's intellectual formation was influenced by key figures associated with the movement, like Charles Johnson, and her artistic and social agenda mirrored those of New Negro artists and intellectuals including Hurston, Brown, Johnson, and Du Bois, all of which merits her inclusion in considerations of this period.1 If we think of the Renaissance as a discursive formation rather than as a geographically and temporarily delimited period, then Dunham's investment in reclaiming African Diasporic folk traditions, her belief in the socially and politically redemptive power ofAfrican American artistic and cultural achievement, and her use of anthropology to radically re-envision discourses on race and culture make her a critical member of the New Negro movement. Dunham was born in 1909 into a middle-class household in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, near Chicago. She is best known as a dancer and choreographer who appeared on Broadway, on concert stages, and in Hollywood films, especially during the 1930s and 1940s but also for many years after that. The place of her choreography in the canon of American modern dance was cemented by her creation of an eponymous modern dance technique that combines AfroCaribbean , modern, and ballet styles and by her creation of the first African American dance troupe to appear on the concert stage and in films. Finally, she is recognized for her pioneering work in the field of dance anthropology. Dunham went on to write an important ethnography ofHaiti that focused on dance traditions called "Dances of Haiti" (1947). Her work in dance circles closely followed the model of other Harlem Renaissance intellectuals in that she saw herself as an artist who translated African American and African Diasporic folk materials in an effort to transform mainstream perceptions ofthe 116 Chapter 6 people who produced these dances and to expand conceptions of American cultural and national identities to include the contributions of Black people. Dunham possessed the New Negro conviction that artistic excellence could change opinions and lead to a more egalitarian society for Blacks, and she sought to reclaim and recuperate African Diasporic folk traditions. On the concert stage, she explored the transmission and invention of African American identity through performance. Even when her choreography focused on representing traditional settings or dances, her emphasis was on reenvisioning African Americans' future possibilities. Dunham's stage work and film choreography participate in a symbolic New Negro progression into modernity. Moreover, her writing, specifically her memoir, shares with her choreography a concern with diasporic continuities and discontinuities. Dunham is, in other words, a significant theorist ofculture and identity, who should be associated with the New Negro movement and whose legacy we must fully reckon with. Despite her importance as an artist, writer, and anthropologist, Dunham 's influence was not fully recognized until recently outside of modern dance circles. Her influence as a scholar is still not adequately appreciated and accounted for in histories of the formation of modern anthropology. Nor has literary criticism of African American modernism fully accounted for her importance, despite the fact that her presence offers an ideal opportunity to consider more broadly the cultural achievements ofthe Renaissance beyond the literary successes of its members. We can attribute Dunham's marginalization in both histories of the Harlem Renaissance and of American anthropology to the male-oriented focus of early and influential histories of modern anthropology and the Harlem Renaissance.2 Reading these texts underscores several commonalities across the wide spectrum of intellectuals and culture-workers on whom they focus. The primary actors in both of these movements (Boas and Du Bois would be the models against which others were measured) shared a passion for and investment in intellectual work; they took advantage of and indeed where shaped by opportunities to travel internationally, which contributed in large part to the self-identification of the New Negro as cosmopolitan subjects; and they possessed , to varying degrees, institutional power that enabled their efforts to define and shape academic, cultural, and political developments. New Negro women, while they shared the same intellectual and political commitments, were often overlooked because the perception was that they lacked institutional power in the academy, or in...

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