Katherine Dunham

Reviews / Votes

Das offers a balanced and loving account of a complex person living and dancing across complex times (nearly a century, 1909-2006). She presents Dunham's history as a deft and daring navigation of a uniquely American tangle of racial, gender, and class norms. * Sima Belmar, Dancers Group * 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 ... lively descriptions of seminal ballets, including early works that were proposed but never performed ... Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. * Choice * Katherine Dunham is an important addition to the field of dance studies, critical race studies, and transnational American studies, as the book, like its subject, defies easy categorization. At once a cogent biography and an exemplary case study in the messiness and, oten, the riskiness of diasporic politics and performance. Katherine Dunham will no doubt prove instructive to scholars and students across dsciplines. * Doria E. Charlson, DRJ * Joanna Dee Das brilliantly congeals historiography and dance studies, giving us a probing inquiry of new diasporan perspectives on Katherine Dunham as one of the most complex world dance figures of the 20th century. Das meticulous archival research reveals longed-for details about Dunhams awareness of her Africanist aesthetic in dance and her constant fight against racism what Das astutely calls her politics of diaspora. * Halifu Osumare, Professor Emerita, University of California, Davis and former co-director, Institute for Dunham Technique Certification * The first scholar to fully plumb the archive, Joanna Dee Das offers an incisive portrait of Dunham as artist and activist whose multifaceted career profoundly shaped understandings of the African diaspora in her time and in ours. * Susan Manning, Professor of English, Theatre, and Performance Studies, Northwestern University *