Download or read book Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham written by Hannah Durkin and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-08-16 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham were the two most acclaimed and commercially successful African American dancers of their era and among the first black women to enjoy international screen careers. Both also produced fascinating memoirs that provided vital insights into their artistic philosophies and choices. However, difficulties in accessing and categorizing their works on the screen and on the page have obscured their contributions to film and literature. Hannah Durkin investigates Baker and Dunham’s films and writings to shed new light on their legacies as transatlantic artists and civil rights figures. Their trailblazing dancing and choreography reflected a belief that they could use film to confront racist assumptions while also imagining—within significant confines—new aesthetic possibilities for black women. Their writings, meanwhile, revealed their creative process, engagement with criticism, and the ways each mediated cultural constructions of black women's identities. Durkin pays particular attention to the ways dancing bodies function as ever-changing signifiers and de-stabilizing transmitters of cultural identity. In addition, she offers an overdue appraisal of Baker and Dunham's places in cinematic and literary history.
Download or read book Katherine Dunham written by Joyce Aschenbrenner and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She believes that dancing involves the development of an entire person and that the rituals and traditions of dance are integral to the study of culture. Throughout her career she has been a living model of the socially responsible artist working to wet cultural appetites and combat social injustice. Building on Dunham's published memoirs. A Touch of Innocence and Island Possessed. Joyce Aschenbrenner's multifaceted portrait blends personal observations based on her own interactions with Dunham, archival documents, and interviews with Dunham's colleagues, students, and members of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. Integrating these sources, Aschenbrenner characterizes the social, familial, and cultural environment of Dunham's upbringing and the intellectual and artistic community she embraced at the University of Chicago that laid the groundwork for her development as a dancer, anthropologist, and humanitarian.
Download or read book Alien Bodies written by Ramsay Burt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alien Bodies is a fascinating examination of dance in Germany, France, and the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Ranging across ballet and modern dance, dance in the cinema and Revue, Ramsay Burt looks at the work of European, African American, and white American artists. Among the artists who feature are: * Josephine Baker * Jean Borlin * George Balanchine * Jean Cocteau * Valeska Gert * Katherine Dunham * Fernand Leger * Kurt Jooss * Doris Humphrey Concerned with how artists responded to the alienating experiences of modern life, Alien Bodies focuses on issues of: * national and 'racial' identity * the new spaces of modernity * fascists uses of mass spectacles * ritual and primitivism in modern dance * the 'New Woman' and the slender modern body
Download or read book The Third Eye written by Fatimah Tobing Rony and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charting the intersection of technology and ideology, cultural production and social science, Fatimah Tobing Rony explores early-twentieth-century representations of non-Western indigenous peoples in films ranging from the documentary to the spectacular to the scientific. Turning the gaze of the ethnographic camera back onto itself, bringing the perspective of a third eye to bear on the invention of the primitive other, Rony reveals the collaboration of anthropology and popular culture in Western constructions of race, gender, nation, and empire. Her work demonstrates the significance of these constructions--and, more generally, of ethnographic cinema--for understanding issues of identity. In films as seemingly dissimilar as Nanook of the North, King Kong, and research footage of West Africans from an 1895 Paris ethnographic exposition, Rony exposes a shared fascination with--and anxiety over--race. She shows how photographic "realism" contributed to popular and scientific notions of evolution, race, and civilization, and how, in turn, anthropology understood and critiqued its own use of photographic technology. Looking beyond negative Western images of the Other, Rony considers performance strategies that disrupt these images--for example, the use of open resistance, recontextualization, and parody in the films of Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston, or the performances of Josephine Baker. She also draws on the work of contemporary artists such as Lorna Simpson and Victor Masayesva Jr., and writers such as Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin, who unveil the language of racialization in ethnographic cinema. Elegantly written and richly illustrated, innovative in theory and original in method, The Third Eye is a remarkable interdisciplinary contribution to critical thought in film studies, anthropology, cultural studies, art history, postcolonial studies, and women's studies.
Download or read book Dancing in Blackness written by Halifu Osumare and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2019-02-08 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Society for Aesthetics Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award Dancing in Blackness is a professional dancer's personal journey over four decades, across three continents and 23 countries, and through defining moments in the story of black dance in America. In this memoir, Halifu Osumare reflects on what blackness and dance have meant to her life and international career. Osumare's story begins in 1960s San Francisco amid the Black Arts Movement, black militancy, and hippie counterculture. It was there, she says, that she chose dance as her own revolutionary statement. Osumare describes her experiences as a young black dancer in Europe teaching "jazz ballet" and establishing her own dance company in Copenhagen. Moving to New York City, she danced with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company and took part in integrating the programs at the Lincoln Center. After doing dance fieldwork in Ghana, Osumare returned to California and helped develop Oakland’s black dance scene. Osumare introduces readers to some of the major artistic movers and shakers she collaborated with throughout her career, including Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Jean-Leon Destine, Alvin Ailey, and Donald McKayle. Now a black studies scholar, Osumare uses her extraordinary experiences to reveal the overlooked ways that dance has been a vital tool in the black struggle for recognition, justice, and self-empowerment. Her memoir is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist who has boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a black woman.
Download or read book Island Possessed written by Katherine Dunham and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 2012-05-16 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as surely as Haiti is "possessed" by the gods and spirits of vaudun (voodoo), the island "possessed" Katherine Dunham when she first went there in 1936 to study dance and ritual. In this book, Dunham reveals how her anthropological research, her work in dance, and her fascination for the people and cults of Haiti worked their spell, catapulting her into experiences that she was often lucky to survive. Here Dunham tells how the island came to be possessed by the demons of voodoo and other cults imported from various parts of Africa, as well as by the deep class divisions, particularly between blacks and mulattos, and the political hatred still very much in evidence today. Full of the flare and suspense of immersion in a strange and enchanting culture, Island Possessed is also a pioneering work in the anthropology of dance and a fascinating document on Haitian politics and voodoo.
Download or read book Embodying Liberation written by Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2001 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays concerning the black body in American dance, EmBODYing Liberation serves as an important contribution to the growing field of scholarship in African American dance, in particular the strategies used by individual artists to contest and liberate racialized stagings of the black body. The collection features special essays by Thomas DeFrantz and Brenda Dixon Gottschild, as well as an interview with Isaac Julien.
Download or read book Josephine written by Jean-Claude Baker and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revelatory biography of Folies Bergere dancer Josephine Baker (1906-1975) is a study of struggle, truimph and tragedy.
Download or read book Notable Black American Women written by Jessie Carney Smith and published by VNR AG. This book was released on 1992 with total page 842 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arranged alphabetically from "Alice of Dunk's Ferry" to "Jean Childs Young," this volume profiles 312 Black American women who have achieved national or international prominence.
Download or read book Second Skin written by Anne Anlin Cheng and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What does a black burlesque star have to do with some of the most enduring and passionate ideas in modern aesthetic theory? Josephine Baker emerges in this untold story as a principal figure in the drama behind the making of Euro-American Modernism. Instead of seeing her nude performances as a Primitivist given, Cheng argues that Baker's skin was central to debates about and desire for "pure surface" that crystalized at the convergence of modern art, architecture, machinery, and philosophy. Taking the reader across the Atlantic - through real stages and imagined houses; banana plantations and ocean lines; metallic bodies and radiant cities-this study tracks the ardent and protean conversa-tion between the making of a Modernist style and the staging of a new black visuality. In this account, Baker and the Modernists known to have adored and objectified her in fact share a common dream: the fantasy of remaking and wearing the skin of the other"--
Download or read book The Race Card written by Richard Thompson Ford and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2009-03-03 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of the Year What do hurricane Katrina victims, millionaire rappers buying vintage champagne, and Ivy League professors waiting for taxis have in common? All have claimed to be victims of racism. But these days almost no one openly defends bigoted motives, so either a lot of people are lying about their true beliefs, or a lot of people are jumping to unwarranted conclusions--or just playing the race card. Daring, entertaining, and incisive, The Race Card brings sophisticated legal analysis, eye-popping anecdotes, and plain old common sense to this heated topic.
Download or read book Katherine Dunham written by Joanna Dee Das and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most important dance artists of the twentieth century, dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) created works that thrilled audiences the world over. As an African American woman, she broke barriers of race and gender, most notably as the founder of an important dance company that toured the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Australia for several decades. Through both her company and her schools, she influenced generations of performers for years to come, from Alvin Ailey to Marlon Brando to Eartha Kitt. Dunham was also one of the first choreographers to conduct anthropological research about dance and translate her findings for the theatrical stage. Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora makes the argument that Dunham was more than a dancer-she was an intellectual and activist committed to using dance to fight for racial justice. Dunham saw dance as a tool of liberation, as a way for people of African descent to reclaim their history and forge a new future. She put her theories into motion not only through performance, but also through education, scholarship, travel, and choices about her own life. Author Joanna Dee Das examines how Dunham struggled to balance artistic dreams, personal desires, economic needs, and political commitments in the face of racism and sexism. The book analyzes Dunham's multiple spheres of engagement, assessing her dance performances as a form of black feminist protest while also presenting new material about her schools in New York and East St. Louis, her work in Haiti, and her network of interlocutors that included figures as diverse as ballet choreographer George Balanchine and Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor. It traces Dunham's influence over the course of several decades from the New Negro Movement of the 1920s to the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and beyond. By drawing on a vast, never-utilized trove of archival materials along with oral histories, choreographic analysis, and embodied research, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora offers new insight about how this remarkable woman built political solidarity through the arts.
Download or read book Josephine Baker in Art and Life written by Bennetta Jules-Rosette and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond biography: a legendary performer's legacy of symbolism
Download or read book Blackening Europe written by Heike Raphael-Hernandez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional Scholars have often looked at African American studies through the lens of European theories, resulting in the secondarization of the African American presence in Europe and its contributions to European culture. Blackening Europe reverses this pattern by using African American culture as the starting point for a discussion of its influences over traditional European structures. Evidence of Europe's blackening abound, form French ministers of Hip-hop and British incarnations of "Shaft" to slavery memorial in the Netherlands and German youth sporting dreadlocks. Collecting essays by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic and fields as diverse as history, literature, politics, social studies, art, film and music, Blackening Europe explores the implications of these cultural hybrids and extends the growing dialogues about Europe's fascination with African America.
Download or read book Remembering Josephine written by Stephen Papich and published by Bobbs-Merrill Company. This book was released on 1976 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance written by Brenda D. Gottschild and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1998-06-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the African presence in various types of American dance forms. It argues that the Africanist aesthetic has been 'invisibilised' by racism, and investigates its presence as a major factor in shaping American performance.
Download or read book Defiant Itineraries written by Lydia Platón Lázaro and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-08-05 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Caribbean rituals helped form new currents in the performing and visual arts of the United States? This book answers this question through an examination of the Caribbean-inspired dance creations of dancer/choreographer Katherine Dunham and the experimental films of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren.
