Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham

Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham PDF Author: Hannah Durkin
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252051467
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
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.

Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham

Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham PDF Author: Hannah Durkin
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252051467
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Alien Bodies

Alien Bodies PDF Author: Ramsay Burt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415145945
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Looks at dance in Germany, France, and the United States during the 1920s and the 1930s, including ballet, modern dance and dance in the cinema and Revue. Artists examined include Josephine Baker, Jean Cocteau, Valeska Gert, and George Balanchine.

Embodying Liberation

Embodying Liberation PDF Author: Dorothea Fischer-Hornung
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 9783825844738
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
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.

Katherine Dunham

Katherine Dunham PDF Author: Joyce Aschenbrenner
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252027598
Category : Choreographers
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
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.

Notable Black American Women

Notable Black American Women PDF Author: Jessie Carney Smith
Publisher: VNR AG
ISBN: 9780810391772
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 842

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Book Description
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.

Island Possessed

Island Possessed PDF Author: Katherine Dunham
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0307819841
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
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.

Workers in Hard Times

Workers in Hard Times PDF Author: Leon Fink
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095979
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Seeking to historicize the 2007-2009 Great Recession, this volume of essays situates the current economic crisis and its impact on workers in the context of previous abrupt shifts in the modern-day capitalist marketplace. Contributors use examples from industrialized North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia to demonstrate how workers and states have responded to those shifts and to their disempowering effects on labor. Since the Industrial Revolution, contributors argue, factors such as race, sex, and state intervention have mediated both the effect of economic depressions on workers' lives and workers' responses to those depressions. Contributors also posit a varying dynamic between political upheaval and economic crises, and between workers and the welfare state. The volume ends with an examination of today's "Great Recession": its historical distinctiveness, its connection to neoliberalism, and its attendant expressions of worker status and agency around the world. A sobering conclusion lays out a likely future for workers--one not far removed from the instability and privation of the nineteenth century. The essays in this volume offer up no easy solutions to the challenges facing today's workers. Nevertheless, they make clear that cogent historical thinking is crucial to understanding those challenges, and they push us toward a rethinking of the relationship between capital and labor, the waged and unwaged, and the employed and jobless. Contributors are Sven Beckert, Sean Cadigan, Leon Fink, Alvin Finkel, Wendy Goldman, Gaetan Heroux, Joseph A. McCartin, David Montgomery, Edward Montgomery, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Melanie Nolan, Bryan D. Palmer, Joan Sangster, Judith Stein, Hilary Wainright, and Lu Zhang.

Josephine

Josephine PDF Author: Jean-Claude Baker
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0815411723
Category : African American entertainers
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
This revelatory biography of Folies Bergere dancer Josephine Baker (1906-1975) is a study of struggle, truimph and tragedy.

The Race Card

The Race Card PDF Author: Richard Thompson Ford
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429924047
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
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.

Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker PDF Author: Bryan Hammond
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Leven en carrière van de Amerikaanse - in Parijs triomfen vierende - revuedanseres/zangeres (1906-1975) in woord en beeld.