Abstract
This article assesses the African American dancer and intellectual Katherine Dunham's vision and legacy for a performative history of the Black Atlantic by examining two of her early choreographic works, L'Agya and Little Black Sambo. From little-known archival materials and her published writings, I reconstruct the genesis of these works in her fieldwork in the French Caribbean as well as in the phantasm of the Plantation. Through the emotional relationships between Africa, Africa, and African diasporic expressive life that emerge, I excavate a hidden history for the modern subject as formed through not only the displacements generated by colonialism and slavery, but also unexpected new regimes of pleasure that were their historical consequences. The resulting imaginative and kinetic expressions that conflate colonial and postcolonial temporalities enable me to posit the limits and possibilities of trans(post)colonial collaborations within Dunham's repertoire as well as for the horizon of the present.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 213-231 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Sept 2015 |
Keywords
- Archive and repertoire
- Black Atlantic dance
- French Caribbean dance
- Katherine Dunham
- Little Black Sambo
- Trans(post)colonialism
- Transcolonialism