Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema by Hannah Durkin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema by Hannah Durkin Joanna Dee Das Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema. By Hannah Durkin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. pp. xiii + 256. $99.00 cloth, $27.95 paper, $14.95 e-book. Hannah Durkin's Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema pairs two of the twentieth century's most famous dancers to address [End Page 173] questions of Black women's authorship in a transatlantic context. Scholars have paid much more attention to Baker and Dunham's live stage performances than to their written or cinematic work, and this book aims to fill that gap. Though the two women had distinct career trajectories, Durkin compellingly argues for examining them together, given that "both women adopt self-reflexive narrative voices and explore dance to communicate radical narratives of Black female subjectivity" in a mid-century context (13). Durkin shows how both women intervened in racist structures to insist on the authority of their own voices. The first two chapters focus on literary works. Chapter 1, "The Dancer in Translation: Baker's Coauthored Narratives," takes Baker's memoirs seriously as sources of understanding Baker's negotiation of racism on multiple continents. Durkin asserts that despite the fact that these early memoirs were coauthored by white men, Baker's voice comes through and she still is able to challenge primitivist and exoticizing narrative tropes that framed her. Importantly, Durkin analyzes untranslated memoirs written in French, for the most part overlooked by scholars writing in English. Chapter 2, "The Dancer as Translator: Dunham's Ethnographic Memoirs," examines Katherine Dunham's Journey to Accompong (1946) and Island Possessed (1969) as literary works that have been overlooked because of how they blur genre categories. Dunham's memoirs offer a penetrating look at the subjective nature of anthropological research, as she constantly questions the ethnographer's "perceived position of authority" (57). They also, as Durkin writes, offer "an important literary account of Dunham's intellectual development and debt to Caribbean artistry" (69). Chapter 3, "Performing within Primitivism: Baker on the French Silent Screen" applies a well-rehearsed argument to new materials: that through dance, Black subjects carve out space for agency within oppressive structures. This argument has also been made with reference to Baker before by scholars such as Mae Henderson and Michael Borshuk, as "ambivalence" (93) and "ambiguity" (97) are terms frequently associated with Baker. While Durkin's argument is therefore not groundbreaking, her analysis of two silent French films, La Revue des revues (1927) and Sirène des tropiques (1929), adds important documentation of Baker's dancing to the existing literature. Refreshingly, Durkin specifies the African American vaudeville tradition from which Baker derived her material, describing specific dance steps (Pecking, the Itch, the Mess Around, etc.) as she analyzes the films. Contextualizing the reception of Sirène among Black cinema-goers in the United States was also helpful to read. Chapter 4, "Cinematic Stardom: Baker and the 1930s French Musical Film" continues in the same vein: Durkin reiterates the argument that Baker's films Zouzou (1934) and Princesse Tam-Tam (1935) "reinforce her image as an exotic [End Page 174] Other" but also "grant Baker some control over her dance scenes, enabling her to articulate a self-referential screen image that intervenes in and disrupts racial binaries" (106). Durkin emphasizes the difference between the French film industry, which framed Baker as a glamorous star, and Hollywood, which excluded Black women from ideas of glamor, beauty, or stardom. In particular, the French films featured Baker as a glamorous icon who could sing in the delicate chanson style; Durkin notes that when Baker replicated such a performance for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 on Broadway, white American theatre critics judged her harshly for straying outside of the bounds of acceptable Black performance. Unlike Baker, Dunham did have to take on Hollywood racial codes. Durkin's goal in chapter 5 echoes that of the previous four chapters: to "investigate the ambiguities resulting from Dunham's attempts to resist screen stereotypes" (136) and to conclude that "Dunham worked within such limitations to present an artistically and aesthetically...