Reconsidering Isadora Duncan’s Global Legacy: The Reception of Duncan’s Writing and Dance in China

Abstract

This article reevaluates the reception of Isadora Duncan among Chinese intelligentsia, literati, and dancers in the first half of the twentieth century. Contextualizing Duncan’s autobiography My Life (1927) and choreography within global cultural production, I focus on the transculturation and hybridity generated through the artist’s transnational circulation to China. Far more than just a pioneer of modern dance, Duncan was a cultural icon that Chinese intellectuals, women writers, and dancers appropriated for their own political and cultural purposes.