The Negro Dance

Abstract

Katherine Dunham’s The Negro Dance (1941) focuses on dances in the West Indies and on their similarities with North American dance forms rooted in African culture. Though backed up by the New Negro arguments of the time, it shows Dunham’s prominent elaboration of a dignified African-American art based on syncretic bodily practices, which anticipated theorizations in dance and cultural studies. By uniting a theoretical approach and performance ability, she also made methodological choices which, decades later, became standard practices in the field of dance anthropology. Moreover, she is now considered an ante litteram exponent of public or applied anthropology due to the fact that, by using various strategies, she managed to take anthropological knowledge out of the academic world and use it as an instrument for social transformation. The Negro Dance is introduced by Rossella Mazzaglia and followed by an afterword by Cristiana Natali and a biographical note by Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt.