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9780226171128

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Reviews

This book is an autobiography of the childhood of Katherine Dunham, the dancer- but there is little internal evidence of this. The protagonist is she or the girl , and dancing enters almost not at all. This approach lends a curious, cool distant quality- it is almost like a book about someone else. Albert Dunham, Katherine's father, married twice- both times women much older than himself. His first wife, Katherine's mother, was French-Canadian-Indian, fair and wealthy. The descriptions of an upper middle class life with houses and horses on the shifting line between many shades of color are fascinating. After the mother's death, the family knew the poverty of Negro city life, and Albert, though re-married, never again succeeded in pulling his family- or himself- together. It is probably these agonizing scenes of disintegration that are responsible for the cool, literate style of the whole book- as if this material were still too painful to handle directly, as well it might be... An interesting study of a life most whites, and probably few Negroes, have ever experienced in such profound variety- though actually the author is less concerned with the problem of color than with that of personalities under terrible stress. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) was a dancer, choreographer, educator, and cultural ambassador. Dunham had a very successful and influential dance career and directed her own dance company for many years. Dunham studied ballet while an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and purused academic work in anthropology, doing fieldwork in the Caribbean focused on local dance forms. Although she submitted a masters thesis based on that work, she soon left academic study to pursue a career in dance. Her early years were the basis for A Touch of Innocence: Memoirs of Childhood, published in 1959. A continuation based on her experiences in Haiti, Island Possessed, was published in 1969.

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