Building the African Diaspora in Paris: Katherine Dunham, Dance, and the Négritude Intellectuals

In November 1948, the choreographer Katherine Dunham arrived in Paris with her company to perform Rhapsodie Caraïbe, a dance revue. Before long she had become an obsession, with reporters hiding under the table in her dressing room in the hopes of getting a quote or photo. Seeing Dunham perform in Paris inspired Henri Matisse to paint Creole Dancer and Paul Colin to create a series of iconic posters. Perhaps most importantly, however, Dunham captured the attention of the editors of Presence Africaine, a new journal dedicated to promoting négritude, a term whose exact definition was hotly debated but roughly meaning an assertion of pride in blackness. Before Dunham’s arrival, the journal’s contributors had written about literature, poetry, and music as important avenues in the search for a black consciousness. Dance was off their radar, as they considered the city’s primary exponent of black dance—Josephine Baker—not as an intellectual peer. This paper explores how Dunham, armed with a degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago, brought dance to the conversation about black identity that was happening among African intellectuals living in post-World War II Paris. It considers how her dancers’ embodiment of diaspora in Rhapsodie Caraïbe influenced the contours of the growing anti-colonial movement and what it means for Paris to have been the meeting ground for these diasporic encounters.