Katherine Dunham (1909–2006)—the choreographer, dancer, activist, and institution builder—is a black dance icon. There is a paradox to iconicity, though: with fame can come a fortifying of artifice, and sometimes a flattening of depth. In Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora, dance scholar Joanna Dee Das resists this seduction. Das, a historian by training, takes Dunham out of a spotlight that blinds and into a beam that historicizes, humanizes, and clarifies.

Arranged chronologically, the book begins with Dunham's early years as a young adult in Chicago (1928–35); turns next to her first research trip in the Caribbean (1935–6); considers her life against the backdrop of the Great Depression, then professional challenges and accomplishments during World War II; moves on to the founding of her school in New York (1944–54); addresses her company's international tour; examines her trip back to Haiti and later Senegal; and finally ends with her planting roots in East St. Louis. Taken together, the book's eight chapters map a web of personal and artistic discovery in direct relation to the artist's diasporic encounters. Across the chapters we see Dunham's racial and diasporic consciousness take (and change) shape in response to the political contexts of her place and time. As a result, we come to know Dunham as a powerful figure who took risks, made mistakes, and forged a new clearing for dance anthropology.

The book's greatest contribution is its framing of Katherine Dunham's life, career and repertoire as an index of diaspora and as an ongoing engagement with black freedom struggles. Das writes that, “While scholars recognize her achievements in dance and anthropology, her influence on the black freedom movement in both the United States and abroad is less well known” (2). An attention to what the author describes as Dunham's “aesthetics as politics” (4) threads the biographical sketches together. Das frames aesthetics as politics as a decision-making strategy about “thematic content, movement vocabulary, dancers’ body types, the arrangement of said dancers in space, and performance venues” (4). The Dunham technique—a codified movement form that is still taught today—is itself an amalgam of her Afro-Caribbean dance research. Dunham's performance work is not, therefore, a break from racial politics; it is diasporic consciousness in motion.

To describe Dunham's worldview, Das offers up a “politics of diaspora” defined as a “conscious refashioning of existing cultural forms and even the creation of new ones” that “resists notions of cultural purity” (3). Importantly, her research and performance, understood by Dunham as inextricable since she worked within a research-to-performance model, offers a diasporic consciousness different from those that have routinely centered Africa. For Dunham, Haiti was the marrow of her diasporic sensibility.

Among the contributions of Das's work is its archival depth, accessible writing, and holistic approach. Dunham is certainly one of the most researched and written-about black female-identified choreographers. Dunham herself published three autobiographies—Island Possessed (1969), A Touch of Innocence (1959), Katherine Dunham's Journey to Accompong (1946)—each focusing on a specific time in her life. She is also the subject of a number of biographies, including Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life by Joyce Aschenbrenner (2002), Katherine Dunham: Pioneer of Black Dance by Barbara O'Connor (1999), and the magisterially edited collection Kaiso!: Writings by and about Katherine Dunham edited by VèVè A. Clark and Sara E. Johnson (2005). Das does not merely re-present what these aforementioned authors wrote. Instead she mines these publications and a legion of archives for verifiability and detail, flips over unturned archival stones, and weaves together a narrative of Dunham that refuses easy answers.

What to do, for example, with the fact that early in her career Dunham balked at being called a black dancer even while her work imbued that category/domain with technical rigor, historical depth, and cultural significance? Dunham positively (re)defined “negro” dance, even while distancing herself from the category itself. Rather than numbing complexity for the sake of prostration, Das embraces the gray. In Das's rendering, Katherine Dunham is extraordinary because her ingenuity, accomplishments, and research emerged in part through professional and personal distress, not despite it. The author also paints a forthright picture of Dunham's personality: charming, self-possessed, and at and times thorny. As Das states, “One aspect of Dunham's complex personality did not change: her indomitable will” (9). Across the span of the text, Dunham's contradictions never demean her impact.

Anyone with an interest in dance, theatre, race, and performance will find this book compelling. As Dunham's mentor Melville Herskovits wrote in a recommendation on her behalf, “We have in [Dunham] one of those rare persons who combines the finest aesthetic perceptions with an intellectual capacity of the highest order” (55). Das has produced a rich and important volume: a biography of this rare person. If Dunham continues to be (rightly) held up as a parent of diasporic dance studies, then we should be clear what, exactly, we are inheriting. In reading Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora, we will find that the endowment is profuse.