When I first began a plan of this book I intended it to be concerned with all the gods who have walked through my life.…Damballa and Agwe and Yemanja and Guede and Lenguesou and Simbi and the Congo gods…all these gods brought such fresh and delightful memories and vivid recall that I was willing to let them claim me for their own, at least for a time. It hasn’t been easy, because the great baobab trees of Senegal—dry, aching stumps of branches extruding from gnarled bases as large as small huts, gaunt reminders of prehistory—house their own rab, governing spirits that must be appeased by sorcery and complex curing ceremonies.
Katherine Dunham, “Epilogue,” Island Possessed (1969)
Here, three thousand miles from my centre of learning, either for my own awakened and undefined needs, or under pretext of fulfilling a mission, or a mixture of both, I was deep in the most banal and, at the same time, most esoteric of secret society inductions, that into ceremony, ritual, secret pact, blood sacrifice, into the vaudun or voodoo of Haiti. There we lay, scarcely breathing, waiting, listening, senses alert, packed like sardines much as the slave who crossed the Atlantic, motionless as though chained, some of us afraid.
Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (1937)
In 1966, a sixty-year-old Katherine Dunham visited Dakar, Senegal, at the invitation of her long-time friend Léopold Senghor, who had appointed her as official adviser to the first-ever World Festival of Negro Arts.Footnote 1 The festival took place in April, but Dunham leased a house in Dakar, stayed on, and began writing Island Possessed, an engrossing memoir of her first visit to Haiti almost thirty years ago as a student of anthropology studying under Melville Herskovits at Chicago’s Northwestern University.Footnote 2 What in Dakar made her recall that precise, momentous year of her life and reproduce it in such clarity—as though it had all taken place just yesterday?
Dunham herself provides an answer in the book’s epilogue. In the passage I reproduce as my first epigraph, she conducts one of her frequent swerves from anthropological “objectivity” to immersion in pan-African spirituality, citing as her inspiration the dialogue between Afro-diasporic and African gods. Diverse Afro-diasporic gods are both brought to the surface by and placed in competition with the palpable presence of the “rab,” gods autochthonous—like the great baobab tree is—to Senegal. “It hasn’t been easy,” she declares dramatically yet nonchalantly, as if this extravagant consorting with multiple yet related divinities constitutes just another day in the life of Dunham. This parable of competing spirits succinctly enacts the complex emotional relationships between Africa, “Africa,” and the sites and manifestations of African diasporic expressive life that the Illinois-born, Chicago-educated Dunham first experienced during her eighteen months of fieldwork across the Caribbean (no doubt with Melville Herskovits’s thesis of “African retentions” ringing in her ears).Footnote 3 Indeed, in the 1960s, in Dakar, she remembers herself recalling the Middle Passage while undergoing one of the most physically exacting experiences of her anthropological and spiritual awakening—her initiation into the vaudou cult of the snake-god Damballa.Footnote 4 This recollection-within-a-recollection forms my second epitaph.
These coils of memory circle around the Black Atlantic and persist through Dunham’s astonishingly productive and varied career, bestowing on it shape, passion, and energy. For more than five decades, Dunham created choreographies for her dance company drawing on her experiences in and imaginings of Jamaica, Martinique, Haiti, Mexico, Brazil, Africa, and, of course, her African American heritage. “From her seminal mid-1930s fieldwork she re-created specific Afro-Caribbean dances into creative ballets on western stages, thus creating a dynamic confluence between anthropology and dance…. In the process, she clearly envisioned the African diaspora—the Black Atlantic—long before that nomenclature was ever used.”Footnote 5 Despite the pioneering nature of this achievement, Dunham’s vision and legacy are far from adequately integrated into a wider understanding of “performance [as] the most recognizable intellectual traditions of the African diaspora.”Footnote 6 To do so, we need to bring Dunham’s prolific writings in dialogue with her choreographic work, with her sensitivity to the “embodied wisdom” of Afro-diasporic dance,Footnote 7 and with her training in one of the most celebrated anthropological traditions of the early twentieth century. We also need to revisit the early years of her intellectual and creative formation.
“When Miss Dunham undertook her fieldwork in the Caribbean in the mid-1930s, she was a young, highly educated, middle class, light-skinned African American.”Footnote 8 What did it mean for such a person to pass through the doors of the University of Chicago, take off for more than a year (thanks to the prestigious Rosenwald fellowship) to live among maroons, fisherfolk, and vaudou priestesses in three Caribbean islands, cultivate friendships and romantic attachments at will, learn two French Creoles and the dances of different islands, return to Chicago, start her own company during the height of the Depression, and consistently reject the advice of male anthropologists while shaping, instead, her own destiny?Footnote 9 In this singular path, the one constant was Dunham’s desire to showcase the relationship between pan-Caribbean and African American expressive cultures and to demonstrate the Afro-diasporic contribution to global modernity by staging that relationship through affection, humor, and passion. What was her emotional relationship to the phantasm of “Africa” decades before she set foot on that continent? What erasures did she have to effect, along with the retrievals and reconstructions? My essay addresses these questions through Dunham’s published and unpublished writings concerning two productions of 1938 for the Chicago stage: L’Ag’ya and Little Black Sambo. While the former became a highly successful part of the Katherine Dunham Company’s repertoire, the latter sank into oblivion, even for Dunham herself.Footnote 10
I encountered these materials during archival research at Southern Illinois University, the repository for a large collection of papers, photographs, and footage that Dunham deposited there in 1965 after an eleven-week engagement as the university’s artist in residence.Footnote 11 I came to this archive after being enraptured by Island Possessed, and, as its author had been—by Port-au-Prince.Footnote 12 Dunham’s career now constitutes a crucial part of the research project I direct, “Modern Moves,” which investigates the global popularity and transoceanic histories of African-heritage rhythm cultures.Footnote 13 These often hidden histories reveal how the modern subject was formed through not only the tragic displacements generated by colonialism and slavery, but also unexpected new regimes of pleasure that were the historical consequences of those displacements. Yet, as Saidiya Hartman warns us, “issues of terror and enjoyment frame the exploration of subjection…The desire to don, occupy, or possess blackness or the black body as a sentimental resource and/or locus of excessive enjoyment is both founded on and enabled by the material relations of chattel slavery.”Footnote 14 With this caveat in mind, how do we assess the pleasures of plantation-derived performative traditions? Dunham’s writings of 1938 reveal her grappling with this very philosophical and psychological conundrum. Her responses participate in and revivify what Joseph Roach calls circum-Atlantic “genealogies of performance.”Footnote 15
My essay excavates these genealogies to bring circum-Atlantic expressive traditions closer to the concerns of “postcolonial literary inquiry.” The temporally staggered (de)colonization of the Atlantic rim, and its linguistic fracturing by different imperial regimes, imposes methodological barriers on analyzing that “submarine unity” that Black Atlantic movement-worlds have always kept alive.Footnote 16 I thus crosshatch evidence from both the “archive” and the “repertoire” to refresh the potential, reach, and remit of the “postcolonial.”Footnote 17 Dunham’s fascination with the French Caribbean island of Martinique, manifested in L’Ag’ya, and her attraction to Little Black Sambo’s phantasmatic Africa, which comes already merged with a phantasmatic India, testify to traumas, survivals, erasures, and intimations of trans(post)coloniality. This subliminal layer of the dancer’s imaginary is best reconstructed through the archival materials I privilege—the fragment, the scribble, the minor essay, and the field notebook.Footnote 18 I dredge up these less-visible graphic traces from the Dunham Papers to illuminate the kinetic creative processes of someone whose “critics seem unable to reconcile her sensual and vibrant performance with her intellectual discussions of the relationship between dance and society.”Footnote 19 My use of material that came to me only through my physical journey to Dunham’s archive is also a scholar’s way of paying homage to her acute awareness of the “import of the physical imprint of cultural experience.”Footnote 20
“Love-Theft by Witchcraft”
L’Ag’ya premiered at the Federal Theatre in Chicago on January 27, 1938: Dunham’s earliest dramaturgic creation on her return to Chicago from the Caribbean. At twenty-one minutes long, it was part of the nascent Dunham Company’s Ballet Fedré, surely a wordplay on the Federal Theatre Project of which Dunham had been recently appointed artistic director. L’Ag’ya consists of three acts divided into five scenes that are in turn subdivided into eight dance sections: Market Scene, Pas de Deux, Zombie Scene, Mazouk, Beguine, Charm Dance (Majumba), L’Ag’ya Fight, and Death Scene.Footnote 21 These sequences are generated by a simple love triangle set in what programs down the years describe as “the tiny eighteenth century fishing village of Vauclin,” Martinique. Loulouse and Alcide are in love, but the jealous and spurned Julot seeks to thwart their happiness. Entering the Forest of the Zombies, he obtains a love-charm, the cambois, from Roi Zombie (the Zombie King). Julot manages to administer the cambois to the entire village, which has assembled at a ball to dance the mazurka (mazouk in Creole) and beguine. The villagers turn to stone; Loulouse breaks into the majumba dance, slowly shedding her clothes for Julot. But Alcide overcomes the effects of the cambois and challenges his rival to a round of l’ag’ya (ladja in Creole), a Martinican martial arts form not unlike Brazilian capoeira and Reunionnais moring in history and form.Footnote 22 Although Alcide throws Julot, the latter sneaks up from behind and kills Alcide just as the reunited lovers embrace. Bereft, Loulouse grieves over her dead lover’s body.
From the start, L’Ag’ya won the hearts of its audiences. An effusive review appeared the very next day: “Miss Dunham’s dance drama ‘L’Ag’ya’ carried off the evening’s first honors. Her large troupe of colored dancers moved with admirable ease and lack of affectation. John Pratt’s handsome tropical costumes and Robert Sanders’ pointed and danceable score shared the distinction of Miss Dunham’s choreography.”Footnote 23 It continued to provide the pièce de resistance in Dunham Company revues through the subsequent decades. New York, Hollywood, Copenhagen, Paris, London—wherever the company performed, they performed L’Ag’ya. In 1938, when the original score went missing, Dunham commissioned its creator, Robert Sanders, to re-create it; L’Ag’ya reemerged through the sounds of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra at the July 1944 Hollywood performance. Watching it in 1949, one of London’s leading ballet critics proclaimed: “this daughter of slaves has come as a conqueror to Europe.”Footnote 24 In April 1988, L’Ag’ya took center stage at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre’s retrospective and tribute, “The Magic of Katherine Dunham.” This was the only time that Dunham sat in the audience watching someone else play Loulouse.Footnote 25 L’Ag’ya’s first performance had cast Dunham’s friends and lovers in the main male parts, and populated the stage with people “off the street: maids, cooks, typists and chauffeurs.”Footnote 26 Although the cast soon began to reflect the increasing professionalism of the Dunham Company, with Alcide, Julot, and Roi Zombie being roles reserved for star dancers like Vanoye Aitkens and Lenwood Morris, it was always Dunham who played Loulouse. Some of her most arresting studio and stage photographs—barefoot, in a white broderie anglaise petticoat with ribbon trim typical of Martinique—are from L’Ag’ya performances.
What was the secret of L’Ag’ya’s success? Critical reception of Dunham’s work evolved between pre- and inter-war America.Footnote 27 Nevertheless, reviews of L’Ag’ya are consistent about what constituted its appeal. In 1938, a reviewer writes delightedly of “the folklore of Martinique,” “love theft by witchcraft,” “zombie charm,” “Miss Dunham (an exquisite figure)…yield[ing]her clothing item by item until Henry Pitt, her rightful swain, suicidally intervenes,” “brilliant costumes,” “delightful movement,” and the “tragic and powerful ending;”Footnote 28 in 1988, a reviewer was still talking about “villainous interloper,” “evil zombie king,” “stiff-legged zombies who rise from the ground of their foggy graveyard, a cackling witch doctor, vigorous folk dances and a frenzied, erotic striptease.”Footnote 29 Michael Jackson’s music video for Thriller (1982) surely colors the later reviewer’s imagination, but, as the similar language of both reviews suggests, the ingredients that seduce remain constant: a simple but strong storyline populated by folk and quasi-fairytale figures that hover at the edge of rationality; inspired costumes which drew equally on historical sources and Dunham’s fieldwork (frills, ruffles, and headscarves for the villagers; dark Grecian lines for the zombies; and, for Roi Zombie, a combination of a dressing gown and a grass skirt);Footnote 30 a spirited score, and a variety of dances enthusiastically performed by African American non-professionals. Through their unexpected encounter with a kinetic history both familiar and estranged, they “gave the stage the dimension of reality which made the folk myths believable.”Footnote 31 Her principal dancers regularly cited L’Ag’ya as eliciting their most memorable work.Footnote 32 And there was the mind and body of Dunham herself: as Loulouse, and as the work’s fons et origo: “I don’t think anyone else used classical ballet [as I did] in L’Ag’ya.”Footnote 33
“Ecstases de Vauclin”
In Box 48 of the Morris Library’s Dunham Papers (Manuscripts series) is a slim, blue-covered, A4-size notebook of eight pages dated 1936. Handwritten on its front cover is “Miss Katherine Dunham,” and, at an angle to the name, “cinnamon, allspices, cloves.” The date and contents—staccato handwritten observations on dance—point it to being a field notebook from her time in Martinique. On its first page, under the rubric “Haute-Taille,” are instructions in French for this set dance for couples that descended from the European quadrille.Footnote 34 Over the next two pages, other couple dances popular in the French Caribbean are mentioned: “Biguine,” “Polka,” “Mazouk,” “Biguine Belair,” together with occasional marginal annotations (“rumba transposed as beguine [sic]”). Soon the writing peters out into jottings. “ ‘Bele martiniquaise’; bele guadeloupeanne; bele dominicaise; bele cayennaise,” a sequence declares, suggesting Dunham’s interest in the prevalence of the Martinican folk dance form “bele” in neighboring islands (Guadeloupe, Dominica) and in French Guyana (Cayenne).Footnote 35 Below “bele martiniqaise” are indications of costuming used for the dance: “grande robe, jupe” (large dress, skirt). Dunham’s analytical bent is visible in a list of villages, occupations, and the names of dances filling the notebook’s last two pages: for instance, “St Joseph—canne à sucre (sugarcane), banane (banana), ananas (pineapple), distillery; ag’ya, haute-taille, belere”; “Rivere-Salee—largest factories, small proprietors of sugarcane who sell to usine-Ag’ya is much danced”; “Trois Ilets—large pottery—tiles—lime—fishing secondary—best ag’ya drummer, much interest in ag’ya for fighting, belere known.” The prominence of “ag’ya” in this list reveals an early attraction to the kinetic practice somewhere between dance and fight that will reappear as the climactic moment in the eponymous L’Ag’ya two years later. In the list, too, is “Vauclin- factory, sev(eral) distilleries, sugarcane, fishing, ag’ya, belere well known, haute-taille.”
This, then, is the “tiny eighteenth century fishing village of Vauclin,”Footnote 36 on the southeast coast of Martinique. Of the many villages where Dunham, as “all dancer and little scientist” enjoyed “the festivals, dance halls, rhythms, and laughter of the island,”Footnote 37 Vauclin left on her the greatest impact. It was here that she filmed an actual performance of the ag’ya with a 16mm Kodak Special II camera.Footnote 38 Not unsurprisingly, Vauclin lent its name to the setting of L’Ag’ya. Even more interestingly, it played a central role in a sequence of essays entitled “Sketchbook of a Dancer in Martinique,” conceived by her between 1937 and 1938. A sheet of typescript paper from the same box as the blue notebook contains the following “plan for a complete overview”:
I Fort de France (with apologies)
II Bamboo and Fujia (in the north)
III Procession to the Sea (in the south)
IV Ecstases de Vauclin [ecstasies of Vauclin]
Les Pecheurs [the fishermen]
Les Vierges [the virgins]
L’Ag’ya
Constance
V La Boule Blanche (bigine-bigine!)Footnote 39
We do not know whether all these pieces were ever written. The incunabula of Box 48 include complete typed drafts of only four essays: “La Boule Blanche,” “L’Ag’ya,” “Les Vierges,” and “Les Pêcheurs.” Of these, “La Boule Blanche” and “L’Ag’ya” found an unexpected showcase in a 1939 volume of the gentlemen’s magazine Esquire, whose owner, Al Smart, Dunham had met at a Rosenwald party in Chicago earlier that year.Footnote 40 These extant constituent parts of “the ecstasies of Vauclin,” structurally central to the planned “Sketchbook of a Dancer in Martinique,” supplement what the jottings in her real sketchbook indicate: that for Dunham, the rhythm world of Martinique was one of her earliest sources of creative inspiration and that Vauclin was a microcosm of this world.
Despite their provisional and protean quality, Dunham considered these incunabula and stray notes precious enough to preserve them for two decades and then include them within her first official archive. Precious they indeed are, offering unique insight into the creative process behind a work of constant significance to her repertoire. Most crucially, they help correct certain assumptions regarding the genesis of L’Ag’ya. It was certainly inspired by “an event during her Caribbean field trip in 1935–1936 when she witnessed and filmed the ag’ya, the fighting dance of Martinique”;Footnote 41 nevertheless, as proclaimed by a scribbled sequence on the blue notebook’s inside cover—“ag’ya- belere- haute-taille- ag’ya- belere-jumba-haute-taille”—the ag’ya coexisted on a rhythm spectrum that included different dance genres. Moreover, the African-heritage constituents of this spectrum are, at this early moment in L’Ag’ya’s history, wholly French Caribbean: pace the Library of Congress’s statement that its choreography included “traditional folk and social dance forms such as the habanera (Cuba), the majumba (Brazil), and the mazouk, the béguine, and the ag’ya (Martinique).”Footnote 42 There is no “habanera” in this version, and neither is the “majumba” (called “jumba” in the sequence cited above) Brazilian—as we shall see in the following section. Finally, as evident in the notebook’s list of villages with their occupations and dances, Dunham was keenly interested in the relationship between dance and labor. “Underline names of towns in order of importance: fishing—black; factories and distilleries—red; cultivation private—purple; specialized industries as basketry, pottery, mass cultivation—green”: declares a “note to self” on the notebook’s inside cover. Clearly, the conjunction of aesthetic, analytical, historical, and kinetic considerations was already in place during her fieldwork in 1936.
“Pride in Their Rhythms and Their Bodies”
These archival traces reveal Dunham’s understanding and use of dance to reconcile the different expressive cultures of the North American and Caribbean African diasporas. In the uncertainty of the Depression, L’Ag’ya, her first balletic experiment after returning to Chicago, gave ordinary African Americans the chance to escape from the breadline through dance. Dunham attributed their initial reluctance to dance on stage to Christian devoutness.Footnote 43 The distinction between their Protestant upbringing, which she shared, and the Catholic islands whose African-descendant population had developed their imaginative and kinetic lives very differently from North American black people, had fascinated her during fieldwork; the unpublished essay “Les Vierges” juxtaposes the sensuous pleasures of “the full-bosomed, strong legged brown girls who stride to the sea” with their veneration of virgin saints. Dunham’s “real delight and sense of achievement” lay in introducing Chicago’s church-going “proletariat” to “the hip-swaying, shoulder-shaking, lusty enjoyment of such indigenous Martiniquan dances as the majumba and beguine.” Statements that her imagination assigns to the fishermen of Vauclin are equally applicable to her dancers: They “may have forgotten the significance of this dance, but the blood of their ancestors is strong. They have not forgotten the dance.”Footnote 44 Theirs is a shared ancestral reclamation. Those fishermen—“naked to the waist, trousers rolled up to the knee, their magnificent black torsos swing[ing] in perfect rhythm as they haul the heavy nets across the sand and raise them to hang on a line of bamboo poles”Footnote 45 —animated her transformation of the Chicago cast. The “cooks and maids and chauffeurs and waiters of all sizes and shapes,”Footnote 46 who danced her arrangements, in turn animated her recollection of the fishermen at work: “They must feel pride in their rhythm and their bodies.”Footnote 47
During rehearsals for L’Ag’ya, the mimetic capacity of Chicago’s urbanized African Americans uncannily collapsed separate histories of diaspora: “the creole waltz and mazurka they performed like true veterans, bowing, curtsying, shuffling, fluttering their beribboned fans and embroidered lace kerchiefs, swaying to Robert Sanders’ suave rhythms as I had imagined the slave population of those islands would have done in the mimicry of the masters of the big house.”Footnote 48 In this adeptness, Dunham’s cast were repeating the trans-American embodied history of these couple dances, which, arising out of European musical cultures, were transformed through the slaves’ inherited rhythmic habits. Most prominent within these inherited Africanisms was what Western musicology would call “syncopation,” a rhythmic fact realized (though not necessarily simultaneously) on musical and kinetic levels.Footnote 49 Concurrently, distinct sartorial styles mimicked—just a bit too faithfully, recalling Bhabha’s notion of “sly civility”—European codes often denied through sumptuary laws, offering early Afro-diasporic versions of what Mbembe has termed “African modes of self-writing.”Footnote 50 Dunham relied on flamboyant costume for maximum theatricality, and her archives confirm her avid interest in the use of European dress by freed and enslaved Afro-Caribbean populations. L’Ag’ya used elaborate eighteenth-century creole dress for its showcases of beguine and mazurka. But how empowering ultimately were these “sticky webs of copy and contact”?Footnote 51 The “big house” is a traumatic splinter in Dunham’s post-slavery self. It is both evoked on stage and displaced through spatio-temporal and socio-economic remoteness (the “tiny eighteenth-century fishing village”). Similar recognition-in-denial of this ur-site of “‘slavish imitation” occurs in The Black Jacobins, where C. L. R. James lambasts house slaves for their unerring imitation of the courtly dances from Europe that provided the big house’s main entertainment.Footnote 52
Yet neither James nor Dunham can let go of the couple dance. As Afro-diasporic subjects, they understand well the ironies and new possibilities of creolized performance. But for both, the endless repetition necessitated by mimicry can enable release from history only under certain conditions. For James, the Black Jacobins could rise in revolution because the syncopated quadrilles and minuets existed alongside the drums in the Bois Cayman that beat out vaudou rhythms kept alive in secret societies.Footnote 53 On her part, Dunham had realized that the couple dance escaped from mere imitation from its continued proximity to African kinetic repertoires that survived throughout the Caribbean as signifiers of resistance, marronage, and deep African-ness.Footnote 54 In Martinique, these latter forms included structured movement within drum circles where the percussion was provided by the ti-bwa and tambouye: the ag’ya, of course, but also the different forms of bele. In particular, one of the movements of the bele, the majumba, caught her imagination. In her essay, “L’Ag’ya,” she describes how “a man and a woman alone took the centre and danced the ma’jhumbwe, a dance more intimate and sexual in its import.”Footnote 55 Her desire to replicate this special energy led to L’Ag’ya’s “majumba”: the dance performed by Loulouse under the influence of the cambois. During this sequence, the orchestra stopped, live drumming began, and Loulouse/Katherine danced her notorious “strip-tease.”Footnote 56 In 1970s Martinique, “madjoumbe,” which also means “pitchfork,” came to signify a roots movement in music, dance, and culture.Footnote 57 But for Dunham, the majumba was always the “love dance of Ancient Africa.”Footnote 58 This discrepancy reminds us that L’Ag’ya, ultimately, was a fabrication of island life based as much on fieldwork as on fantasy, longing, and wish-fulfilment.
Purple Shoes, Green Umbrella, Tiger-Yellow Pancakes
I now explicate this relationship between fantasy and fieldwork by turning to Dunham’s other production of 1938 and the inaugurator of that year’s autumn season: Little Black Sambo. Under her directorship, the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project’s Chicago branch staged this work at the city’s Great Northern Theatre on the 29th of August.Footnote 59 Because Dunham’s next big undertaking after L’Ag’ya, the two productions would have developed consecutively, if not concurrently, in her mind; yet the afterlives of each work strikingly diverged. Every aspect of L’Ag’ya —scenography, score, choreography, libretto—was a product of Dunham’s creativity. No precedent for it existed in the graphic domain.Footnote 60 But it left a substantial enough archival footprint to enable us to reconstruct its form and its reception. Little Black Sambo presents the opposite picture. Performed only once, it benefits from none of the photographic and descriptive record that accrued around L’Ag’ya. Its clearest archival trace consists of seven loose sheets of paper in the same box that contains the writings and jottings about Vauclin examined previously.Footnote 61 On these seven sheets Dunham had written out, in pencil, her paraphrase of the Little Black Sambo story, with an eye to the choreography and concomitant moods she intended to convey through it. No other material evidence of the production seems to have survived. Yet, because this story draws on a text with a complex print history throughout the English-speaking world since its appearance in 1899, we can assess with some confidence how Dunham’s version would have differed from its predecessors. These differences, in conjunction with her re-creation of island life in L’Ag’ya, help me unpack what I have called the “trans(post)colonial intimations” that shape Dunham’s diasporic consciousness in this period.
The originating text for Dunham’s piece is the children’s storybook Little Black Sambo, written by a Scotswoman of Empire, Helen Bannerman, in the 1890s. Born in Edinburgh, and living in India as the wife of an imperial medical officer, Bannerman wrote and illustrated this story to amuse her children while on a train journey, purportedly between the southern Indian locations of Kodaikanal and Madras.Footnote 62 Little Black Sambo is a boy who lives in a jungle; his parents are Mumbo and Jumbo. Mumbo presents Sambo with a set of new clothes: a pair of purple shoes lined with red silk, a little red jacket, a little blue pair of trousers, and a splendid green umbrella. Accoutred thus, Sambo sets off for a walk whereupon he encounters four very hungry tigers. Their appetite for Sambo is kept at bay only by his offer, to each tiger, of one of these items of clothing. Not only are the tigers readily diverted by these sartorial offerings, but they are prompted by their possession into narcissistic infighting, which leads them to self-combust into pools of butter. The story ends with Sambo’s parents, Mumbo and Jumbo, using the butter to make tiger-yellow pancakes of which Sambo devours 169. Eye-catching illustrations of the narrative’s major moments enliven this simple, if bizarre tale. Published from Edinburgh in 1899, the story quickly gained popularity throughout the Anglophone world. Early reviews confirm that it was the text’s short sentences, repetition, rhythm and cadence, pleasing synchronization of text and story, and above all, its folktale simplicity that ensured this positive reception: “this story which might almost have come out of some folklore collection, has about it an effortless perfection which baffles analysis.”Footnote 63
Because similar ingredients went into the narrative of L’Ag’ya, we can see how these aesthetic possibilities would have appealed to Dunham, although she could not have been unaware of the racialist controversies that Little Black Sambo was increasingly generating. Although Bannerman had not verbalized the race of her protagonists, her choice of names suggested a stereotyped, if not pejorative, invocation of an African heritage: Sambo was a popular name in Blackface minstrelsy,Footnote 64 and Mumbo and Jumbo had become a phrase suggesting “gibberish” with a connotation of vaudou’s perceived irrationality.Footnote 65 Moreover, Bannerman’s simplified illustrations showed a dark-skinned, black-haired family in clothes reminiscent of the African diaspora—knotted headscarf, striped blouse, and Madras skirt for Mumbo and jaunty stripes for Jumbo. The American versions of Little Black Sambo that soon proliferated, including pirated ones, progressively reinterpreted Sambo as the African American “pickaninny” stereotype.Footnote 66 “Possibly, the popularity of Sambo was due to an acceptance of racism and a fascination with the distorted images of blacks presented in the entertainment industry,” suggests a historian of the text’s American reception.Footnote 67 By 1917, Sambo’s face starts resembling minstrel makeup, and by 1933, the caricatured features of Sambo and his parents prompted Langston Hughes to declare the text as “amusing undoubtedly to the white child, but like an unkind word to one who has known too many hurts to enjoy the additional pain of being laughed at.”Footnote 68 Yet Hughes’s dear friend Dunham chose to rework precisely this “unkind word,” even roping in Shirley Graham, future wife of W. E. B. DuBois, to create its music and scenography.Footnote 69 What made these African American women at the vanguard of the Chicago Renaissance turn their collective talents to this problematic work?
“Melted Butter (Or ‘Ghi,’ as It Is Called in India)”
The answer lies in certain aspects of Bannerman’s text that undercut Little Black Sambo’s recalibration as a potentially unflattering African American story. although the illustrations lent themselves to stereotypes damaging to black self-perception, the storyline itself encouraged the text’s recuperation as an affirmative tale of survival through Sambo’s quick thinking and the tigers’ self-destruction through greed. Thus a national debate on whether Little Black Sambo was a culturally appropriate read for children declared it “free from caricature” in 1943.Footnote 70 Graham and Dunham would have probably concurred with this perspective; each even tailored the text to articulate her political position. Graham used Little Black Sambo to deconstruct “the minstrel notion of blackness,” evoking a “whimsical, poetic, colorful never-never land” nevertheless “based on a sense of African nationalist consciousness and identification.” Footnote 71 Dunham’s handwritten paraphrase additionally reveals an investment in Afro-diasporic dance traditions across languages and different colonial histories. Witchdoctors perform “a tap dance very much in the Harlem style”; Sambo joyfully dances the cakewalk on receiving his flashy new outfit. When the first tiger accepts the offer of Sambo’s red coat, they seal the transaction with “a few measures of a stately contredance.” After the third tiger absurdly agrees to wear Sambo’s fine but too-small shoes on his ears, he and Sambo similarly “waltz together a few steps.”Footnote 72 Through Little Black Sambo, as in L’Ag’ya, then, Dunham developed the semiotic and affective possibilities of creolized Plantation dances, including those she writes about and stages in L’Ag’ya. But this text also pressed upon Dunham an encounter with colonized peoples beyond the African diaspora. For Bannerman had placed people with African-sounding names within a setting with distinctly Indian aspects—as clinched by her statement that the tigers became “melted butter (or ‘ghi,’ as it is called in India).”
As an early review of Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo noted, “his history was not written with an eye to parents and guardians, otherwise the inconsistency of mixing up the African type of black with delightful adventures in an Indian type of jungle with tigers would have never been allowed to pass.”Footnote 73 This geographical inconsistency was subsequently widely criticized,Footnote 74 but it has always functioned as a safety valve of sorts, with revivals of the text in a more politically correct era even replacing Bannerman’s Mumbo’s Afro-diasporic clothes with a sari.Footnote 75 Although Bannerman never visited the African continent,Footnote 76 her life in India would have made her aware of a host of plausible Indian-sounding names for her characters, as well as how to clothe them in appropriate fashion, if a completely Indian story is what she had sought to write. A close examination of the original text’s narrative and illustrations in fact reveals a sustained ambiguity that could hardly have been unintentional. Nothing in it suggests either India or Africa exclusive of the other. The written text contains signifiers of “Africa(n-ness)” (most obviously, the names Sambo, Mumbo, and Jumbo), of “India” (the bazaar, tigers, ghi, and a brass pot carried by Jumbo); of the African diaspora (pancakes); and of an indeterminate tropical location (a palm tree). On the visual level, the characters are bestowed with a complexion, hair texture, and physiognomy that suggest black African heritage, and, as has been remarked on earlier, clothes suggestive of the African diaspora; but an orientalized Indianness is also invoked through Sambo’s loincloth and turned-up Aladin shoes, Bannerman’s illustrations of the tigers, and the brass pot on which is even inscribed “tiger ghi.”
This conflation of geographically discrete spaces is a phantasm generated by the imperial imagination—as confirmed by Bannerman’s visual presentation of a generic, if incompletely constructed, colonial subject. Mumbo and Jumbo wear a bricolage of Western-style clothes in tropical patterns and colors; Sambo, when not sporting his new outfit, is in a mere loincloth; all are barefoot, signaling but a veneer of sartorial civility. The final illustration is suggestive of the triumph of civilisation—the family sits around a table neatly covered with white linen and eat their pancakes with cutlery. Beneath the tablecloth, however, bare feet still lurk. This fragile imperial construct is imperiled by Sambo’s overweening desire for fancy clothes and the tigers’ overweening desire for Sambo. Despite the unfavorable balance of power, Sambo emerges victorious. He safeguards his body by persuading the tigers to transfer their desire to his clothes; he regains his clothes because the tigers autodestruct in their fight over their spoils; he devours the tiger-butter pancakes. The fate of the all-powerful tigers, ultimately consumed by the disempowered colonial subject, suggests acute anxiety regarding role reversal. We should recall that Bannerman’s British India had already experienced the violence of the so-called Sepoy Mutiny, the confirmation of fears of native revolt, and the consequent hardening of imperial control.Footnote 77 The tigers’ alchemical yet nauseating transformation into butter that is further transformed into pancakes asks to be read as the delirious product of a guilt-ridden imperialist imaginary sublimated through the medium of children’s story. In this movement among guile, guilelessness, violence, and desire, played out “necropolitically” on a body that has to surrender external markers of sovereignty,Footnote 78 Dunham found a compelling vehicle to perform that other site of Afro-diasporic trauma linked to the big house: the Plantation.
“Le Coulie des Trois-Ilets”
In a masterful deconstruction of Bartolome de las Casas’s account of a plague of black ants, discordantly intercalated within his Historia de las Indias, Antonio Benítez-Rojo has exposed this foundational text for the colonization of the Americas as “a discursive point of origin” for writing about “the emergence of African slavery in the Antilles.”Footnote 79 Benítez-Rojo interprets de las Casas’s description of an army of black ants that swarms over the island of Hispaniola, and the piedra soliman (an alchemical substance) that miraculously overcomes them, as metaphorical substitutions leading back to the Plantation’s slave laborers (the black ants) and its prized commodity, sugar (the white soliman). He also points to the text’s numerous silences and displacements—for example, its hovering as close as possible to the word cañas (“cane,” via the cañafistola trees that the ants destroy), without ever mentioning the Plantation. These substitutions and evasions, argues Benítez-Rojo, reveals de las Casas as deeply traumatized by his advocacy of slavery for the New World’s plantations. His analysis of de las Casas’s fantastical digression from historiography helps us understand better both the function of the self-combusting tigers in Bannerman’s story and Dunham’s attraction to it. Like de las Casas’s anecdote, Little Black Sambo articulates the Freudian uncanny, a phantasm that haunted Bannerman’s imaginary to signal the Empire’s recognition and repression of historical responsibility. Dunham’s realization that the history of slavery in the Americas was best retrieved through performance rather than narration allowed her to recognize the discursive substitutions already at play in the confrontation between Sambo and the tigers. She could thereby interpret it in terms of the “ferocious battle between origins” that constitutes the foundational trauma of the Americas.Footnote 80
Dunham bestows on Bannerman’s jungle the same deep African-ness that the majumba solo and ag’ya fight had evoked in L’Ag’ya. “Against a background of kettledrums are projected the night sounds of the jungle,” states her opening directions, subsequently adding the “chant of the witch doctors” and “native drums.” The witch doctors of L’Ag’ya’s Zombie Forest return, sporting body paint, “top hats,” “grass skirts,” “fine spats and shiny shoes.” Their performance of “a dance at first African, later a tap dance very much in the Harlem style” suggests diachronic movement out of Africa, but the text scrambles linear temporality through a return to “the gay sounds of an African morning.” The ambiguity is ontological as well as spatio-temporal. Revisions to the manuscript indicate Dunham’s increasing desire to present the action as Sambo’s dream; in the statement “they [the witch doctors] advance slowly and with great relish toward LBS, who becomes more and more uncomfortable in his dreams,” the word dreams replaces a crossed-out sleep. The “evil Witch Doctors” who disappear when Sambo “starts suddenly from his sleep” inhabit an oneiric world, yet, as the chief doctor had earlier been stirring “the huge kettle… obviously preparing for LBS [Little Black Sambo],” it is unclear who is dreaming up whom.Footnote 81 There is also affective ambiguity. Despite the happy ending, the text is shot through with compromise, signalled by Sambo’s unhappy yet unavoidable exchange of precious clothes for life. The Witch Doctors’ unexplained malevolence also suggests betrayal from within, although this possibility is not as well developed as in L’Ag’ya. Through these ambiguities, together with the kettledrums, witch doctors, and creolised dances, emerges the Plantation, a traumatic yet life-affirming site of memory. This Plantation creates newness through the kinetic-percussive inheritances of Africa and Europe, the embodied source materials of cultural compromise.
The question remains: At what price? To extract the liberating possibilities of new world creolization for herself and the African Americans who were her actors and audiences, Dunham had to confront histories of displacement and trauma entangled with those of the Afro-diasporic subjects she felt an affinity with. Her understanding of the African continent’s colonized modernity would have had to wait till her first visit to Paris in the 1940s, when she would meet young African intellectuals such as Senghor. In 1936, however, in Martinique, she learned of another diasporic group, the “coolies”: Indian indentured laborers who were taken to the French Antilles to work on the plantations from which the slaves had lately been liberated.Footnote 82 As in the Indian Ocean, French and British imperial collaborations brought laborers from British India to islands now under French rule. Francophone creolization processes make it nigh impossible today to reconstruct detailed histories of these Indo-French Caribbean populations. Few unambiguous sonic or kinetic traces of Indian-ness survive from the French Caribbean. Yet in Box 48, among the lyrics transcribed by Dunham as “majumba,” we read the phrase “coulie des Trois-Ilets” (coolie of Trois-Îlets—a Martinican village that still boasts a pronounced Indian-descendant demographic) and the name “Madou Manovar” (most probably the Hindu name “Madhu Manohar”). Furthermore, the majumba lyrics include references to hospitals, doctors, policemen, cars, and taxis. L’Ag’ya’s emphasis on the “tiny fishing village” notwithstanding, these lyrics suggest that Martinican villages such as Trois-Îlets actually boasted a full-fledged urban infrastructure, and populations whose creolization went beyond “African” and “European.” Yet in reconstructing Loulouse’s “majumba” as the “love-dance of ancient Africa,” danced to the rhythm of African drums, Dunham erased the coolie of Trois-Îlets as well as the signifiers of civic modernity contained in the songs she collected in Martinique.
Trans(post)colonial: Limits and Possibilities
In a suggestive exploration of performative practices across different Caribbean islands in the wake of the Haitian revolution, Sara Johnson coins the term transcolonial collaboration to define the cultural exchanges that were triggered by the movement of former Haitian slaves throughout a Caribbean linked by still-incoming African and European populations, but already differentiated by the stamp of diverse colonial regimes. Despite the “imperial compartmentalization that divided the region into distinct linguistic, cultural, and political communities,” these newly diasporized (and desubjectified) African-heritage populations found pragmatic, kinaesthetic, consolatory, and spiritual succor in communicating through “gesture, dance, and musical rhythms.”Footnote 83 Communitas was fostered through “percussive-based idioms” that “occurred in the context of festive plantation traditions oriented towards both survival and play.”Footnote 84 Tracing the late nineteenth century popularity of the Haitian Tumba Francesca percussive traditions in Cuba on the one hand, and Haitian “French Set Girls” in Jamaica on the other, she demonstrates how “artistic traditions born out of interisland exchanges became incorporated into diverse local island cultures,”Footnote 85 while generating a pan-diasporic aesthetic across the Americas. This duality allows us to appreciate the “flourishing regional counterplantation aesthetic during the Age of Revolution, an era that necessitated the constant renegotiation and restructuring of black community life.” Transcolonial collaborations reveal how “performers and their audiences were forced to come to grips with the dynamic tension between togetherness and apartness depending on [their] political and intellectual choices.” Johnson’s model for analyzing “rhythm as resistance” beyond the local to a circum-Caribbean scale takes further Barbara Browning’s work on the alterity of “infectious rhythms” from Haiti to New Orleans: “as mnemonic devices, dance and music (both instrumental and lyrical) also created, stored, and disseminated memories of former homes with responses to new ones.”Footnote 86
Taking a cue from, but also moving beyond, Johnson’s focus on the Age of Revolution, I have shown how a self-identified “negro” woman of the early twentieth century recovered the embodied memory of transcolonial rhythmic and kinetic collaborations arising from the Plantation to articulate her own sense of community and place within it. Dunham’s productions of 1938 urge us to insert within the transcolonial the idea of the “post” as notwithstanding the differently postcolonial status of the Caribbean islands she visited in 1938, and, indeed of the United States itself, there is a sense of the belated that attends to her discovery of the wider African diaspora through her fieldwork. This belatedness is born of her apprehending—through dance as a sensuous, embodied, participatory act—a closeness to French Afro-Caribbean dance culture, but also an estrangement from it through her African American history, modulated by Protestant Anglo-Saxonism and urban capitalism.Footnote 87 Through dance she sensed how the “negro” of the Caribbean and of North America followed separate entries into modernity thanks to being embedded within different (post)colonial regimes. Dunham’s graphic capture of kinetic practices, albeit equally belated, constituted a crucial step in her act of rekineticizing them for the Chicago stage. The “graphic” here includes technologies of writing as well as recording: The score for L’Ag’ya was inspired, Dunham recalls, “by old Edison cylindrical recordings I made in Martinique, as well as popular recordings of Creole mazurkas and waltzes and beguines, songs and music that I had learned, thinking perhaps of future theatre repertoire for myself.”Footnote 88 The “graphic” thus interacted with embodied memory as an aural-kinetic field. The trans(post)colonial emerges as a creative process that moves back and forth between embodiment and writing, intuition and analysis, thinking and feeling, remembering and reenacting.
The full story of how L’Ag’ya’s score was created helps us calibrate the collaborative possibilities of this trans(post)coloniality. Technologies of recording let Dunham share her knowledge of Creole music with the young music composer Robert Sanders, whom she had met at the University of Chicago. Sanders found himself drawn to “every rehearsal, and though a piano was not his instrument, he often accompanied on the old upright piano that had been installed in the basement of the Elks Temple on North Dearborn, measure by measure, practically step by step, phrase by phrase”; his embodied participation in turn “spurred [Dunham] on to greater heights of creativity.” Footnote 89 A similar collaboration, this time also in the interpersonal domain, led to the spectacular costumes and mise-en-scenes of Dunham Company productions: these were created by John Pratt, Dunham’s white American husband, whom she met in 1937.Footnote 90 It was Pratt who sensed—even better than Dunham—the necessity of a tragic ending to L’Ag’ya as the most appropriate expression of the compromises and betrayals embedded in Creole creativity. Yet as the dances between Sambo and the tigers enact, such trans(post)colonial collaborative possibilities were shadowed by limitations. Dunham had at hand no meta-narrative to integrate the Indian diasporic presence in the Caribbean into her program of diasporic self-fashioning. Nevertheless, the coexistence in 1938 of Little Black Sambo and L’Ag’ya suggests that, in the domain of the imagination at least, the trans(post)colonial had already realized a transcontinental dimension. It is for us of a later age to use her journeys as a way to retrieve the stories that even a visionary such as Miss Dunham had to erase in order to write—and stage—her Afro-diasporic self into danced being.Footnote 91
