Rituals of Return in African American Women's Twentieth Century Literature and Performance.

Abstract

A substantial body of African American Studies scholarship has demonstrated how the unresolved pain, suffering, and violence of the past impacts the present, and,furthermore, how African American women writers and performers particularly have often depicted the lingering past as ghostly or ancestral figures. However, few sustained studies consider this phenomenon beyond the scope of representation. Rituals of Return in African American Women’s Twentieth Century Literature and Performance focuses on four key twentieth century figures—Josephine Baker (1906-1975), Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), Ntozake Shange (b. 1948), and Julie Dash (b. 1952)—and probes the methodological and creative challenges that the past poses for these women whose literary, cinematic, choreographic, and dramatic works grapple with the resonances of gender, sexual, and racial violence. Using ritual, spiritual possession, divination, and the ancestral burial grounds as overarching metaphors, this dissertation argues that the creative process is a dialogic rather than oppositional interplay between the spiritual and the political, pain and beauty, invisibility and hypervisibility, and the disembodied ancestral past and embodied temporal present.

Beginning with a close reading of Josephine Baker’s conga performance in the 1935 French colonial film Princess Tam Tam, I demonstrate how neither the exuberance of her dancing, nor the political demands of francophone discourses of black internationalism can quiet the lingering pain of Baker’s upbringing in the U.S. Midwest, or the historical, exploitative representations of black female bodies. Katherine Dunham’s choreography in her 1951 Cold War era production of Southland, a balletic dramatization of lynching in the American South, similarly incites phenomenal reproductions of the past and its attendant pains, as well as subsequent crises in identity. In the 1975 for colored girls, Ntozake Shange inherits these crises and remedies them through the ritual form of the choreopoem and through a more individualized and gendered depiction of black women’s lives. At the close of the twentieth century, Julie Dash’s film and novel Daughters of the Dust illustrate how ritualizing the creative process reveals those moments when text meets performance, where the ancestral crosses the living, and where ritual affirms the fact of black humanity.