ABSTRACT
After over two decades as manager and star of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, in 1958, Dunham decided to dissolve her troupe and remain in Tokyo to begin writing the autobiographical account of her “first painful eighteen years” (Island Possessed 266). For the next year, she devoted herself to the excruciating yet liberating process of constructing a narrative of her life in the period prior to her career as a dancer. As one of the first African American anthropologists in the Caribbean in the 1930s and later as star and manager of the largest independent dance troupe of its day, her career took her to over 50 countries throughout the world. Dunham saw herself clearly and consciously as a part of a cosmopolitan process of fertile cultural interchange in the world of dance, and her career marks a significant chapter in African American internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and afropolitanism. Utilizing archived correspondence, this chapter traces details of Dunham’s writing and publication of A Touch of Innocence: Memoirs of Childhood , illustrating how Japan became a resonating space for the consideration of both her early life in the United States in the past and the decimation of her dance troupe in the present.
Dunham, Katherine. A Touch of Innocence: Memoirs of Childhood . [1959]. U of Chicago P, 1994.
———. Island Possessed. [1969]. U of Chicago P, 1994.
