Afterword

Abstract

The complex maps of diasporic displacements legible in Katherine Dunham’s Caribbean- inspired choreographies imply routes that are driven by the imagination in her motivation to study Caribbean dance as a way to understand and heal the claim of a forgotten African American past and heal the wounds of forced passage, enslavement, and oppression. She chose Jamaica first and then Haiti as sites where the survival of ancient forms from Africa intertwined with the interpretations and inventions of the creative spirit of those who were forcibly brought to live in the region and whose links to any sort of cultural authenticity were normally interpreted as being severed. Similarly, in Maya Deren’s visual images of the dancing bodies in Haiti and in her mode of experimentalism in film and writing, the creative exchanges between Haitians, African American modern dancers, and the artist filming them illustrate a challenge to preexisting notions of representation by artists of their Others. In both cases, the usual patterns of knowledge and transmission are inverted in artistic practices. The relationship among Caribbean performance in the dance rituals of Vodou, North American black dance, and experimental film as practiced by Dunham and Deren has been presented in this study as a network of potential acts of transformation within artistic and academic discourse, precisely following the route of the imagination.