An internationally known dancer, choreographer, and gifted anthropologist, Katherine Dunham was born to a black American tailor and a well-to-do French Canadian woman twenty years his senior. This book is Dunham's story of the chaos and conflict that entered her childhood after her mother's early death. In stark prose, she tells of growing up in both black and white households and of the divisions of race and class in Chicago that become the harsh realities of her young life. A riveting narrative of one girl's struggle to transcend the painful confusions of a family and culture in turmoil, Dunham's story is full of the clarity, candor, and intelligence that lifted her above her troubled beginnings. "A Touch of Innocence is an absorbing family chronicle written with a gift for physical detail sometimes too real for comfort. In quietly graphic prose the growing girl, the slightly older brother, the ambitious father and the kind stepmother are pictured in such human terms that when their lives get tied into harder and harder knots beyond their undoing, one can only continue to read helplessly as doom closes in upon the household."—Langston Hughes, New York Herald Tribune "A Touch of Innocence is one of the most extraordinary life stories I have ever read . . . . The content of this book is so heartbreaking that only the strongest artistic skills can keep it from leaking out into sobbing self-pity, but Katherine Dunham's art contains it, understands it and refuses to be overwhelmed by its terrors."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times "The first eighteen years of the famous dancer and choreographer's life are brought vividly to the reader in this first volume of her autobiography. She writes of what it is like to be a special, gifted young woman growing up in a racially mixed family in the American Middle West. A beautiful, touching and sometimes discomforting book."—Publishers Weekly "As writing it is honest, searing, graphic and touching, giving us a rather heartbreaking early view of the young American Negro who was later to make a name for herself as a dancer and choreographer."—Arthur Todd, Saturday Review

A Touch of Innocence: A Memoir of Childhood

Biographies & Memoirs

Dunham, Katherine

Arts & Literature

University of Chicago Press

Just as surely as Haiti is "possessed" by the gods and spirits of vaudun (voodoo), the island "possessed" Katherine Dunham when she first went there in 1936 to study dance and ritual. In this book, Dunham reveals how her anthropological research, her work in dance, and her fascination for the people and cults of Haiti worked their spell, catapulting her into experiences that she was often lucky to survive. Here Dunham tells how the island came to be possessed by the demons of voodoo and other cults imported from various parts of Africa, as well as by the deep class divisions, particularly between blacks and mulattos, and the political hatred still very much in evidence today. Full of the flare and suspense of immersion in a strange and enchanting culture, Island Possessed is also a pioneering work in the anthropology of dance and a fascinating document on Haitian politics and voodoo.

Island Possessed

Gollantz: London-Paris-Milan [Sixth of the Gollantz Saga]

A Touch of Innocence

Ayer Co. Pub

Format Hardcover Subject Literary Collections Publisher Greenwood Pub Group

Journey to Accompong

Praeger

Kasamance: A Fantasy

Literature & Fiction

Classics

The Third Press

UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies publication is a valuable resource for dancers and anthropologists.

Dances of Haiti

Humor & Entertainment

Univ of California Center for Afro

Dances of Haiti (A CAAS special publication)

Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

Katherine Dunham's Journey to Accompong

Henry Holt And Company, New York, 1946. Hardcover in Dust Jacket. Written by Katherine Dunham, Introduction by Ralph Linton. Illustrated by Ted Cook (Proctor Fyffe Cook). First Edition (NAP). ' Katherine Mary Dunham (also known as Kaye Dunn), was an American dancer, choreographer, author, educator, and social activist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers in American and European theater of the 20th century, and directed her own dance company for many years. She has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance." While a student at the University of Chicago, Dunham took leave and went to the Caribbean to study dance and ethnography. She later returned to graduate and submitted a master's thesis in anthropology. She did not complete the other requirements for the degree, however, and realized that her professional calling was performance. At the height of her career in the 1940s and 1950s, Dunham was renowned throughout Europe and Latin America and was widely popular in the United States, where The Washington Post called her "dancer Katherine the Great". For almost 30 years she maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only self-supported American black dance troupe at that time, and over her long career she choreographed more than ninety individual dances. Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of dance anthropology, or ethnochoreology. She also developed the Dunham Technique.'

Literary

Literary Licensing, LLC

Format Paperback Subject Literary Collections

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dunham, Katherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dunham, Katherine

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dunham, Katherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Touch of Innocence: A Memoir of Childhood

Island Possessed

A Touch of Innocence

Journey to Accompong

Kasamance: A Fantasy

Dances of Haiti

Dances of Haiti (A CAAS special publication)

Katherine Dunham's Journey to Accompong

Katherine Dunham's Journey to Accompong