RITUALS OF RETURN IN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE AND PERFORMANCE by Tayana L. Hardin A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (American Culture) in The University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Professor Magdalena Zaborowska, Co-Chair Professor Frieda Ekotto, Co-Chair Professor Tiya Miles Associate Professor Robin Wilson © Tayana L. Hardin 2012 Rituals of Return is dedicated to Thomas, Sr. (“Pops”) and Betty (“BB”) Hardin and all of our mothers and fathers: George Leonard and Mollie Bell (Gatewood) Nuckols Roosevelt and Janie (Garnett) Richardson Walter Oscar and Martha (Holt) Hendrickson Paul Onis and Edna (McWhorter) Hardin Paul, Jr. and Mattie Frances (Hendrickson) Hardin James Theodore and Hannah Bell (Nuckols) Richardson ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the following units at the University of Michigan for funding and research support while I completed doctoral degree requirements: Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies; Center for the Education of Women; Center for World Performance Studies; Institute for Research on Women and Gender; Program in American Culture; Department of Afroamerican and African Studies; Arts of Citizenship; and the Department of Comparative Literature. I am especially grateful for a 2010-2011 Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, which is administered through the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The American Studies Association and the Society of Dance History Scholars also provided financial support to present my dissertation research at their national conferences. Many thanks to my dissertation committee: Magdalena Zaborowska and Frieda Ekotto (my co-chairs), thank you both for walking this dissertation road with me! You have been supportive as mentors, colleagues, and friends. I also extend gratitude to Tiya Miles and Robin Wilson, for being present and available to me throughout this process. I admire you all as scholars, practitioners, and exceptional human beings. It has been an honor to work with you. I would like to acknowledge the 2005 cohort, colleagues, staff, and professors of the Program in American Culture for the gift of collegiality, friendship, and support. Special gratitude is extended to Paul Anderson. And very special gratitude is extended to iii Marlene Moore, who entertained my family stories and eased my confusion and panic many, many times. The Incredibles Writing Group has saved the day time and time again. But that’s what super heroes do. Thank you to Paul Farber, Matthew Blanton, and Grace Sanders. The staff and faculty in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS), have provided inspiration and support, often with the humor and laughter of family. A special thanks to Ms. Elizabeth James, who, in goddess fashion, created time for me in 2004. Thank you to the faculty and staff of the Department of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville (Louisville, Kentucky) for opening my door to the black world and for continued support. Special thanks goes to Theresa Rajack-Talley, Denise Martin, and Chandra Stroud. I am also indebted to Dr. Estella Majozo, who looked into me one day and told me to write, and to Dr. Lundeana Thomas, who insisted that I experience the Michigan Difference for myself. The Black Humanities Collective (BHC) has been a steadfast source of intellectual engagement, organizing, and great friendships. Matthew Countryman (Arts of Citizenship), and Julie Ellison and Kristen Hass (Imagining America and Rackham Public Humanities Seminar) have been supportive as mentors, especially on the issue of public scholarship. Glenda Dickerson and the faculty of the Center for World Performance Studies provided the opportunity to bridge imaginative and theoretical work during my graduate residency in the Center. Thank you. iv My graduate work has been sustained by the love, generosity, and support of my local Ann Arbor dance and yoga community. I extend special thanks to René Dykes, Teresa Myers, Georgia Olson, and Bethamie Wyatt. To Patricia Moonsammy, Afia Ofori-Mensa, Lara Stein Pardo, Rachel Quinn, Kiara Vigil, and Aimee VonBokel: you paint your life with such vivid colors. Thank you, thank you for sharing your life (and many, many lunches) with me and adding so much warmth and beauty to my life. Maria Paz Esguerra, you are my sister and dear, dear friend. You’ve held my hand throughout this journey, and I’m so grateful: you’re the best gift. I love you forever. Kanika Harris, you are my sister, dear friend, teacher, and fellow traveler. My life is so much sweeter because you’re in it. I love you forever. Grace Louise Bowers Sanders, I am one of the few people on the planet who has found her soulmate. Thank you. Our future is feeling. I love you forever. And my heartiest and warmest thank you goes to my family. Thank you Pops (Thomas, Sr.) for sharing your wisdom: you get smarter and smarter the older I get. Thank you BB (Betty) for your faith, insight, and encouragement to trust the vision. Thank you T.J. (Thomas, Jr.) for checking in on me and reminding me to honor the creative spirit—you’re right: she always shows up for us. Thank you Lil Jason for helping me to finally understand theory! You saved my graduate career (but there’s only room for my name on the diploma). Extra sweet appreciation to Shaneka Stapleton Hardin, Bria Steen, Brooke Hardin, and Thomas, III. I love you all forever. I am also thankful for my extended family: the Hardins, the Richardsons, the Nuckols, the Hendricksons, and the Stapletons. Thank you all for your support. v And finally, I am humbled by the Spirit who issues the call to worship with every stroke of the pen, and to my Ancestors who give me the courage to heed the call and say my name. I love you with my life. vi PREFACE Aunt Hester is crying An eerie silence had fallen, punctuated by whimpers, sobs and moans rising from the shadows. A woman is led to a lonely and secluded spot near Folsom’s Bridge. They got Eloise. Grief-stricken and terrified, her agony joins with her baby’s two feeble cries. (And Aunt Hester cried too.) There is a deep stain, Then the old woman began howling, a mark of blood and shame which spreads a sound that seemed to come from her very guts. from under the magnolia trees. Southern trees bear strange fruit. (Aunt Hester is crying again.) And though I have never seen a black body swaying from a southern tree, I have felt these things in spirit, and the need to show this thing to the world. The challenge: unearthing the mislaid, forgotten, &/or misunderstood Yall see how dey throw dem in de ground wit no care at all. women writers, painters, mothers, cowgirls, & union leaders of our pasts Now dey come back to we! Sixty million and more. I’m trying to create a land for us where we can live. This is the story of every one of them. (Aunt Hester keeps crying.) Come back to get de proper way from we. Sixty million and more Us got to put dem to right! vii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii PREFACE vii ABSTRACT x CHAPTER Introduction: Locating the Ancestral Burial Grounds 1 1. Josephine Baker and Reckoning with Ghosts 22 La Baker: An Improperly Buried Body 28 La Baker: Exotic Puppet 36 La Baker: No Rest for the Weary 46 2. Katherine Dunham and the Story of Every One of Them 61 Prologue to a Prologue 71 Carving Southland into the Discourse of Lynching 76 Southland: The Story of Every One of Them 86 In Southland’s Wake 101 3. Ntozake Shange and the Remedy of Ritual 112 Summoning the Choreopoem 115 Combat Aesthetic: A Living Remedy 125 viii Àshe: Land Where We Can Live 134 Finding God, Loving Fiercely 147 4. Julie Dash and the Return to the Ancestral Burial Grounds 164 I Never Planned a Career as a Filmmaker 169 How to Make Gumbo: A Lesson on Methodology 172 To Heal Our Imperialized Eyes: Daughters and the Literary Sequel 179 Epilogue: Bone by Bone 193 BIBLIOGRAPHY 204 ix ABSTRACT Rituals of Return in African American Women’s Twentieth Century Literature and Performance by Tayana L. Hardin Co-Chairs: Magdalena Zaborowska and Frieda Ekotto 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 x 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.