Inside Out

Abstract

The second chapter grapples with the tensions between authenticity, spectacle, and exoticism in its examination of Shango (1945), a dance choreographed for Broadway and performed in repertoire by Katherine Dunham and her dancers. Dunham's ethnographically informed invocation of Vodou makes felt the tensions between exoticization and the possibility of decolonization while also preserving something of the unrepresentability—the noise—of Vodou itself. Shango's movement through and distance from African diasporic spirituality complicates questions of agency, representation, and legibility. Dunham's anthropological gaze provides a particular vantage point from which to think the desires and tensions of diasporic belonging. The main tension that undergirds the chapter is the friction between insider and outsider knowledge and how that guides interpretation.