Julia Foulkes
Postdoctoral Fellow, 2002-2003

Julia Foulkes is a Core Faculty member of New School University in New York City where she teaches history. She received her Ph.D. in history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her research focuses on 20th-century U.S. cultural history, especially the politics of artists, with an interdisciplinary approach integrating questions of aesthetics, race, and gender. Her recent book, Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), highlights the significant role African Americans had in the development of modern dance in the United States. This research led to her role as an advisor for the PBS documentary "Free to Dance," about African Americans in dance in the U.S., which first aired in June 2001. She has also been the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College Chicago (1997-98), and a selected participant in a 2001 NEH Summer Seminar on "American Pragmatism and Culture: Art and Society."

Fellow's Project Description
African American Artists and the Dismantling of Colonialism

In December 1948, the French diplomat René Cassin, one of the framers of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, went out to celebrate the passing of the declaration and found himself next to Katherine Dunham, then on tour with her company, in a Paris café. Recalling the evening in his memoir, Cassin took the happenstance of her companionship as a mark of a more harmonious, equitable era of brotherhood then beginning. He conjoined the international fame of an African American artist with a more inclusive vision of the world, a characterization frequently employed in the wake of World War II by those concerned with international politics. What Cassin’s recollection lacks is specific mention of the growing political tension in Africa at a time when those countries were attempting to remove the shackles of colonialism. I intend to fill out Cassin’s characterization by focusing on African American artists’ interactions with political issues concerning Africa during the 1950s and 1960s and how that shaped an international deliberation on the function of the arts.

This research project follows the lead of the dancers and choreographers Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus who played a critical role in the development of concert dance in the United States (an influence that is just recently being restored in histories of dance, such as in the documentary Free to Dance). Both women sought degrees in anthropology at the same time as they pursued dance careers. Even though they argued against an innate dance talent of African Americans, Dunham and Primus promoted the important role of dance in African and Caribbean societies that persevered throughout the African diaspora. Dance, reinforced by the anthropological study of Dunham and Primus in West Africa and the Caribbean, fortified the link to Africa in the mid-century diasporan world that led other artists and politicians to express what black peoples had in common. The work of African American dancers and choreographers provided a bridge from the renaissance movements in Harlem and Chicago to the Black Arts movement of the 1960s by promoting dance as a noted thread of racial heritage.

But I believe this unifying tie to Africa via the arts included other, more conflicting, elements as well. I am researching artists’ interactions with Africa during the 1950s and 1960s by focusing on four topics: 1) the journeys of African American artists to West Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, including those who participated in the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar (with special attention to Katherine Dunham who served as the technical cultural adviser to President Senghor); 2) the participation of African American artists in world conferences on colonialism and Pan-Africanism, such as Richard Wright’s perspective of the Bandung Conference and Paul Robeson’s role in the Council on African Affairs; 3) the transformation of the arts in African countries as they moved from colonialism to independence, such as the development of the Ghana Dance Ensemble which began in the early 1960s and Pearl Primus’ role in establishing a Liberian Cultural Center in Monrovia in 1959; and 4) the response of African Americans in the United States to these events, particularly those involved in the Black Arts movement. At this beginning stage, I believe that African American artists had a conflicted role in the transformation of traditional African cultural practices onto theatrical stages and into museums as African countries moved from colonialism to independence; they were resented by many Africans for their leadership role, yet heralded at home for their fortification of the link to Africa in the mid-century diasporan world that saw the flowering of the Black Arts movement.

This research impacts three scholarly debates. In studies of artistic events of the post-World War II period, historians have argued that African American artists served as anti-communist emissaries in State Department-sponsored junkets in an attempt to secure civil rights at home. This project re-positions the issue by focusing on the outreach of African governments to African American artists and the ramifications that had in re-shaping a cultural heritage in the early years of African countries’ independence as well as in the civil rights movement at home. Secondly, the project builds on scholarship on the Black Arts movement in looking at arts beyond literature and music that illuminates differences between men and women artists and how they worked in and around the masculinist tenor of the Black Arts movement. Finally, the project provides a historical perspective on the debate about the influence of culture in bettering the plight of people living in developing countries. A variety of scholars and politicians have tackled this issue in a recent collection of essays entitled Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, edited by Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington. The book presents a variety of opinions, from the anthropologist Richard Shweder who argues that the notion that western values promote economic, political, and social advancement constitutes another form of imperialism to the African diplomat Daniel Etounga-Manguelle who makes a passionate plea for a “cultural revolution” in education, politics, economics, and social life to combat the crippling poverty in most African countries. What the collection lacks, however, is any historical case study. This project supplies evidence and specificity as to how and in what ways culture matters within the African diaspora, with what costs and what benefits.

At a time when links between people in different parts of the world seem to be both more undeniable and more fractious, the impact of the arts needs further examination. We look to artists to articulate our world, to re-arrange current dynamics into a vision of the future. Therefore, we need to look more closely at the visions—weighed against actions and consequences—of artists of the past. If René Cassin found in Katherine Dunham’s success a move toward international solidarity, then we need to understand why, fifty years later, that vision seems even more unattainable.