The Unofficial Ambassador: Katherine Dunham and Cold War Diplomacy, 1950–65

On December 9, 1950, choreographer Katherine Dunham premiered her anti-lynching ballet Southland at Santiago de Chile’s Municipal Theatre. The U.S. Embassy in Santiago quickly responded by pressuring Dunham to abandon the ballet permanently, but her company performed it again in Paris in 1953. By exposing on foreign soil the horrors of Southern lynch law, Dunham enmeshed herself in the fierce propaganda battles of the Cold War and touched upon a sore point of diplomatic relations: America’s race problem. For the rest of the 1950s, Dunham continued to tour internationally to great acclaim. The U.S. government never took away her passport or canceled her performances, as they did to other politically active entertainers, yet they also denied her funding and official recognition. This paper argues that Dunham occupied an uneasy, liminal space in the diplomatic realm in the 1950s. She was too popular and too important to intercultural exchange to shut down, but her political and aesthetic choices rendered her incapable, in the State Department’s eyes, of officially representing the United States.

When the political winds shifted, the State Department adjusted as well. Dunham often claimed that she never received State Department funding, but in 1965 she flew to Senegal as part of the official U.S. representation at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar. The wave of African decolonization movements in the late 1950s and early 1960s turned the tables of political power. Under pressure from Léopold Sédar Senghor, first president of independent Senegal, the State Department granted Dunham the title of Special Ambassador and financed her yearlong stay in Africa. By looking at Dunham’s career, this paper elucidates the contesting and variable ideas of what bodies were deemed capable of representing the United States to the world during the height of the Cold War.