Politics & Power Quote by Isadora Duncan

A modern art icon recoiling from modernity is always revealing. Isadora Duncan, the dancer who sold herself as liberation incarnate, hears jazz and reaches for the ugliest vocabulary her era kept close: “monstrous,” “primitive,” “savage.” The line isn’t just a complaint about music; it’s a bid to police who gets to stand in for “America,” and which bodies, rhythms, and histories get admitted into that national self-portrait.

Duncan’s intent is cultural triage. She’s rejecting the idea that a Black-born, urban, syncopated sound could represent the country, because accepting jazz as “America” would mean accepting an America shaped by migration, racial mixing, commerce, night life, and the postwar churn of the 1910s and 1920s. Calling jazz “primitive” performs a convenient reversal: it frames the new as backward, letting her cast her own “natural” movement aesthetics as elevated, even as both she and jazz were marketed as shocking, sensual, and disruptive.

The subtext is class anxiety and racial hierarchy disguised as aesthetic judgment. “Rhythm” becomes code for the body, and the body becomes code for the people she’s othering. It’s also a defensive move by a European-leaning modernist who wanted America to be legible through Greece, not through Harlem.

What makes the quote sting is its accidental honesty. It captures the moment jazz stopped being a novelty and started looking like a national language - and how quickly gatekeepers reached for “civilization” talk to keep that language from speaking for them.