Politics & Power Quote by Katherine Dunham

Dunham is negotiating identity as a living institution, not a fixed shrine. The line has the slightly improvised cadence of someone speaking from inside the work: a maker who built a cultural home and is now refusing to let it harden into a single-story museum. You can hear the push-pull between devotion and strategy. She starts with “necessarily African oriented,” a phrase that both honors African diasporic centrality and resists being boxed in by it. That “necessarily” is doing heavy lifting: it signals awareness of how funders, audiences, and gatekeepers try to freeze Black cultural projects into “heritage” rather than letting them function as expansive civic space.

Her specific intent is curatorial and political. Dunham imagines a braid of communities in the region - African American, American Indian, Appalachian - and then widens the aperture again with “the Haitian room.” Haiti isn’t a side note; it’s a manifesto. Dunham’s dance work fused anthropology with performance, and Haiti was foundational to her understanding of Black modernity and spiritual practice. Naming a Haitian room inside a broader center asserts diaspora as local: the “elsewhere” is already here through influence, migration, and shared histories of labor and resistance.

The subtext is coalition without dilution. She’s not abandoning Blackness; she’s insisting that a Black-led space can host multiplicity on its own terms. “We will always have room for another exhibit” lands like an ethics statement: culture is not a closed collection but an ongoing intake, a choreography of belonging that keeps making space.