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Panel

8. Negotiating Margins: Power, Agencies, Representations, Resistances

Global Southeast Asias as Method

3 - Afro-Filipina Aesthetics: Transnational Sound Cultures and Dance Performances

Thursday, June 12, 2025
11:15 - 13:00 GMT
Location: LBD-Conseil

    Presenter(s)

  • JP

    Jewel Pereyra

    Boston University, United States

Presentation Abstract
Gypsy Marpessa Dawn Menor was born in 1934 in the US to a Filipino father and African-American mother. Seeking reprieve from Jim Crow segregation and violence, as a teenager Dawn moved to London and Paris to work as a chorus girl with the Katherine Dunham Troupe, one of the first all-Black dancing troupes touring Europe. After working as background singer and dancer in night clubs, Dawn’s solo career took off when she acted in French comedies like “Chérie Noire” (1958) and the Academy award-winning film Orfeu Negro (1959). Like Josephine Baker, Dawn’s body acted as canvas for Euro-American fantasies of Black women’s bodies, beauty, and sexuality. In this presentation, I pay close attention to Dawn’s performances in “Chérie Noire,” Orfeu Negro, live theatre and musical performances, and recorded interviews in French. In her films, Dawn often performs as Black indigenous and/or islander subjects from unnamed French colonies. For instance, in “Cherie Noire,” Dawn played a Black islander woman, who travels to France to work as a maid for an upper-middle class white family. Dawn’s costumes—seashell coverings and sarongs—fashioned her as a colonial subject from French Polynesia or the Caribbean. Although Dawn performs these tropes of Black islander subjects, she also exhibits what Uri McMillan calls “surface aesthetics,” “manipulat[ing] corporeal…surfaces to refuse the interpretive demands of readability, certitude, and transparency.” Through a reading of her oeuvre, I contend Dawn performs “Afro-Filipina aesthetics'' through her multi-lingual and multi-ethnic representations, complicating visualizations of the mixed-race Afro-Filipina performing subject.