The Kinesthetic Turn: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Machinery of Dance Modernism

Abstract: This essay argues that Jessie Redmon Fauset's debut novel, There is Confusion , sets the terms by which Black women would go on to challenge the formidable color line of twentieth-century dance. The 1924 text dramatizes the exercise of feminine performance to arbitrate between competing doctrines of race essentialism by centering on the figure of the aloof, yet laboring ballerina of color. Fauset ultimately presents her heroine's thinking as a kind of body to emphasize the conditions of mental work Black women have been forced to endure, in the modernist period as in our own.