Baker, Joséphine
1906–1975

The concepts of gender and race are often perceived as discrete components of an individual's social identity. Yet the official discourse on "women of color," in a racialized and patriarchal order, only magnifies this order's implicit assumptions on women in general. Joséphine Baker's tumultuous life and career in twentieth century-Europe is a reflection of women's broader struggle for acceptance in modernity.

An icon of black female eroticism in interwar Europe, Baker simultaneously submitted to European colonial construction of the abject (in Bulgarian writer Julia Kristeva's terms) other, and subtly reframed her performances to fit into an African-American tradition of social commentary through parodic dancing, as exemplified most notably by the cakewalk. The tension between these two dimensions of Baker's persona is summed up in one of her frequently quoted sentences: "Since I personified the savage on the stage, I tried to be as civilized as possible in daily life."

FROM ST. LOUIS TO THE PARISIAN LIMELIGHT

Born Freda Joséphine McDonald on June 3 in Saint Louis, Missouri, to a bar singer, Baker grew up fatherless and in poverty. At eleven she witnessed the East Saint Louis race riots, an experience that may have prompted her to escape the segregated United States later in life. At thirteen she married for the first time. She also landed her first job as a dancer for Southern vaudeville troupes, the Jones Family Band and the Dixie Steppers (1919), and began touring the country. Baker divorced but was soon remarried to a Pullman porter named William Baker and was hired to perform in two Broadway musicals, Shuffle Along (1921) and The Chocolate Dandies (1924), distinguishing herself in the all-black casts by her constant buffoonery.

Selected for la Revue Nègre, a musical production that opened in Paris in 1925, Baker stole the show with her comic rendition of a new dance, the Charleston, and her passionate execution of the Danse sauvage, in front of crowds that included the most notable literati of the time. In line with primitivist shows performed in the trendy nightclubs of Harlem's "Jungle Alley," la Revue Nègre also exploited the European obsession with the alleged radical alterity of African people—former slaves and now colonial subjects. The craze over Sartjee Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus" of the 1810s, and Baker, known as the Black Venus in the 1920s, suggests that women's bodies were thought to be the privileged locus of this alterity. Baker's nudity on stage, enhanced by exotic paraphernalia—feathers and jewelry, a banana belt, boa scarves and even a live jaguar—attracted scores of admirers to her shows, to the restaurant she owned in the Montmartre section of Paris, and to the movies she starred in. Worshiped by the primitivist modernists, she posed for Spanish painter Pablo Picasso and American artist Man Ray, and inspired French painter Paul Colin's lithographies. Writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Erich Maria Remarque, and Paul Morand paid tribute to her talent.

But her seemingly compliant impersonation of the feminized subaltern earned her harsh criticism in a time of heightened pan-African consciousness. Indicted for being "an agent of minstrelsy," and "prostituting Negro talent" (Borshuk 2001, p. 42), Baker was also rebuked for sporting the dubious title of Queen of the 1931 Exposition Coloniale, while starring in a show at the Casino de Paris designed to celebrate the French Colonial Empire. Many criticized her Tragic Mulatto roles in French films, such as Sirène des Tropiques (1927), Zouzou (1934), and Princesse Tam Tam (1935).

A trend-setter, Baker left her mark on the French fashion of the Années Folles with her corset-free clothing, perfume, and short hairstyle. She even marketed a hair gel, the Bakerfix. As the embodiment of the emergent model of woman liberated from social norms popularized by Victor Margueritte in his novel La Garconne (1922), Baker sometimes performed in a deliberately androgynous way, and was rumored to be bisexual. Her alleged affair with Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is briefly mentioned in American director Julie Taymor's movie Frida (2002).

Having attained some autonomy as an artist by the mid-1930s, Baker began asserting her talent and philosophy in a more personal way. After a devastating visit to the United States in 1936, where she experienced racial discrimination anew, she married a sugar magnate, Jean Lion. Now a French citizen, she continued touring Europe in an often hostile prewar climate. Recruited as a spy at the onset of World War II, she participated in the Resistance movement both in France and North Africa with such distinction that she was made a lieutenant of the female division of the French Air Force and awarded the Légion d'honneur. Her health began to deteriorate after a hysterectomy in 1941.

LATER CAREER AND SOCIAL IMPACT

After the war Baker, again single, married her bandleader Jo Bouillon with whom she wanted to create a transracial model community in her manor in Dordogne, France. She adopted twelve children of various nationalities and religious backgrounds. But Baker managed her finances poorly, and became heavily indebted. Bouillon left her in 1957, and she was expelled from her manor in 1969, although her friend Princess Grace of Monaco helped her secure another home for her Rainbow Tribe.

During two trips to the United States, in 1951 and 1963, she used her fame to fight racial discrimination. She insisted on having an integrated audience at the Copa City in Miami, the first in the club's history; attacked the Stork Club in New York City for refusing her patronage; and participated in the March on Washington in 1963. She also gave benefit concerts in support of the civil rights movement.

Due to her financial difficulties, Baker could not leave the stage, but performed until the end of her life with great gusto and to much acclaim. She appeared at the Olympia Theater in Paris in 1959; in Monte-Carlo in 1969; at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1973; and at the Bobino Theater in Paris in 1975. The show at the Bobino Theater, a musical retrospective of her life and career, was cancelled when Baker died of a brain hemorrhage on April 12, four days after the opening. She was given a state funeral at the Eglise de la Madeleine in Paris and is buried in the Cimetiere de Monaco.

Baker's spectacular trajectory from the slums of St. Louis to the limelight of the European art scene has inspired several biographies, among which Hungry Heart (1993), written by her adoptive son Jean-Claude Baker, figures prominently. Jacques Abtey, Baker's partner in the Resistance described her underground activities in La Guerre Secrète de Joséphine Baker (1949). She personally authored a series of autobiographies that included various versions of her life story.

Baker's participation in her own objectification in the first phase of her career in France remains a troubling issue. Her expert self-promotion as the Vogue Nègre's ultimate object of both male and female desire points to her ability to mimic (and expand on) the conventional black female. As Michael Borshuk argues, in adapting an African-American tradition of parodic dancing to the context of European colonial triumphalism, Baker may have intended to subvert race and gender-based stereotypes. Or, as Samir Dayal contends, she may have been "a black subjectivity divided between conflicting self-representations" (Dayal 2004, p. 36). In any case Baker's own comments indicate that she was fully conscious of her contribution to the "blackening" of Europe. In 1927, she wrote: "Since la Revue Nègre has hit the Gay Paris, I would say that Paris is getting more and more black" (Colin 1927).

see also Dance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abtey, Jacques. 1949. La Guerre secrète de Joséphine Baker, avec une lettre autographe du Général de Gaulle [The secret war of Joséphine Baker, with a signed letter by General de Gaulle]. Paris: Siboney.

Baker, Jean Claude, and Chris Chase. 1993. Josephine: The Hungry Heart. New York: Random House.

Borshuk, Michael. 2001. "An Intelligence of the Body: Disruptive Parody though Dance in the Early Performances of Josephine Baker." In EmBODYing Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance, ed. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Alison D. Goeller. Hamburg, Germany: LIT Verlag.

Colin, Paul. 1927. Tumulte Noir. Paris: Art Succes.

Dayal, Samir. 2004. "Blackness as a Symptom: Joséphine Baker and European Identity." In Blackening Europe: The African American Presence, ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez. New York: Routledge.

Kristeva, J. 1982. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Columbia Univeristy Press.

Stovall, Tyler. 1996. Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Light. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

                                                   Sylvie Kandé