Introduction:
Why Josephine Baker?
Indeed, why Josephine Baker? Or rather, how? How is it that, of all
the half-naked chorus girls to appear on the stages of Montmartre during
the Roaring Twenties, Parisians chose to make Josephine Baker into a
star without parallel? How was Baker transformed, in what seems a matter
of mere moments, into the incarnation of Africa, America, and even Paris
itself? How is it that a 19-year-old black girl from St. Louis,
Missouri, who was neither the most beautiful nor the most talented
entertainer to hit interwar France, was able to captivate the
European cultural capital in 1925 and then to keep it mesmerized for
nearly half a century, until her death in 1975 at age 68? These are
questions that have fascinated me, and many others, about the phenomenon
that was and in fact still is Josephine Baker. She is a moment that has
yet to be repeated.
Josephine Baker circulated in the rarefied circles of
twentieth-century celebrity, at one point becoming the highest-paid
entertainer in Europe. She sat for Picasso; had an affair with Le
Corbusier; was raved about by Colette, Langston Hughes, e.e. cummings,
and Jean Cocteau; and was proclaimed by Ernest Hemingway "the most
sensational woman anybody ever saw. Or ever will." The architect Adolf
Loos designed a house that would showcase Baker's naked body from every
angle, and the artist Alexander Calder created several wire sculptures
of her form. Among Baker's benefactors were heads of state from
Princess Grace and the Pasha of Marrakesh to Juan and Eva Péron.
Living as we do at a cultural moment in which entertainers seem able
to become famous for little more than being famous, we cannot help but
recognize the extent to which societies produce celebrities, the extent
to which the public creates the icons that are our artists. It seems
particularly fitting, then, to consider Baker's meteoric rise to stardom
in the light of the sociocultural realities that conditioned her
audience. The negotiation of the exchange that underlies
performance—this at once mutually exploitative and mutually gratifying
interaction between spectator and spectacle—is what has always most
intrigued me about Josephine Baker's story. It was my desire to suss out
its specifics that motivated the September 2006 international colloquium
out of which this issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online
emerged.
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