Josephine Baker, Performance, and the Traumatic Real
Readings of Josephine Baker's cultural status in the twenties
underscore but also tend to limit her stylized performance of the black
body as a modern, primitivist fetish within the registers of colonial
fantasy. For Harlem Renaissance artists such as Gwendolyn Bennett,
Baker's mimicry of primitivist codes, mixed with her mastery of Parisian
cosmopolitanism, was an empowering role model in her own moment. Baker's
performance, of course, would lead her to become a utopian symbol of
progressive celebrity for diverse audiences throughout Europe, South
America, and eventually in the United States, especially in the 1950s,
when Baker was a civil rights pioneer in league with Walter White and
the NAACP.[1]
But from the beginning, the force of Baker's performance
had its source in a psychic register exceeding that of colonial fantasy.
Not just an exotic object or an imaginary bearer of the European
onlooker's desire, Baker emerges as agent, paradoxically enough, by way
of an encounter with a more radically inaugural gaze, one that finds its
source in what Jacques Lacan theorizes in Seminar XI as the traumatic
Real.
To begin with, in her 1923 poem "Heritage," Gwendolyn Bennett
expressed the desire for an African American heritage in the stylized
landscapes of modernist primitivism that would similarly shape the
staging of La Revue Nègre two years later:
I want to see the slim palm-trees,
Pulling at the clouds
With little pointed fingers....
I want to see lithe Negro girls
Etched dark against the sky
While sunset lingers.
I want to hear the silent sands,
Singing to the moon
Before the Sphinx-still face....
I want to hear the chanting
Around a heathen fire
Of a strange black race.
I want to breathe the Lotus flow'r,
Sighing to the stars
With tendrils drinking at the Nile....
I want to feel the surging
Of my sad people's soul,
Hidden by a minstrel-smile.[2]
Here, Bennett conjures Africa through anaphora in the repetition of
the poet's desire not just for the kind of stylized vision of exotic
"palm-trees" derived, perhaps, from writer Claude McKay, but as a more
holistic structure of feeling that involves the five senses. Bennett
insists that she wants "to see lithe Negro girls /Etched dark against
the sky," and to "feel the surging /Of my sad people's soul /Hidden by a
minstrel smile." Moreover, her allusions to the moon's "Sphinx-still
face" and "the Nile" advance the kind of cultural geography of African
location witnessed, for example, in Langston Hughes's celebration of
"the Nile" in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" as a body of water "ancient
as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins."[3]
Before Countee Cullen's own "Heritage" poem, Bennett imagines the
subversive "chanting /Around a heathen fire /Of a strange black race."
Beyond such primitivist reminiscences, however, the poem is marked by a
coded, and decidedly African American, literary "heritage." Bennett's
"minstrel-smile" which hides "the surging /Of my sad people's soul"
communicates the same "double consciousness" portrayed in Paul Laurence
Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask."
Figure 1
By 1926, Bennett's aesthetic ideology had evolved from what Sterling
Brown described as the New Negro "discovery of Africa as a source of
race pride" to a more cosmopolitan mixing of primitive and modern
aesthetic codes, such as in her cover illustration for
Opportunity. This transition was directly linked to Bennett's
viewing of Josephine Baker's celebrated dance sauvage in La
Revue Nègre the preceding year.[4]
In her visual art, Bennett
presents the modern black dancer as a more ecstatic and self-possessed
version of Baker's cosmopolitan persona that signifies, even as it
masks, a stylized primitivist self. The body language of the racially
ambivalent figure silhouetted in white against a black background
suggestively mimics the bold black celebrants modeled on the moves of
Baker's danse sauvage. Aesthetic primitivism, popularized in the
avant-garde imagination of Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Apollinaire,
Blaise Cendrars, and the Zurich dadaists Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara,
coincided with the influx of African American jazz culture and the
emergence, as James Clifford documents, "of a modern, fieldwork-oriented
anthropology ... at the Paris Institute of Ethnology and the renovated
Trocadero museum."[5]
In critiquing the conjuncture of experimental
modernism, primitivism, and ethnography, Clifford concludes, "the black
body in Paris of the twenties was an ideological artifact" (Clifford
197). Following Clifford, Paul Gilroy also reads Baker as a modernist
minstrel that performed the Eurocentric demand for "escapist
exoticism."[6]
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Next page
|
