The Use-Value of 'Josephine Baker'
In both the United States and France, the image of Josephine Baker
endures: from a bronze simply entitled Joséphine in a small
regional museum to her invisible yet omnipresent image in the Princesse
Tam-Tam lingerie boutiques across France. Still images capturing Baker,
even when included in films such as Princesse Tam Tam, remain
problematic; while they often appear to glorify her beauty and talent,
they also fix her image—fix her as an image—rather than as a producer of
multiple, variant, mobile images, capable of using the medium to
transform herself and transcend national, racial, and social boundaries.
Representations of Baker by artists such as Paul Colin have led to
readings (for example, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Karen C.C. Dalton)
that risk confusing Josephine's work with her image. Such readings focus
on the representation of her performances rather than their performance
history, the nature of her stages, her public, and her adaptability to
different forms of performance media. Focusing on such artistic
representations, even critically, we remain within the domain of what
the literary theorist Homi Bhabha has identified as the photographic
fixity of the colonial stereotype.
Admiring dancers' images, focusing on how they look rather than what
they do, we often forget the work that they do to create themselves—the
work of creating images in movement. The cinema, Gilles Deleuze argues
in L'image-mouvement, followed dancers in creating those moving
images. Underneath their iconic images, the work of dancers is ignored
or undervalued because it is invisible, or is not seen as work because
it is indistinguishable from their art. Recent research in dance studies
has explored how concert dance in the 1920s and 1930s took labor as its
theme and identified itself with labor movements. Baker's dancing, in
this age of machines, is both mocking labor as entertainment and
representing labor: she is the human motor, a hybrid dancing machine.
Against the commodification of her labor or her image, she will also use
that other dancing machine, the motion picture camera, the moteur
cinematographique, to get beyond photographic fixity even while
playing to colonial stereotypes.
In France in the 1920s and 1930s, Baker's dancing was seen as at once
liberating and pathological. In Paul Colin's volume of lithographs,
Le tumulte noir, and in the preface by Rip (satirist George
Thenon), her movement images were read doubly, representing without
contradiction what Petrine Archer-Straw has called "'the primordial,'
with all the exotic notions that primitive innocence suggested," as well
as the "urban lifestyle" of "postwar modern man." In Michel Leiris's
homage to Baker, she represents a spirit of freedom to be gained,
ironically, through technological modernity, "an abandonment to animal
joy while under the influence of modern rhythm" that brings with it the
probable "insanity" of a fascination for comfort and progress, along
with the aspiration to a "new life of impassioned frankness." Leiris's
complex formulation of what jazz brought to Europe emphasizes its
African religious or ritual roots and its American modernity;
Josephine's image would come to figure both. Leiris sets up the terms
within which her Africanness as well as her Americanness would be
measured: the postwar technological fantasy recovery from the
technological trauma of the Great War; the pathology of the "dying
civilization" in thrall to the Machine; the insanity of European war
passing for the establishment of order; the violence of that order
imposed by the machines of war and work; and the submission to the
violent rhythms both of work and leisure typified in jazz.
Leiris makes clear that the popularity of La Revue Nègre—as
well as its negative reception as a "contagion" or sickness—were far
from innocent; that French culture projected onto African American dance
forms its own pent-up passions as well as its anxieties, and that
Baker's "primitivism" was also an effect of a "decaying,"
technologically fascinated, industrialized society. Although a limited
European colonial imagination casts Africa as a utopia removed from an
overly mechanized society, the broader imagination of French
ethnographers such as Leiris, who were Baker's contemporaries, gains a
different perspective from working on African cultures that reconnect
technology to ritual. From this perspective, Baker's performances enact
a recontextualization of African material that allows Europeans to see
their own high-tech savagery. A reading of Baker's performances in their
French artistic and intellectual context may serve to emphasize her
status as an object on exhibit. But it also allows an understanding of
the way the components of her dancing—connecting her art to both African
and American-inflected modernisms—bring it into direct relation with
technology understood through both ritual and work, in African as well
as American contexts.
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