It appears to me [...] that if you choose to call these strange creatures of yours related, the relationship is not so much a relationship of blood as of soul or of spirit. It is in the way in which we see all really deep friendship arise among men, opposite peculiarities of disposition being what best makes internal union possible.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities (1807)

In September 1948, a young former Air Force pilot named Garry Davis walked into the United Nations meeting at the Place de Trocadero in Paris and declared himself a citizen of the world. Earlier that year, Davis had renounced his U.S. citizenship and had been ordered out of France by the French government as a sans papiers. When the United Nations delegations assembled in Paris that fall, their temporary residency in the Palais de Chaillot officially became international territory. Davis thus claimed, upon entering the building, that he had emigrated, and began issuing proclamations about the need for a world government and about the inherent violence of individual nations. As Davis stated on the U.N. floor in November 1948, "the sovereign states you represent divide us and lead us to the Abyss of Total War."[1]

Davis's symbolic acts were both an appeal and a challenge to the humanistic mission of the fledgling United Nations, a product of the Second World War, whose charter had been signed only three years previously, in 1945. In particular, Davis's act looked toward the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the General Assembly was currently in the process of ratifying and which would be adopted on December 10, 1948. Demanding that the U.N. hold true to its founding promise to "practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors," Davis called upon the U.N. "to convene forthwith a world constituent Assembly to raise the standard around which all men can gather, the standard of true peace, of one government for one world."[2]

The United Nations, of course, rejected Davis's plea, although his cause found widespread popular support, as well as the endorsement of a substantial number of leading intellectuals, including Albert Camus, Richard Wright, André Breton, and a large number of Surrealists. As Breton wrote, commending but also radicalizing Davis's position, "evil ... resides in the compartmentalization of the world by nations and more or less disguised empires. It is this nationalism, drunk and still thirsting for blood, that today we must arrest wherever it exists; it is this rival imperialism of Coca-Cola and distorted Marxism that we must prevent from consuming the sacrifice of our lives."[3] As Breton's language suggests, Davis's world citizenship fused the broad humanistic project of an international body like the United Nations with the post-Stalinist left's efforts to find new forms of internationalism to replace the nationalisms, colonialisms, and imperialisms they rejected as engines of domination and violence. The pragmatic impossibility of the United Nations supplanting all world governments revealed the idealism, if not the naïveté, of Davis's actions. All the same, his notions of world citizenship remind us how broadly such acts of militant humanism resounded in the political environment of the years that marked the end of World War Two and the onset of the Cold War.

It is within the context of such appeals to the institutionalization of global tolerance that I wish to examine Josephine Baker's own humanistic project, her efforts to establish the village of Les Milandes in Dordogne as what she called La capitale du monde de la fraternité [The world capital of brotherhood]. With her husband, Jo Bouillon, Baker purchased the chateau and much of the village of Les Milandes in December 1947, which they began restoring. In November 1948, she brought her mother, sister, and brother-in-law from St. Louis to live in the chateau. The chateau did not, however, become the world capital of brotherhood right away. After a fraught tour of the U.S. in 1951, marked by the infamous Stork Club incident in which Baker was refused service at the prestigious restaurant and was then slandered in the press, Baker became increasingly militant in the use of her celebrity to fight segregation in the U.S. During the next two years, her civil rights activism was concomitant with her world tour, with Baker appearing at numerous rallies and giving speeches in the U.S., Cuba, Latin America, and France. And then her political tactics changed. In 1953, she adopted Akio, a Korean orphan, while on tour in Japan. She and Jo Bouillon adopted eight more children between 1953 and 1956, reaching a total of twelve children by 1962. These children became Baker's famous "rainbow tribe," memorialized in countless newspapers and magazine articles, as well as in a children's book Baker had published in 1957. With the chateau of Les Milandes as the home base of this collection of ethnically and religiously diverse children, Baker promoted her village in Dordogne as a global village. As she wrote in closing a personal letter to Jo Bouillon in 1968, even as the chateau was about to be auctioned off for its debts, Les Milandes "represents the ideal of brotherhood symbolized by the children."[4]

Throughout her postwar career, Baker would tirelessly reiterate the humanistic mission of her family and adopted village in the French southwest. Whereas Garry Davis made his case for global citizenship in explicitly political terms, Baker's practices of adoption seemed to take place on a more domestic scale. Yet not only did the performer's massive international celebrity render such domestic practices public, but Baker herself mobilized this celebrity as a means for establishing the rainbow tribe's symbolic value as what might be considered a depoliticized form of political intervention. As one of a number of poster designs for Les Milandes commissioned in 1958 suggests [Figure 1], Baker promoted the village as a tourist destination in ways that attempted to build Baker's "world capital of brotherhood" on the order of the United Nations.[5] The design, with its jaunty proliferation of national flags, seems even to borrow the iconography of the U.N. headquarters building in New York, which was completed in 1952.[5] A second poster design [Figure 2], bearing the same slogan, invokes the media attention itself that Baker used to fuel her global village, both financially and politically. A relentless correspondent as well as an oft-interviewed celebrity, Baker's project relied heavily on her contacts with journalists, photographers, intellectuals, and dignitaries, yet its ideological and political stakes were likewise often abstracted, for the same reason. As Benetta Jules-Rosette has suggested, one of the problems with the design of Les Milandes, and of Baker's portrayal in the print media, was that her adoptive project could look more like a celebration of universal motherhood—with Baker as a saintly Madonna—than a symbolic embrace of universal brotherhood [Figure 3]. As a result, Baker's artistic and philanthropic career after the Second World War is often considered a financially doomed and conceptually limited extension of her interwar fame, and her on- and offstage performances as based more on nostalgia than on artistic or political innovation.[7] I would like to propose instead that Baker's rainbow tribe mobilized both multiracial adoption and Frenchness in an effort to extend, through symbolic means, her civil rights activism of the early 1950s.

Figure 1: Courtesy of Emory University Special Collections. [Back to text]

Figure 2: Courtesy of Emory University Special Collections. [Back to text]

Figure 3 [Back to text]

One of Baker's more succinct statements of purpose appears in a letter she wrote in 1959 to her agent, William Taub, in response to his request for details about Les Milandes. For each of the ten children she and Bouillon had adopted by this point, Baker identifies his or her national origin, religion, race, and age. As she writes:

They each are brought up in their own religion so as to prove that religion is an expression of the soul and should unite people instead of separating them and that God is the father of us all.

We adopted these children as an example and a symbol of universal brotherhood and to prove that people of different colors, continents and creeds, can live together in harmony and brotherhood, and that with tolerance, understanding and love there can be a better future for the world.

Every day, our children prove that our theory was right and these children give us profound confidence in the future although the world is confused.

These children are followed closely by special doctors and have been vaccinated against all diseases including polio.[8]

Adding that all the children would be tutored in their native languages and would be reintroduced to their native lands by age 12, Baker's letter emphasizes the extent to which her "rainbow tribe" worked to preserve, rather than to dissolve, the racial and cultural differences among the adoptive children. In certain accounts, this characterization runs into stereotyping, appearing more like the neocolonial small world of Walt Disney than the domestic embodiment of the United Nations.[9] One of the most egregious characterizations of the rainbow tribe's racial and religious "differences" in such terms is also one of the most prominent: Jo Bouillon's introduction to the posthumous autobiography of Josephine Baker, which he coauthored, presents the rainbow tribe's agglomeration of ethnic "types" in memorializing Baker's death. Remembering Baker as "a woman of a hundred faces," Bouillon writes:

These faces rose before me as I traveled through the darkness to Josephine's side. And with them came the beloved faces of the children. Akio, almond-eyed, sensitive, serious; Jarri, with his Nordic fairness and stamina, Jean-Claude, our blond Frenchman, blessed with an innate equilibrium; Mara, a full-blooded Indian, who hoped to become a doctor because they are lacking in his native Venezuela; Janot, the Japanese, whose love of plants and flowers points toward a career in horticulture; Brahim and Marianne, found abandoned under a bush in the midst of the Algerian war, he the son of an Arab, she a colonial's granddaughter; dusky Koffi from Abidjan, with his purity of spirit [...][9]

Bouillon's litany continues, closing with an image of how the children's' faces were "overshadowed by images of Josephine, friend of the rich and poor, the unknown and famous." Not only does Bouillon, throughout his contributions to Baker's autobiography, portray the children as appendages of the dancer's personality, but the sentimentalized racial essentialism of Bouillon's taxonomy also overshadows the more nuanced ways in which Baker conceptualized the rainbow tribe.

Baker's logic for selecting twelve ethnically and religiously distinct children was no less metonymic than Bouillon's taxonomy—indeed, as names like Brahim and Marianne suggest, the children were both chosen and, in many cases, named for their ability to represent ethnicities and religions that were manifestly divided, as were Algerians and French colonial pieds-noirs at the time of the children's adoption, during the Algerian War. The symbolic nature of the rainbow tribe extended beyond this metonymic form of representation, however, comprising Baker's broader theory of adoption as a calculated, albeit compromised form of symbolic militancy against the politics of segregation in the United States. That is, Baker's ideas about adoption—and I mean here both the literal adoption of children, as well as the more figurative adoption of French nationalism—were forged in opposition to the biological determinism that still characterized race relations in the postwar United States. Baker was far from the naïve idealist she is often portrayed as having become in her later years when, separated from Bouillon, she was forced to tour continually and ultimately had to sell Les Milandes at auction to cover her debts. Bouillon, in particular, helped promulgate this negative image when, in his contributions to Baker's autobiography, he repeatedly foreshadows the chateau's bankruptcy, writing of how he "realized yet again that Josephine was much too pure and childlike for our times" and that he needed to protect her idealism and dedication.[10] Ishmael Reed echoes this sentiment in more withering terms in a 1976 review of Steven Papich's book Remembering Josephine. Whereas Reed's review begins by comparing Baker to God, it ends by ridiculing "the doomed multi-cultural experiment in which she brought together children of all races in hopes of building a community of brotherhood at Milandes. The children hated each other. One of the ungrateful wretches called her a 'slut,' after which she suffered her first heart attack. The others became junkies, thieves, bleeders, and cry-babies."[11]

But how quixotic was Baker's adoptive project? If anything, the project was marked by a surfeit of pragmatism. Far from some utopian ideal, Les Milandes remains significant precisely for its geographical specificity: envisioned as a center for international tolerance and fraternity, its relation to a universal humanism hinged upon its quaint rural setting in southwestern France, removed from metropolitan Paris or New York. What made the chateau's physical setting significant was its symbolic value as a bastion of non-cosmopolitan Frenchness. Baker's insistence on situating her global village on French soil reveals her efforts simultaneously to appeal to and ignore the French Republic's assimilationist colonial policies, toward which her pre-war performances had so notably been co-opted. As she wrote in a letter to the French Prime Minister Georges Pompidou in 1966, Baker envisioned a College of Brotherhood at Les Milandes as a place where students of color from Africa and the Caribbean could avoid the disenfranchisement they faced in other French cities, where their loitering was a disappointment to the hard-working parents back home who had struggled to send them to school in France. The pastoral environment of Les Milandes, she argued, could keep students interested. Baker also stressed that it was her fidelity to "la Douce France"—and her faith in what France stood for—that kept her there, even though a number of African, South and Central American countries had all proposed, she claimed, that she found similar global village projects there.

The broad, pluralistic humanism that guided Baker's formation of the "rainbow tribe" at Les Milandes reflected her belief in the ability to transcend the national and biological categories her pluralism nonetheless presupposed. Like the United Nations, Baker's adoptive practices were based on the humanistic paradox of institutionalizing tolerance and friendship as a kind of supplement to existing social and political conditions: regardless of how natural or inalienable these ethical bonds might be, they still required administration. As she asserted in countless lectures, interviews, and letters, the traditional categories of nation, family, and race she regarded as biologically fixed were not deterministic. That is, they could not be abolished, but they could be voluntarily supplanted.

The possibility that Baker's adoption practices were fueled by a cogent theory, and not simply by enthusiasm alone, comes to light in another of the Scandinavian posters Baker commissioned for Les Milandes [Figure 4]. In this image, the seemingly backward-looking appeal to blood ties in fact offers a striking visual metaphor for adoption. Here, the abstract figures of the children are linked, from heart to heart, by bands of red, a set of prosthetic collective arteries. The blood depicted in the image at once naturalizes the poster's celebration of fraternity—since the figures all share the same blood—but it also distinguishes this fraternal bond from the functional veins and arteries of each individual body. The shared bloodstream depicted in the image is only the supplemental blood of fraternity uniting the figures; it does not, in other words, represent the mixed blood of miscegenation or, for that matter, of colonial assimilation. It offers instead a visual reminder of the children's common bond of love, or, to use Baker's words, their united soul. A related poster design [Figure 5] renders this adoptive graft all the more explicit: in the image, the swatches of color representing the variously pigmented children are bundled together by green bands; rather than invoking the metaphorical sense of blood ties, the green bands figure kinship as the tidy, organizing knots that unite the poster's abstract bodies. The uniting bands are, of course, painted in the same shade of green as Baker's name; yet whereas this might seem all too handily to allegorize the calculating agency that guided the formation of Baker's adoptive family, it also suggests, reciprocally, that Baker's adoptions could instigate the surrogate bonds of love and "united soul" that would be impossible under existing political and ideological conditions. Indeed, the significance of adoption to this graft of a collective humanity upon irreducible differences of race, religion, and national origin lies precisely in the non-biological and utterly conscious principle of selection involved in such adoptive practices.

Figure 4: Courtesy of Emory University Special Collections. [Back to text]

Figure 5: Courtesy of Emory University Special Collections. [Back to text]

Baker's use of adoption as a symbolic political practice is based, I am suggesting, on what I'd like to call a notion of "adoptive affinities." The term is derived from Goethe's notion of elective affinities, which describes chemical properties that force a set of existing chemical bonds to break up in order to make possible another, more necessary set of relations. Goethe's novel, Elective Affinities, introduces this bit of chemical jargon as an analogy for marital love, emphasizing how a more passionate relationship can dissolve a more conventional one, as if by choice. In Goethe's case, this affinity is disturbingly anarchic in its power to destroy as well as to create bonds of love, and Baker's understanding of adoption bears a similar sense of the urgency and voluntarism signified in Goethe's analogy. "In this forsaking and embracing," Goethe writes, "in this seeking and flying, we believe we are indeed observing the effects of some higher determination."[12] On the domestic front, the children of the rainbow tribe were immersed in anecdotes and allegories that strove to naturalize the kinds of pacts a family of surrogates made possible, whether this meant a duck adopting motherless chicks, or a dog nursing an abandoned thirteenth piglet.[13] Narratives aside, though, Baker recognized that the rainbow tribe had to function as a family in order to serve as a symbol for the viability of universal brotherhood. As she wrote in a letter to the producer Stephen Papich in 1964, her children

[h]ave proved that there were no more continents,/ No more obstacles,/ No more problems which could prevent understanding and respect between humans,/ No more excuses that color and religious differences prevent unity.[14]

What permitted such a project was, as much in Baker's case as in Goethe's novel, the relatively unadulterated social environment of the rural countryside, which prevented, in Baker's words, the children's "brotherly education" from being "interrupted by bad spirits."

More broadly, Baker's adoptive family was both the extension and the apotheosis of her more politically charged adoption of France as an alternative to the United States. Baker's commitment to fighting publicly against segregation and racial violence in the U.S. led her to reject one nationalism in favor of another; she became a French citizen by marriage in 1937, adopting the nation that made her famous. Indeed, in a speech addressed to a French military audience in the early 1960s, Baker revised her signature song, "J'ai deux amours" [I have two loves], transforming it from a celebration of transatlantic dual citizenship into a rejection of the United States and a panegyric to her adoptive homeland: "Je n'ai qu'un seul amour," she claimed: I only have one love. Baker, unlike Garry Davis or the Surrealists, did not reject nationalism or nations; she instead cast her lot with France, maintaining her patriotism and attachment to De Gaulle's Fifth Republic throughout the Algerian War and the events of May 1968.

Baker's allegiance to French nationalism in the midst of colonial warfare reveals, at best, her naïveté toward French politics and, at worst, the ideological proximity of the rainbow tribe to the assimilationist tactics of French colonialism. Yet Baker's insistence—at least through 1969—on the significance of Les Milandes' location on French soil was as much rhetorical and strategic as it was heartfelt or rooted in ideological fealty. For one, Baker's patriotism was, especially after she began adopting children, as instrumental as her international fame: her voluminous correspondence with French authorities, now housed in Emory University's special collections library, attests to her efforts to secure state support for Les Milandes and for the College of Brotherhood she hoped to establish there.

Moreover, the symbolic nature of Baker's rainbow tribe mobilized Frenchness as a means for counteracting race relations in the United States. As Mary Dudziak has shown, Baker's civil rights activities of the 1950s, however unradical they might have seemed, were targeted by the F.B.I. and the State Department, who severely curtailed Baker's ability to travel through the U.S., Cuba, and South America.[15] Les Milandes—and Baker's adoptive affinities—became a means for staging Baker's civil rights activities from abroad. A New York Times article, published in 1963, several months after Baker marched in the August 28 Civil Rights March on Washington, suggests how much Baker was thinking of Les Milandes in terms of U.S. racial politics. As the article reads:

Well aware that her own family United Nations is made possible by an artificially created environment, she is doubtful whether a similar project could be successful here at this time. "Actually I haven't been here long enough to say [...] Things are changing here so fast, but I don't know if we are ready yet."[16]

Baker's response that "I don't know if we are ready yet" suggests the degree to which the "we" of the rainbow tribe was always directed as a response to the "we" of the United States. Baker's adoptive family served as a symbolic means for confronting the United States with an image of the humanistic possibility that it could then only imagine in the abstract. Baker's adoptive project may have been dedicated to the global eradication of racial intolerance—as Margo Jefferson put it, she wished to transform race from a caste into a palette; all the same, Baker's attention remained focused on the politics of race in the U.S. Baker's appeal to universal brotherhood fell short of confronting other racisms and colonialisms as stridently as those she confronted in the U.S., and the pluralistic ideology that fueled the rainbow tribe was developed at the expense of Baker's participation in other contemporary movements in black internationalism. Yet Baker's adoptive practices were no less strategic in their conception as a symbolic act; far from striving to eradicate race altogether, the pluralistic humanism of Baker's global village was, however depoliticized, forged in the name of the civil rights movement in the United States.

Endnotes

1. See Garry Davis's online archive (http://www.garrydavis.org/archive.html). [Return to text]

2. UN Charter; Davis, Oran Declaration, Nov. 22, 1948. [Return to text]

3. Breton, "La Paix par nous-mêmes," Franc-tireur, ctd. in José Pierre, ed. Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, Volume 2 (1939-1969). Paris: Terrain Vague, 1982. [Return to text]

4. Letter from Josephine Baker to Jo Bouillon, Josephine Baker archives, Emory University Special Collections. [Return to text]

5. The posters, which now form part of the Josephine Baker collection at Emory University's Special Collections Library, were designed by the Scandinavian artists Inger Kihlman and Leif Kristensen. [Return to text]

6. Notably, there is no flag of the U.S. in the poster's composition. While hardly an adamant form of political expression, this exclusion suggests the extent to which Baker's internationalist project was, however neutrally it voiced its pluralism, tied to an implicit rejection of U.S. domestic and international policy. [Return to text]

7. For treatments of this notion see, for instance, Benetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007; Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time. New York: Doubleday, 1989. [Return to text]

8. Letter to William Taub, Emory University Special Collections. [Return to text]

9. Josephine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Josephine. Trans. Mariana Fitzpatrick. New York, Harper and Row, 1977, ix-x. [Return to text]

10. Josephine, 237; 248. [Return to text]

11. Ishmael Reed, "Remembering Josephine, by Stephen Papich," New York Times Book Review, December 12, 1972; 2. [Return to text]

12. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. James Anthony Froude and R. Dillon Boylan. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1962; 37. [Return to text]

13. See Janot's anecdote of the dog suckling the thirteenth pig—an anecdote attributed to Jo Bouillon—in Josephine, 208. [Return to text]

14. Ctd. Steven Papich, Remembering Josephine. Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976. [Return to text]

15. Mary L. Dudziak, "Josephine Baker, Racial Protest, and the Cold War." The Journal of American History, Vol. 81, No. 2 (Sep., 1994), pp. 543-570. [Return to text]

16. Jane Cook, "Josephine Baker Rears an International Family," New York Times, Oct. 17, 1963; 42. [Return to text]