"In feathers, in bananas, in her own skin, intelligent body attached to a gaze. Stripped down model, posing for a savage art, brought color to a primitive stage."

—Harryette Mullen, Trimmings, 1991

Perhaps those inclined to gather for an international conference to celebrate and analyze Josephine Baker were among the only observers in the television or Internet audiences unsurprised, if intrigued, by Beyoncé Knowles's[1] recent evocations of and tributes to Baker. A preview of the banana dance that the pop star would perform on CBS's presentation of Fashion Rocks[2] came on September 7, 2006, when Beyoncé appeared on Good Morning America.[3] Beyoncé sat for an interview with Diane Sawyer in order to promote her new record B'Day, during which she curiously, remarkably, announced her affinities with Baker. The segment alternated tightly between sequences of images from Beyoncé's coming-up years, accompanied by Sawyer's voice-over, and sequences of the one-on-one sit-down between the two media figures.[4] It also included clips of black-and-white footage featuring Baker dancing. Via references to Baker in the interview, Beyoncé presents herself as a woman coming into her own who is ready to defend herself or make an attack, as suggested by the militaristic tone in the album title's rhyme with "D-Day." Beyoncé also appeared to me as a performer claiming a history of audacious black female creativity, exemplified—we'd all agree—by Baker, the original Diva.

The singer had recently celebrated her 25th birthday, on which she debuted songs from the album in a live concert in Asia. Sawyer and Beyoncé's conversation centered on this year as a turning point in Beyoncé's life, but it also marked a professional transition because she recorded B'Day independently. The new album, then, stands for Beyoncé's independence in significant ways. One is how she recorded B'Day on her own, without, she said, the knowledge of or input from her usual management. Further, Beyoncé seemed to be seeking a renewed sense of self-direction following her work as the character Deena in the film Dreamgirls (Bill Condon, 2006), which required her to undergo a strict dietary regime. She said of her weight loss, "I didn't feel like myself. And this album was my release. That's why it's [the tone of the album] so aggressive. Because I had been in Deena's body or Deena had been in me for so long that I had all these emotions that I, in my life, don't—didn't—feel." Returning to Sawyer's narrative of the album's back-story, the host explains that Beyoncé "fused that fire into her music, recording B'Day in a secret studio session far away from her record label and manager father." How this story-within-a-story format functions in Beyoncé's promotional appearance will be addressed partially below, while considering the greater question of what it means for Beyoncé to evoke Baker at this juncture in her career will be my main task.

Beyoncé was nuanced and explicit in her statements about Baker in the GMA interview. She told Sawyer what qualities in Baker inspired her, saying, "I wanted to be more like Josephine Baker [than perhaps like Deena, who is a more repressed character], because she didn't—she seemed like she was just possessed and it seemed like she just danced from her heart, and everything was so free. ... This record sounds like a woman possessed. It sounds like a woman that is kind of desperate, and I wanted it [the album] to come from the soul. I just did whatever happened there [in the studio]."[5] Thus, Beyoncé describes her own liberated feelings in terms of the paradoxical notion of possession as freedom. Possession suggests total consumption by something outside the self, a kind of imprisonment and lack of power, yet it implies its opposite as well: self-absorption that transcends or otherwise violates established conventions, whether social or personal. Possession is a kind of abandonment. Beyoncé's word choice—possession—acknowledges her power while also potentially disavowing it: the music came; she did not make it, nor does she claim to control it. Yet, what dominates here is a sense of freedom and self-possession. Beyoncé sought to capture Baker's dance practice, which is characterized by total movement, a sense of possession (see the music-hall party sequence in Princess Tam Tam) and unpredictability, controlled with her own bodily intelligence. Therefore, while promoting her new album on GMA, Beyoncé delivered her conceptual association with Baker's aesthetics, central to which for her is this idea of possession or self-possession.

In her performance on Fashion Rocks [watch the video on youtube.com], Beyoncé delivered a literal Baker sampling. When the sequence opens, a projected drawing of Baker in the banana skirt is visible as the camera floats over the audience toward the stage. Beyoncé's name in huge gothic script set in clouds follows. The stage fills with smoke. Beyoncé enters the scene, thrusting her hips with her arms high above her head, wearing a version of Baker's banana skirt. In the opening moments of the Fashion Rocks dance, Beyoncé performs a direct quotation of Baker's famous banana dance, which is accessible through film footage. The historical reference contextualizes Beyoncé's erotic dancing, which includes thrusting her derriere powerfully and circling her hips slowly while she tosses her hair and, adding a comic touch, clicks her neck from side to side. After a segment where she dances and sings with the clouds covering her waist, she stands to dance, and screens behind her rise to reveal a well-known image of Baker's face.

Beyoncé captures Baker's burlesque without—significantly, and thankfully—attempting an imitation of Baker. For example, Beyoncé's hairstyle does not copy the short lacquered flapper cut with the distinctive curl on the sides and/or forehead. Neither does Beyoncé mix comedy into her routine the way that Baker did, although there is some, nor does she attempt to revive all of Baker's moves, which include crossing the eyes and doing the Charleston within a series of quickly changing kicks, turns, bends, and slides. Instead, Beyoncé's hairstyle is composed of long, brown curly waves that bounce along with her movements, which blend selected Baker moves with Beyoncé's hip-hop repertoire. Beyoncé strategically samples Baker's famous costume and dance practice (speed, Africanisms mixed with older and new American dance) as she remixes her 1920s aesthetics for contemporary audiences.

Although Beyoncé's quotations, evocations, and translations of Baker marked a change in her tendencies as a performer, her innovation fits into a history of artists sampling Baker in their work. Baker citations have appeared in several films, including the early French comedy Hallucinations of a Fireman (1928), in which Baker appears as herself opposite a fireman. When he first appears, he is already bumbling and drunk, but he is further undone by his own fantasies. An early example of French erotic film, the piece shows the fireman imagining that both men and women transform themselves into nude white women. Traversing the city, the fireman descends to the subway. When an attendant reproaches him for an unclear infraction, he responds by re-imagining her as Josephine Baker. Though Baker appears as herself, her performance occurs in a fantastical realm, complicating what might have been a straightforward cameo appearance.[6] Even playing herself, she enters the film through another character's fantasy. This early film presentation of Baker establishes her as a fantastical figment—a role she would reprise in subsequent work. More significantly, by making fantasy her entrée into the film, Hallucinations illustrates Baker's cinematic grammar—that her persona is constructed through a structure of looks and intersecting fantasies.

Movies that do not include the living Baker's literal physical presence in them foreground the interplay of subjectivities that constitute Baker in a different way from those that do so. The Baker telebiography, for instance, which is revealing from a number of perspectives, is a transitional piece in the trajectory I am building. It recalls Baker's life through Lynn Whitfield's performance in The Josephine Baker Story (Brian Gibson, 1991) but it can be understood as a show about a certain kind of glamour and artistry in colonialist and segregationist contexts. Or it is perhaps a cautionary/celebratory tale about ambition, launched from an account of Baker's rise, fall, and comeback. Seeing the events in Baker's life and how they affected her played out by an actress, opens up space for Baker's story to find a context broader than the entertainer's specific career. Whitfield brings to the piece her own transformation from an actress to a multidimensional entertainer into Baker's persona. Her performance represents Baker's biography on one level, while on another it is an imaginative work, authored not by the director or screenwriter but by Whitfield.

Baker starred in four feature films[7] and was featured in a variety of newsreels, television specials, and concert footage. The motion pictures in which Baker starred function, like the films that quote her, as filmic close analyses of her persona as much as they are the particular stories, which may not concretely concern Baker. The filmic citations, like Beyoncé's tribute, help to conceptualize Baker because they allow us to envision patterns across Baker's performances. From the samples and attention to all of Baker's films, we can see that she plays characters that are very similar to her early music-hall persona: exotic, naïve, and given to seemingly spontaneous singing and dancing. These movies' narratives are structured around the transformation of Baker's character from a naïve, exotic, talented, and anonymous person to an acclaimed exotic music-hall star. Baker's films tend to retell her own transformation from dance novelty to recording artist and film actress, and they encode an account of Baker's stardom. Precisely because of the ways in which Baker's authorship is fractured by the participation of screenwriters, directors, and co-authors, the imperative becomes looking carefully at what Baker does, what her film stories are, how she delivers her lines, and what settings she inhabits. Sampling effectively does some of that work by isolating particularly distinctive characteristics in Baker's performance.

Art historian Griselda Pollock characterized Baker's central conflict as the effort to author a self between invisibility and excessive visibility. In The Josephine Baker Story, she said, we see Baker negotiating among her subjectivity, embodiment, and performance.[8] Indeed, characteristic of cinematic grammar, Baker's subjectivity, her performance or her "looked-at-ness,"[9] is not merely her presentation, but an interaction between her presentation and perceptions of her. Cinema, an art of editing and gazes, implies a relationship of looks and subjects, so that if Baker is seen, she is being looked at. The concept of Baker is as much about her as it is about those who look at her—whose fantasy is she? Thus her image, perhaps her self-image, competes with, if it does not directly complement, the images and their attendant desires projected unto her by her audiences. In any case, the cinematic Baker is a relationship of looks, fundamentally, between who is displayed and who observes. Baker cannot be fully understood in isolation, as though she is in a still photograph. If she is in a still photo, its place in a semiotic field has to be analyzed, and if she is in a film, she is already in a semiotic field that has to be detailed, textualized, and laid bare in order to examine the connections between shots and between sequences. If Baker's central conflict is that of invisibility versus excessive visibility, then her underlying structure is true to that of the cinema. Her conflict cannot be generated without a looker, and a cinematic analysis examines exactly the structure whereby a Looker and a Looked-At create a performance through the interplay of gazes. The figure of Baker is a cinematic phenomenon in a fundamental structural way.

Within the body of motion pictures that reference Baker, which includes her No. 8 ranking on "Wayne's Top Ten Babes of All Time,"[10] she tends not to be the central character. There is a passing reference to her by a character in Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch 2004) when he discusses a past era in Paris' café culture, perhaps when a certain Parisian flair for flirtation, fashion, and fantasy-in-the-everyday seemed within easier reach. In Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, 2003), an animated version of Baker in the banana skirt capitalizes on her as it explores the erotic and exoticist dimensions of her relationship with her audiences. In Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002) she appears as "Paris Chanteuse" (Karine Plantadit-Bageot) and as a figure of Frida Kahlo's sexual imagination. Beneath the radar of these theatrically released films is a short piece, Tree Shade (Lisa Collins, 1998), which circulated at festivals and is now distributed by Women Make Movies. In evoking Baker's performance through an experimental form, it offers sharp insight on the relationship among citation, cinema, and Baker's performance.

Tree Shade is a fable about a student, Savannah Mayfield (Renée Griggsby), coming to terms with her family tree through a class assignment to research her genealogy. The film is divided into segments that represent matriarchal generations of one family, and each woman's story is rendered in the film style common to that time, with some contemporary touches that are witty and somewhat macabre. In the first section, which appears to be the pre-sound era of the 1920s, a maid named Etta Mae Mayfield (Girlina, a female impersonator) looks uncannily similar to Baker. She has the characteristic flapper hairstyle with the curl that Baker helped make into a style phenomenon. A self-expressive character, she reaches beyond her servant role and, like Baker, is drawn to beautiful clothes and the sensual pleasures of dancing. In the rising action of the scene, Etta Mae is interrupted by her husband the gardener (uncredited), who has stolen a visit with her while the bosses are supposedly away for the day. After initially scolding him, she relents and even changes into one of her mistress' dresses, whose stylish cut contrasts with her uniform. We see the newlywed couple emerge from their working roles through their dancing, but only for a moment because the owners return unexpectedly, returning the couple to their places. What ensues in this confrontation lands Etta Mae in jail, but not before she flashes a direct look into the camera.

Etta Mae's crime is to defend herself and protect her husband, but she is arrested—not strictly to punish her action, but to mark the boundaries inside which black women's personalities should remain. The maid's crime is audacity. The film encourages a sympathetic reception of Etta Mae's crimes by emphasizing the way they reflect her will to pleasure, love, and style. The way the film takes Etta Mae's perspective and depicts her abandonment of her assigned roles sweetly heroic makes Tree Shade one of the more startling Baker evocations in the cohort of samples.

Together with the films in which Baker actually starred, they constitute Baker's cinematographic history, albeit in various ways. Baker samples range from work that cites her in a concrete way, such as film and vocal recording excerpts, to those that evoke her through partial references or imitations, such as in Beyoncé's recent work and in Tree Shade, and in those films in which she appears as herself. Three final examples illustrate this continuum: Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1972), Alma's Rainbow (Ayoka Chenzira, 1994), and Madame Sata (Karim Ainouz, 2002).

Touki Bouki, known as sub-Saharan Africa's first avant-garde film, cites Baker through her singing voice. This citation is associated with the film's two main characters, Mory (Magaye Niang) and Anta (Mareme Niang), who scheme and plot to leave their town for Paris. Whenever they discuss their plans, the clip from Baker's recording is heard. In one particular scene, the couple is riding on Mory's motorcycle through a field of fallow trees. Gradually, the sound of the bike gives way to Baker's voice. She sings: "Paris, Paris, a bit of paradise on earth." The action—Mory and Anta traveling on modern motorized transport—and the desolate setting, combined with Baker's beckoning lyrics, is ironic and cutting. For as Baker's excerpt recurs, both her high-pitched singing voice and the lyrics seem to constitute a siren's song enticing the young travelers to their destruction. The recurrence can also express Mory and Anta's tenacity, true to their commitment to migrate. In the Baker sequences, the success she represents, along with the fantasy Paris of which she sings, reinforces the illusory, seductive nature of their closely held dreams.

Next, the story of Alma's Rainbow includes a character that is a former Baker impersonator who has returned, broke and a little lost, from paradise to New York. In this girl's coming-of-age comedy-drama, Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt) seeks aesthetic and sexual independence from her protective mother. The mother, Alma Gold (Kim Weston-Moran), runs a beauty shop, located on the first floor of a brownstone she apparently owns. Suspicious of unregulated glamour and Rainbow's dreams of studying dance, she keeps a close eye on her daughter. In the Baker sample, Alma celebrates her birthday with friends, and at one point they gather for a group picture. Before the photographer can click the shutter, all eyes turn toward the Baker impersonator, Ruby Gold (Mizan Nunes). Singing "Happy Birthday" in French and wearing a costume worthy of Baker, which she shows the rapt audience by turning around slowly, the display is much more her spectacle than it is a tribute to her sister. Predictably, they clash throughout the movie, as this Bakeresque character contrasts with her mother, who is financially responsible but repressed and cautious about romance. They do find ways to come to terms with each other and their particular struggles through their shared experiences performing in an all-girl singing group. They both confront the bundle of ambition, artistry, and folly that this period in their lives represents. Alma's Rainbow shares Tree Shade's concerns with audacity and self-expression in constructions of beauty and womanhood, highlighting the risk and release involved in them through evocations of Baker.

Finally, Madame Sata is based on the story of Joao Francisco de Santos (Lázero Ramos), who was a well-known Brazilian transvestite performer with the stage name Madame Sata and an early contemporary of Baker's. The movie he has inspired features an excerpt from Baker's film, Princess Tam Tam. The clip serves to paint a picture of De Santos' interior life, where his wishes are playful yet tinged with desperation. Following a sequence in which De Santos discusses his ideal life of leisure and beauty with a friend, they are seen in a cinema audience watching the extended production sequence from Princess. Madame Sata, out of costume, gazes at the screen intently, studying Baker's moves, taking in every detail of her presentation, perhaps for use in his own show. The position of the Princess Tam Tam excerpt in the movie invites connection between movie viewing and daydreaming. Moreover, it indexes Baker's status as an international feminine icon that, in this case, embodies intersecting fantasies of self-absorption/self-expression, leisure, stardom, and glamour. The highly constructed, illusory nature of gender—and race, for that matter—in Baker's performance helps to make it available for impersonation and sampling by both men and women.

Though they are from different time periods and countries, these films share characters that hope for transformation and escape from drudgery, using the transportations of the imagination, beauty, and music—particularly music performed at night. Baker represents both longings unfulfilled and the exquisite stretch of reaching toward one's desires. She represents the pleasures of illusions, and probably also of delusions, because of the way they mask reality. Her embodiments in the films I have discussed are the ways characters make their pain and frustration not just bearable but beautiful. Through references to multiple forms and aspects of Baker's aesthetics, characters seek release from the everyday in the darkened, enclosed personal theaters of the mind, bedroom, cabaret, subway, or cinema. For in such spaces of containment, the body is liberated and is less pressured by the policing gaze of family members, the larger society, or even the self. Yet as Touki Bouki and the short French film show, the mind can imprison one in delusion as well as lift the spirit with fanciful flights.

The Baker samples further demonstrate the entertainer's capacity for multiplicity within iconicity. Baker's subjectivity is composite: her audience is linked to her and to what she makes possible through her performance and embodiments in this interchange. Baker's syncretic dance practice or her performance, which emphasizes change, disjuncture, and the use of multiple embodiments, is true to Baker's composite subjectivity. Baker's films thematize her recognizability—her status as an icon—and in so doing make her available for a wide range of interpretations by varying audiences while remaining essential and legible. Through sampling, Baker's iconicity becomes complete, for without being actually present and visible, she can figure in a film narrative as a psychological, visual, and aural force, magnetizing the longings, delusions, and wishes of both characters and audiences.

Baker's quotability makes room to consider, as it demonstrates, her capacities as an author of her performance, rather than only the object of colonialist male fantasy. For the history of a colonizing male sexist gaze that has tended to denigrate Baker need not be her only narrative. We can find the ways Baker owned her work and seek access to her genius. Beyoncé, dismissible as pop/hip-hop silliness in many scholarly quarters, seeks, it seems, greater significance and ownership of her own work by claiming Baker and enacting a researched performance. The association sheds new light on both performers. The possibility of locating black women's creativity within the commodity-driven mass culture scene is perhaps Baker's greatest legacy. This space for black women to make the erotic a space of power and pleasure, not merely humiliation and control, is the paradise Josephine Baker cleared out of fallow, hostile cultural fields in which they were not meant to survive, much less be independent and important.

Endnotes

1. Subsequent discussion of Beyoncé Knowles in this paper will use her first name only, which seems to be the conventional way of referring to the pop star. [Return to text]

2. Last accessed May 30, 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JEvqcqBxx8. [Return to text]

3. Baker's dancing in the music video Déjà vu is also evocative of Baker's signature multiplicity and disjuncture while quoting many of Baker's movements. Last accessed May 30, 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QmHqKml51k. [Return to text]

4. A fuller discussion of Sawyer's role as a white woman representing the curiosities of the female majority in the news magazine's audience is beyond the scope of this paper, but it suffices to say that she is meant to be an intermediary figure representing conservative values that balance curiosity, cravings for novelty, and a reluctance to abandon the safety of traditional models of decorum. The talk-show host's role is to maintain the balance of freakishness and normality, between celebrity and anonymity, by performing the journalist's role of the objective-yet-sympathetic interrogator/representative. Sawyer is like a supportive aunt whose rebellious niece mirrors her own youthful rebellions. In so doing, Beyoncé's "possession" and "aggressive" singing and dancing style is contained as a right of passage rather than an oppositional aesthetics. [Return to text]

5. "Beyoncé: Music's New Dreamgirl." Last accessed May 30, 2007. http://abcnews.go.com/search?searchtext=beyonce%20baker&type=. [Return to text]

6. This sequence shows both the Baker and fireman characters in a fantastical realm. However, Baker is sometimes shot theatrically rather than from his perspective. This subtle shift may be the grounds to consider the ways that Baker's owns her own performance within the fireman's fantasy. [Return to text]

7. Ètiviént, Henri and Mario Nalpas, Siren of the Tropics, France, 1927. Allégret, Marc, Zou-Zou, France, 1934. Gréville, Edmond T, Princess Tam-Tam, France, 1935. Baroncelli, Jacques, Fausse Alerte/The American Way, France, 1945. [Return to text]

8. Griselda Pollock's ideas as represented here were delivered at An International Symposium on Josephine Baker. St. Louis, Missouri. Sponsored by The Sheldon Art Galleries. April 28, 2006. [Return to text]

9. The term "to-be-looked-at-ness" is drawn from Laura Mulvey's usage in her essay, "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema." [Return to text]

10. This sentence refers to an early 1990s "Wayne's World" skit shown on Saturday Night Live. [Return to text]