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.

On the one hand, Josephine Baker: A Century in the Spotlight was meant to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the last century's most important and widely celebrated artists. In some ways, though, Josephine Baker's birthday was a pretext, an ideal point of departure from which to examine a whole host of issues and phenomena that have marked both Europe and the Americas over the course of the past 100 years. American-born, French-bred, and world-renowned, Josephine Baker shines a revealing light on the transatlantic spaces and moments through which she moved. And so, much more than a centenary celebration of one woman's exceptional life, this event—and the pages of this web journal—were designed to explore in as many ways as possible Baker's Parisian triumph and her persistent impact on the international cultural scene. While Baker's story is perhaps most spectacular—both literally and figuratively—in the 1920s and 1930s in Paris, her influence can be felt in art, in literature, in the media, in politics, in architecture, and in academia on both sides of the Atlantic up to the present day. She has been the subject of several biographies, an Emmy Award-winning film, and countless critical studies. She has been recovered and imitated by entertainers and advertisers alike, reflecting curious attitudes even now toward commercial and performative appropriations of American blackness. Facilitating reflection on the function of black, "foreign" womanhood—quintessential "otherness"—in the European-North American world, Josephine Baker offers a beautiful springboard from which to examine French and American politics of race, gender, and entertainment in the twentieth century. The various components of her identity provide a veritable mirror in which "our" culture is reflected.

Josephine Baker is in many ways problematic: she is postmodern and postcolonial, and she is as controversial and difficult to define as these terms themselves. To comprehensively account for her initial and enduring celebrity means looking closely at the many facets of her artistic and political identity while also addressing larger questions concerning the French and American social, cultural, and political parameters that have so determined relations between Whites and Blacks, France and the United States, Europe and its colonies, and "Us" and "Them" over the course of the twentieth century. It means acknowledging that Baker's contribution to world culture went far beyond the infamous banana skirt forever associated with her name; it means accounting for the numerous roles that she played over the course of her lifetime. End-of-the-line dancing girl and music hall diva, painter's muse and businesswoman, mother of 14 and civil rights activist, secret agent and movie star, Baker moved fluidly between identities and arenas. Ever the artist, she continuously repackaged and reinvented herself, and this chameleon-like adaptability was ultimately as revealing of the environments and audiences she encountered as it was of the woman herself. Perhaps even more so.

Given this, Josephine Baker: A Century in the Spotlight considers the big picture of Baker's life, focusing on the many ways in which her trajectory coincided and intersected with some of the most significant artistic and political phenomena of the last hundred years. Scholars from a broad range of disciplines have come together here to reflect not only on what Baker offered to and represented for Paris as a black American, but also on her function and reception in the United States as an empowered international media darling. We have concentrated on Baker's handling—both intended and unwitting—of the various categories she occupied.

We begin this exploration with a section titled "Reflections in Josephine's Mirror." This section features "The Intelligent Body and Erotic Soul of Josephine Baker," Margo Jefferson's thoughtful look at the many contradictory facets of Baker's persona and at her ambivalent reception by her international public. Jefferson convincingly articulates the fantasies and anxieties Baker evoked in those who witnessed her über-modern, New Negro, femme fatale productions. Taking us from Baker's St. Louis childhood and comedic ventures on black Broadway, through her personal tragedies and diva-like overcompensations, to her change-making social and political activism, Jefferson offers up the whole Baker, in all her messy and endearing glory. And because Jefferson infuses these comments with her own performative nuances, we decided to offer the actual footage of her presentation here.

Things get more specific in Part 2 of this issue, "Paris' Call and Baker's Response." Addressing the initial moments of Baker's celebrity, Terri J. Gordon and Tyler Stovall consider the convergence of aesthetic and historical circumstances that primed Parisians for Baker's appearance on stage and screen during the 1920s and 1930s. Looking at the Roaring Twenties as a particular spatio-temporal site, they discuss exactly what was expected of blacks, of women, and of black women in modernizing interwar France. From there, they note the particulars of Baker's response to these expectations—her "self"-positioning with respect to such phenomena as the "new womanhood," the weakening of empire, black American expatriatism, and the rising popularity of jazz across Western Europe. Gordon's "Synesthetic Rhythms: African American Music and Dance Through Parisian Eyes" provides an analysis of the artistic scene that set the stage for the success of the Black Venus. Looking at jazz as the motive force of modernity, Gordon reads closely the language of the contemporary Parisian press to account for the enthusiasm with which Baker's primitivist showgirl routine was greeted by a cosmopolitan, metropolitan public. In "The New Woman and the New Empire: Josephine Baker and Changing Views of Femininity in Interwar France," Stovall examines the reiterated performative trope of impossible interracial romance as it appears in Baker's music hall and filmic performances. He reads this placement of brown Baker as the almost-but-not-quite love interest of white European males as revelatory of increasing French ambivalence toward women, toward France's imperial subjects, and toward the project of empire in general.

Part 3, "Baker's Craft," is concerned with the various traditions that inform Josephine Baker's expression as a hybrid performer. Anthea Kraut, Daphne Ann Brooks, and Mae Gwendolyn Henderson pose questions regarding Baker's "tangible" contributions, the specifics of her performance techniques, and the extent to which these elements of her enormous talent have at times been obscured by the drama surrounding her persona. In "Whose Choreography?: Josephine Baker and the Question of (Dance) Authorship," Kraut reflects on Baker's creative agency as a place from which to think more broadly about black female agency in the arts. She considers Baker's refashioning of elements from the black vernacular tradition as subtle gestures of resistance in a white entertainment context that often denied her value as an artist. Brooks looks also at Baker's incorporation of African American traditions into her performances. Specifically, she investigates in "The End of the Line: Josephine Baker and the Politics of Black Women's Corporeal Comedy" how Baker's stage "antics" can be read alongside of and inserted into a tradition of black women entertainers who, while making spectacles of themselves, managed to subvert paradigms that stereotyped their performing bodies. In "Colonial, Postcolonial, and Diasporic Readings of Josephine Baker as Dancer and Performance Artist," Henderson further interrogates Baker's choreographic practices in an effort to acknowledge the multiple possible interpretations of her seemingly stereotypical but implicitly subversive self-representation.

"Staging Tensions, Crossing Borders, Dancing In-Between," Part 4 of our project, is about Baker's skillful manipulation of the ways in which she found herself treated by her admirers, her handlers, and her public. Claudine Raynaud and Felicia McCarren investigate specific instances of this careful negotiation on Baker's part. In "Foil, Fiction, and Phantasm: 'Josephine Baker' in Princesse Tam-Tam," Raynaud offers a close reading of one of Baker's most successful films. She notes the film's inclusion of specific biographical elements in the fiction of its narrative, and so reveals the fantasy and the phantasm at the heart of Baker's "real" and performative identities. McCarren, in "The Use-Value of 'Josephine Baker'," similarly wonders about the specifics of Baker's play with the public and private versions of her body and her self. McCarren looks at Baker as a clever negotiator, able to walk the fine line between primitivism and cinematic technology, and to carefully preserve an illusion of Africanized naturalness in the middle of "the West's" machine culture.

Part 5, "Agent(?) Josephine," returns to this matter of Baker's agency. Here, though, she is considered not only as a performer but also as a resistance worker and humanitarian, and the question is posed as to whether hers was a naïve or a visionary consciousness (or some combination of the two). Terri Francis, Jonathan Eburne, and Walter Kalaidjian discuss the manner in which Baker's transcendent identity as an entertainer enabled her to function on an international level, both during and long after her banana-skirt days. Francis, in "What Does Beyoncé See in Josephine Baker?: A Brief Film History of Sampling La Diva, La Bakaire," explores the usefulness of Baker's image in film as a conduit for the liberation of repressed, suppressed, or otherwise limited persons searching for a means of self-expression. In "Adoptive Affinities: Josephine Baker's Humanist International," Eburne offers a compelling analysis of Baker's "rainbow tribe" through the lens of her relationship to both France and the United States and the racism with which she was confronted in both countries. Finally, "Josephine Baker, Performance, and the Traumatic Real" proposes a psychoanalytical approach to Baker's choices as a performer. Kalaidjian considers Baker's agency as embedded in a tradition that includes Gwendolyn Bennett and Countee Cullen as they reflect on the poetics of possession, the gaze, and the black (female) body.

The final section of this issue, "From Josephine Baker to Other 'Others,'" considers Baker in the light of other black or "brown" women navigating the French public's very particular perspective on and perception of non-White, non-European persons. Geneviève Fabre, Michel Fabre, Maryse Condé, and Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina—all world-renowned scholars of the African American and African Caribbean experience—look at Baker's strategies for survival and success as they compare with those employed by her predecessors, her contemporaries, and her heirs, those to whom she owes a debt for her achievements as well as those for whom she ended up tracing a path. Geneviève Fabre's "Katherine Dunham on the French Stage (No Repeat of La Revue Nègre)" evokes the parallels in Baker and Dunham's biographies and the persistent tendency of Parisians to read one alongside the other, despite the two women's very different approaches to performance and to the black American dance tradition. In "Rediscovering Aïcha, Lucy and D'al-Al, Colored French Stage Artists," Michel Fabre offers a hard-won accounting of the lives of three "uncertainly black" women who, much like Baker, played with exoticist ethnic and racial stereotypes to build careers in the French capital but who, unlike Baker, never achieved much more than a moderate degree of fame. Maryse Condé compares and contrasts Josephine Baker's strategy and reception with those of the Martinican bourgeois intellectuals Jane and Paulette Nardal in "Body and Soul: Josephine, Jane, and Paulette" (a talk we've also chosen to include as it was delivered during the conference). Condé presents here some thoughts on the why of the Nardal sisters' popular neglect as compared with the unmitigated celebrity of their contemporary, Josephine. Also included in this section is a video of Gretchen Gerzina's multimedia presentation, "After Josephine: Black American Women in the French Music Scene." Gerzina moves beyond Baker in her presentation to recount the life choices of black American women entertainers who, decades after the Josephine Baker sensation had left town, sought to create their own fairy tale in a very different Paris. Part 6 closes with "And She Set the Stage for Us," a performance tribute to Josephine Baker featuring eight "brown" women tap dancers from the Studio Museum in Harlem's "Hoofer's House" program. A medley of improvised numbers more and less inspired by Baker's legacy, the dancers performed this homage as a visible example of the resonance of Baker's spirit in the black female dance tradition as it continues to develop today.

Both the colloquium and this issue of S&F Online were a thrill to put together. With a birthday party as the foundation and a bona fide superstar as main attraction, how could it not have been? But beyond allowing me to indulge my longstanding star-struck fascination with this marvelous woman, Josephine Baker: A Century in the Spotlight satisfied my desire as a brown female intellectual and admitted Francophile to consider—from a variety of highly original perspectives—France's relationship to the "Others" in its midst. Questions of race and gender, of the exotic and the erotic, of inclusion and exclusion, of art, celebrity, and political engagement were all raised and addressed, if not answered, by the brilliant scholars I had the privilege of working with on this project. And I am very content to say that in the end, though Baker was perhaps the one on stage, it was truly the whole of the twentieth century in the transatlantic world that we were able to fix in the spotlight.

Enjoy the show.