Tyler Stovall, "The New Woman and the New Empire: Josephine Baker and Changing Views of Femininity in Interwar France" (page 7 of 7)

To conclude, Josephine Baker's three feature films present the paradox of an attractive leading lady who always failed to land the leading man. Baker's identity as both New Woman and native concubine, at a time when France entertained grave reservations about both, doomed her characters to a life without love. Such a conclusion not only helps us to understand the dynamics of Josephine Baker's films, and the way their French audiences might have viewed them, but also suggests new insights into the culture of interwar France. It underscores, for example, the idea of the New Woman as savage, and traditional gender roles as inscribed in a context of civilization versus barbarity. It illustrates the ways in which primitivism and exoticism were bound up at times with colonial nostalgia, so that celebrations of empire at the same time anticipated its loss. And it reveals the gendered nature of French ambivalence about colonialism in the interwar years; the native woman in particular seemed to symbolize both the joy and vitality of the colonies, and the inability of France to accept them as equals. It shows how the tendency of some French feminists to support colonialism as a way of advocating for colonized women could have the paradoxical effect of undercutting models of female liberation in the métropole. Finally, such an understanding reaffirms the idea that the study of blackness in Europe is central, not peripheral, to the European experience as a whole.

To discuss the limits placed upon Josephine Baker's film characters is not to reduce her simply to an automaton of historical context. Quite the contrary, it should deepen our appreciation of Baker's skill as a performer that in spite of these limitations she succeeded in infusing her characters with humanity and dignity. It is very much to her credit that in spite of the nearly impossible situation in which discourses of race and gender in interwar France placed her, she was able to triumph as a star of the Paris music hall. The final scene of Zou Zou leads one to ask the question, Who was in the cage: Baker, or those whose view of her was so circumscribed?

Endnotes

1. Mae G. Henderson, "Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre: From Ethnography to Performance," Text and Performance Quarterly 23, no. 2 (April 2003); Karen C.C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen Through Parisian Eyes," Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (Summer 1998); Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Jennifer Boittin, "Soleil Noir: Race, Gender and Colonialism in Interwar Paris," PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2005; Samir Dayal, "Blackness as Symptom: Josephine Baker and European Identity," in Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (London: Routledge, 2004). [Return to text]

2. Jacqueline N. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005); Jane M. Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). [Return to text]

3. On the history of black Europe, see in particular the pioneering work of Allison Blakely: "European Dimensions of the African Diaspora: The Definition of a Black Racial Identity," in Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod, eds. Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999); and Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994). See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1996); Brent Hayes Edwards, Practicing Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). [Return to text]

4. Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Laura E. Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire Building (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Susan Pedersen, "National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy Making," Journal of Modern History 63, no. 4 (December 1991). [Return to text]

5. Major works on World War I in France include Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker, France and the Great War 1914-1918 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jean-Jacques Becker, Les français dans la grande guerre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980). [Return to text]

6. Edward Montier, L'idéale fiancée (Paris: Èditions marriage et famille, 1932); Elisa Camiscioli, "Producing Citizens, Reproducing the 'French Race': Immigration, Demography, and Pro-Natalism in Early Twentieth-Century France," Gender and History 13, no. 3 (2001); Mary Lynn Stewart, For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for French Women, 1880s-1930s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). [Return to text]

7. On the idea of the New Woman in France, see Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Dominique Desanti, La femme au temps des années folles (Paris: Stock, 1985); James McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: The Position of Women in French Society, 1870-1940 (New York: St Martins Press, 1980); Laura Downs, Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metalworking Industries, 1914-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, eds. The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). [Return to text]

8. Mary Louise Roberts, "Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Fashion in 1920s Paris," in Chadwick and Latimer, op. cit. [Return to text]

9. Anne Marie Sohn, "La Garconne face à l'opinion publique: Type littéraire ou type social des années 20?" Mouvement Social 80 (1972). [Return to text]

10. Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1959). [Return to text]

11. M. Numa Sadoul, "Une Controverse: L'Emancipation de la jeune fille moderne est-elle un progrès reel?" Progrès civique (June 13, 1925), cited in Roberts, Civilization, p. 20. [Return to text]

12. Victor Margueritte, La Garçonne, roman (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1922). [Return to text]

13. Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939 (New York: Penguin Books, 1979). [Return to text]

14. Marc Michel, L'Appel à l'Afrique: Contributions et Réactions à l'Effort de Guerre en A.O.F. (1914-1919) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1982); Joe Harris Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Oxford: James Currey Publisher, 1999); Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Tyler Stovall, "The Color Line Behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France During the Great War," The American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (1998). [Return to text]

15. Raoul Girardet, L'idée coloniale en France (Paris: Table Ronde, 1972). [Return to text]

16. On the Colonial Exposition, see Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, L'Exposition coloniale, la mémoire du siècle (Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1991); Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). [Return to text]

17. Ezra, op. cit.; Petrine Archer-Shaw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000); Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz Age Paris (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). [Return to text]

18. Martin Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics, and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, eds. French Colonial Empire and the Popular Front: Hope and Disillusion (New York: Palgrave, 1999). [Return to text]

19. Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). [Return to text]

20. Tyler Stovall, "National Identity and Shifting Imperial Frontiers: Whiteness and the Exclusion of Colonial Labor after World War I," Representations 84 (2004). [Return to text]

21. William Schneider, Quantity and Quality: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Anne Carol, Histoire de l'eugenisme en France: Les médecins et la procreation XIXe-Xxe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1995). [Return to text]

22. Camiscioli, op. cit.; Schneider, op. cit. [Return to text]

23. Roberts, Civlization; William Schneider, op. cit. [Return to text]

24. Schneider, op. cit.; Elisa Camiscioli, "Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Reproduction, and National Identity in France, 1900-1939," PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2000. [Return to text]

25. France Renucci, Souvenirs de femmes au temps des colonies (Paris: Balland, 1988); Yvonne Knibiehler and Régine Goutalier, La femme au temps des colonies (Paris: Stock, 1985); Tyler Stovall, "Love, Labor, and Race: Colonial Men and White Women in France during the Great War." In Tyler Stovall and Georges Van Den Abbeele, French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003). [Return to text]

26. On the question of colonial miscegenation, see Conklin, op. cit.; Conklin, "Redefining 'Frenchness': Citizenship, Race Regeneration, and Imperial Motherhood in France and West Africa," in Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds, Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998; Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1991); Ann L. Stoler, "Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures," American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (November 1989); Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaires: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). [Return to text]

27. Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989), pp. 100, 111. [Return to text]

28. Max de Mirecourt's wife is a complex figure who herself represents, to a certain extent, the New Woman: she smokes, drives a car, and flirts with other men. However, I argue that in allowing herself to be pursued and captured by Max, she ultimately reverts to traditional femininity and therefore wins him back. [Return to text]

29. The relationship between André and the corrupt Frenchmen of the colonies, especially the overseer Salazar, whom he prevents from raping Papitou, is also complex. On the one hand, André represents the classic naïve young Frenchman who arrives in the colonies full of good intentions only to be seduced and corrupted: Papitou's father is a vision of what will happen to André if he remains in the Caribbean. On the other hand, the contrast between André and Salazar alludes to a major theme in the French Caribbean, the contrast between the "good" France of the métropol and the "bad" France of the colonial planters and slave masters, so that freedom is to be achieved by leaving the Caribbean for France. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). [Return to text]

30. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). [Return to text]

31. On colonial nostalgia, see Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Alec Hargreaves, ed., Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). [Return to text]

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