Colonial, Postcolonial, and Diasporic Readings of Josephine Baker
as Dancer and Performance Artist
... [P]opular culture, commodified and stereotyped as it
often is, is not all, as we sometimes think of it, the arena where we
find who we really are, the truth of our experience. It is an experience
that is profoundly mythic. It is a theater of popular desires, a
theater of popular fantasies. It is where we discover and play with the
identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are
represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not get the
message, but to ourselves for the first time.
—Stuart Hall
... [I]dentities are about questions of using the resources
of history, language, and culture in the process of becoming rather than
being: not "who we are" or "where we came from," so much as what we
might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we
might represent ourselves. Identities are therefore constituted within,
not outside representation. Above all ... identities are constructed
through, not outside, difference.
—Stuart Hall
Culture is an embodied phenomenon. This implies that
one's cultural location is not fixed to any one geographical space.
Cultures, in other words, are not inherently provincial by nature. They
move and evolve with the bodies that create and live
them.
—Jennifer Rahim
My earlier work on Josephine Baker positions her performances within
the historical and cultural context of early twentieth-century French
modernist primitivism. In "Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre:
From Ethnography to Performance," I argue that although Baker's early
representation is cast in the dye of ethnographic primitivism, her
performances are manifestly modernist in their conceptualization and
staging. In the present essay, I seek to "flip the script," as it were,
and examine Baker's eroticized and parodized dance performances as a set
of mediating, self-constituting, and potentially oppositional practices
shaped within the context of black vernacular and diasporic culture.
It is important, however, to recognize at the outset that Baker was
not only a product of the French colonial imaginary, but also the
producer of an image that contributed toward shaping that
imaginary. And although my work has been largely predicated on the
assumption that the image of Baker is shaped across the intersecting and
sometimes antagonistic discourses of French colonialist and modernist
aesthetics, I also establish Baker's agency as a self-authorizing text
and self-constituting subject who is herself liable to diverse and
sometimes contradictory and paradoxical readings.
Staged as popular entertainment and produced for profit and pleasure,
Baker's public dance performances conform to popular culture critic
Richard Dyer's definition of entertainment as "a type of performance
produced for profit, performed before a generalized audience (the
'public') by a trained, paid [individual] who [does] nothing else, but
produce performances which have the sole (conscious) aim of providing
pleasure." Arguing that this form of production embodies the "usual
struggle between capital (the backers) and labor (the performers)," Dyer
insists that it is nevertheless the performers themselves who exercise
the "dominant agency" for defining the form because, in entertainment,
the workers—or the entertainers themselves—are "in a better position
[than many others in the workforce] to determine the form of [their] product [and
notably here the product is a "form" and not a "thing"]" (Dyer,
372).
Such a definition underscores how the performer, in this instance
Josephine Baker, is able to exercise a degree of agency even when the
conditions of performance and production are governed by the dynamics of
the entertainment marketplace. The relationship between this mode of
cultural production, especially as it marks and markets ethnic and
gender difference, and the demands (consumption and regulation) of the
dominant and hegemonic order in the 'circuit of culture' [Hall 1997]
remains complex and often problematic. Notably, Dyer's larger argument
turns on the escapist and wish-fulfilling, or utopic, functions of
popular entertainment that "[offer] the image of 'something better' to
escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don't
provide" (Dyer, 373). Baker's early stage performances—epitomized in the
iconic danse sauvage, the finale of La Revue Nègre, and in
the persona of the native girl Fatou in La Folie du Jour, whose
sexualized banana dance represents the fulfillment of the sleeping
explorer's dream fantasies—mirror and arguably constitute colonial
desire as a longing for otherness imagined in terms of sexual and
colonial conquest. It was the manipulation of such "utopian" imagery
("under Western eyes") that allowed Baker to exercise control and agency
in the marketing of her image in an entertainment economy and cultural
circuit based on the production and consumption of otherness.
As Paul Gilroy and others suggest, the "pleasure and danger" offered
by black performers to the white spectator often found fulfillment in
what anthropologist James Clifford calls "escapist exoticism." And
demonstrably, Baker's artistic and commercial successes were not always
"incompatible" with racist, patriarchal, or colonial assumptions. On the
contrary, the dominant order would expect of such performances the
ritual re-enactment of what Gilroy calls the "grand narrative of racial
[and I would add sexual] domination" (Gilroy, 21). In fact, Baker's
early performances were deliberately packaged to meet such demands and
expectations. Further, important to understanding the impact of Baker's
performances is the recognition that like any other signifying system
and practice—language or music, for instance—dance plays a special role
in the production of social and cultural identity. And arguably, it is
the fluidity of dance as movement and modality that serves as a metaphor
for articulating the migratory and transformative nature of culture, as
well as the instability and contingency of corporate and social
identities as they get produced in cultural and artistic
performance.
For some critics and theorists, including Jacques Derrida, dance as a
cultural and artistic form of expression functions to challenge static
notions of identity by disrupting conventional binary constructions of
the self. In his interview with Christie McDonald, Derrida speaks
theoretically of the liberating and revolutionary potential of dance by
invoking Emma Goldman's famous remark, "If I cannot dance, I will not be
part of your revolution"—an observation that, as I read it, provides a
metaphorical link between political transformation and the circular
turns of dance movement. And although in his interview Derrida focuses
on the deconstruction of sexual binaries, the function of dance as form
and metaphor would seem to apply equally to other binary constructions
of identity. Thus, Baker's dance performances—the form for which she was
best known—position her as a kind of iconic signifier of identity "in
the process of becoming rather than being" (Hall 1996).
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Next page
|
