The complex layering of the performative space that Baker traverses
in its registers of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real can be discerned
by way of comparison to Claude McKay's inscription of the visual field
as a network of possessing looks and gazes in "The Harlem Dancer":
Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes
And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,
The light gauze hanging loose about her form;
To me she seemed a proudly swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls
Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise,
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;
But looking at her falsely-smiling face,
I knew her self was not in that strange place.[7]
McKay's English sonnet foregrounds the visual field of performance as
a space of desire. During the course of the poem's action, the viewing
audience, the jazz club dancer, and the poet-observer variously emerge
as perceiving subjects through the power to behold others as imaginary
objects of desire. Possessing the gaze, however, is double-edged, as
every act of possession risks being possessed by the regard of the
other. Ownership of the gaze is further inflected by the mediating power
of capital to reify the aura of the visible according to the exchange
logic of the commodity fetish.[8]
The poem begins with the paying
audience made up of "applauding youths" who include not only the
consumers of the primitivist spectacle but also those onlookers, the
"young prostitutes," who are themselves for hire. Their consumption of
the spectacle hinges on the imaginary fantasy of the "perfect,
half-clothed body" of the dancer that is itself fetishized by "the light
gauze hanging loose about her form." Desire in the poem is Dionysian and
seizes "the wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls," with
intensities that exceed the conventions of compulsory heterosexuality.
However "devoured" by the "eager, passionate gaze" of the onlookers, the
dancer's imaginary "shape" cannot redress the exchange of glances that
undercuts the audience's mastery of the spectacle. The jazz club
audience must supplement its place in the scene's visual economy by
literally paying attention to the dancer, by "tossing coins" at the
stage. Similarly, the poet-observer would possess the power of the gaze
through the linguistic economy of figurative language, fixing the dancer
as a "proudly swaying palm /Grown lovelier for passing through a storm."
"Looking," however, on the mask of the dancer's "falsely-smiling face,"
the poet finds that his aesthetic voyeurism is deflected by the agency
of the other's gaze that, ultimately, falls outside the scopic frame of
primitivist spectacle. The final cogito or "I" of the poem's couplet
presents a more radical perception of what the speaker "knew" to be "not
in that strange place." Entering the register of the Real, the
witnessing "I" testifies to what escapes the desiring "eye" through a
glance that renders the bizarre spectacle of "that strange place" even
more uncanny.
Similar to its extralinguistic horizon in "The Harlem Dancer," the
return of the Real happens for Baker as the possessing address of the
gaze whose origin lies outside the frame of both her own performative
self-presentations and her audience's imaginary expectations and
desires. How may we begin to account for that spectral regard animating
yet exceeding the "strange place" of her performance?[9] The force of
Baker's agency as a dancer, I would argue, negotiates a vexed legacy of
loss and displacement similarly witnessed in Countee Cullen's 1925 poem
"Heritage," written the same year as La Revue Nègre's
staging. Cullen's stylized aesthetic primitivism inscribes dance motifs
that invoke Africa as a place of memory whose trauma nevertheless
exceeds the imaginary registers of colonial fantasy. In the famous first
line, "What is Africa to me?" Cullen invokes Africa as what Pierre Nora
would theorize as a lieu de mémoire,[10] precisely in the
sense that "All lieux de mémoire are," as Nora writes,
"objets mises en abîmes" (Nora 297). Such places, sites, and
figures of memory are "mixed, hybrid, mutant" (Nora 295), where the
memory "passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body's inherent
self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories" is
"transformed by its passage through history, which is nearly the
opposite" (Nora 289).
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