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Double Issue 6.1-6.2: Fall 2007/Spring 2008
Josephine Baker: A Century in the Spotlight

Josephine Baker, Performance, and the Traumatic Real
Walter Kalaidjian

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).

Nowhere is corporeal memory more troubled by history than in what Paul Gilroy characterizes as the Black Atlantic's "transformation of cultural space." And it is precisely in the diasporic historicity of the middle passage that Cullen's rhetorical question, "What is Africa to me?" is symptomatic of an African heritage that is both a repository of corporeal memory and a discursive space marked by a Eurocentric history of primitivist inscription: "one three centuries removed."[11] On the one hand, Cullen presents memory in "Heritage" as always already imbricated with the "book" of colonial history: "A book one thumbs /Listlessly, till slumber comes." Frantz Fanon would later explore this textual legacy in Black Skin, White Masks: the acquired, cultural "sum of prejudices, myths, collective attitudes of a given group."[12] The poem's text negotiates the stylized landscape of colonial desire, whose African exoticism is replete with the eroticized signs of "Jungle boys and girls in love." On the other hand, Cullen also bears witness to an existential "heritage" of lived racial affect figured in the "dark blood dammed within" the "chafing net" of the poet's repressed, colonized body.

The contradiction between history and memory in "Heritage" sutures the poet into the "weird refrain" of a dance whose hybridity bell hooks will later critique as the "madness" of black postmodernity:[13]

When the rain begins to fall;
Like a soul gone mad with pain
I must match its weird refrain
Ever must I twist and squirm,
Writhing like a baited worm,
While its primal measures drip
Through my body, crying, "Strip!"
Doff this new exuberance.
Come and dance the Lover's Dance!"
In an old remembered way
Rain works on me night and day.

These lines demonstrate hybridity not only in the ambiguous performance of black skin, but also in the imperative commands to "strip, come, and dance." To begin with, "The old remembered way" of black dance is itself a cultural hybrid whose primordial roots in African ritual and sacred performance have, since the middle passage, been grafted with the heritage of modernism's production, surveillance, and display of black bodies as commodity forms. On the decks of the slave ships, "in order to keep [slaves] in good health," James Arnold testified before the 1789 Parliamentary Committee for the Abolition of Slavery:

It was usual to make them dance. It was the business of the chief mate to make the men dance and the second mate danced the women; but this was only done by means of a frequent use of the cat. The men could only jump up and rattle their chains but the women were driven in one among another all the while singing ....[14]

From the auction block, nicknamed the banjo table, to the plantation buck-and-wing dance competitions at the big house, to such urban sites as Congo Square in New Orleans and New York's Five Points, the heritage of African American dance describes a performance that is both emancipatory and commodified.

Read through the vexed history of the middle passage, Cullen's dialogic imperative to "come and dance" simultaneously voices both a commanding interpellation of the black subject for Eurocentric commodification and an invitation to liberate the African body from Eurocentric repressions. On the one hand, the stripped black body repeats the molting of the poem's "silver snakes that once a year / Doff the[ir] lovely coats." Such doffing and stripping would shed the repressed, Occidental self in transformative liberation of an Afrocentric identity. On the other hand, the command, rather than the invitation, to "strip" brings into play the surveillance of black skin as spectacle, which reaches back to the middle passage where, at auction, black skin was literally read for signs of insubordination left from cat-o'-nine-tails scarring (Emery 101). Within the text of this "heritage," the black body has come to signify what Frantz Fanon described as "a racial epidermal schema" (Fanon 112). This racial identity strictly linked to skin happens in the exchange between self and other as a third position of surveillance: a spectacle of corporeality that is underwritten by the deep "legends, stories, history, and above all historicity" of a troubled racial past (Fanon 112). Black corporeality in the visual field of the white other, as Fanon witnesses it in "The Fact of Blackness" is inherently unsettling, and before it became a vehicle of empowering agency for Josephine Baker, performing race as spectacle was particularly traumatic owing not just to her mixed racial ancestry, but equally important, to her encounter with the trauma of race's social relation, triggered early on in her childhood by the St. Louis Riot of 1917.

One symptom of how formative this trauma was for Baker is revealed in the very first sentences of her autobiography's opening chapter; sentences that recast the optimism of Jo Bouillon's opening question about her early years. "My happiest childhood memory?" she muses. "I really don't know, but I can tell you which was the worst. It marked me, first unconsciously and later all too consciously, for life. I think in ancient times they used to call it the power of destiny."[15] Here Baker is acting out an insistent need to return to a formative trauma that, by her own account, leaves its imprint with the "power of destiny." Trauma befalls Baker's already difficult childhood poverty in 1917 in a literal awakening to the uncanny nightmare of racial violence. Torn from sleep by the oncoming riot, Baker is driven with her family out of her home. Following her fleeing mother and siblings, she enters the disaster. "What I saw before me as I stepped outside," she testifies:

had been described at church that Sunday by the Reverend in dark, spine-chilling tones. This was the Apocalypse. Clouds, glowing from the incandescent light of huge flames leaping upward from the riverbank, raced across the sky ... but not as quickly as the breathless figures that dashed in all directions. The entire black community appeared to be fleeing like ants from a scattered ant heap. "A white woman was raped," someone shouted, and although I didn't understand the meaning of his words, I knew that they described the ultimate catastrophe. The flames drew nearer. As the choking stench of ashes filled the air, I was overcome with panic. (Josephine Baker, quoted in Josephine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Josephine, New York: Harper & Row, 1976, 2)

Other atrocities and cruelties are recounted in Baker's experience of the St. Louis riots that merge into a cumulative impression of apocalypse. Not insignificantly, it is precisely such searing knowledge of the traumatic Real—which, according to Lacan, "burns where it falls"—that Baker encounters, symptomatically, in the "scorching" eye and burning "fever" of La Revue Nègre spotlights. As a rising black star for a multicultural public sphere, Baker experienced, like Cullen, her audience's demand for the fetish of black skin as an encounter with sublime terror: "The first time I had to appear in front of the Paris audience," she recollects:

I had to execute a dance rather ... savage. I came onstage and a frenzy took possession of me; seeing nothing, not even hearing the orchestra, I danced! ... Driven by dark forces I didn't recognize, I improvised, crazed by the music, the overheated theater filled to the bursting point, the scorching eye of the spotlights. Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever. Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained the earth it seemed to be mine alone."[16]

From Baker's subjective position, black dance has less to do with the psychically charged space of colonial desire—what Fanon characterized as the hybridity of Western negrophobia/negrophilia—than it does with experiencing what Lacan would describe as the gaze of the Real. The spotlight's "eye" is not coincidental with the point of view of the colonial audience. Unlike the colonial look, which relies on fetishistic spectacle, the gaze of the Real exceeds any representation. It scorches and burns with an extralinguistic intensity: one that elicits for the dancer "crazed" emotions and "dark forces." That horizon of the Real exceeds both the Imaginary investments of colonial desire and the range of symbolic expression available to experimental modernism and, more radically, splits conscious subjectivity with the force of what Lacan describes as a traumatic encounter. In Seminar XI's well-known reading of Freud's dream of the burning child, Lacan defines the nucleus of the Real as that which escapes conscious understanding precisely in the child's burning reproach "Father, can't you see I'm burning?" Not just a representation of trauma, [t]his sentence," Lacan writes, "is itself a firebrand—of itself it brings fire where it falls—and one cannot see what is burning, for the flames blind us to the fact that the fire bears on the Unterlegt, on the Untertragen, of the real."[17]

In a similar encounter with the Real as "firebrand," Baker experiences its "scorching eye" as a blinding sublime where both the framing of Miguel Covarrubias's avant-garde set designs and the scene of her Parisian viewers fall away. "Seeing nothing, not even hearing the orchestra," she testifies, "I danced." It is only in a later moment that the ecstatic dance negotiates that gaze of the Real through "improvisation." The first moment, however, belongs to a "frenzy" whose "possession" radically exceeds Baker's identity as an entertainer. The intensities of Baker's Afrocentric performance practice find their roots in her personal childhood trauma of the St. Louis Riot, which itself is just one episode in a deeper collective history of institutional racism whose violence marks the expressive culture of black dance with a traumatic "heritage" reaching back to the middle passage.

As Judith Butler, David Eng, and others have recently argued, trauma and loss can produce, paradoxically enough, new modes of aesthetic and cultural representation, social identity, community, and political agency.[18] If the heritage of black dance encrypts the trauma of the middle passage as part of its expressive culture, then Baker's crossings and re-crossings of that transatlantic performative space allowed her an agency that served as a powerful, cosmopolitan symbol of emancipation from the contained culture of postwar America on the eve of the civil rights and women's movements. Indeed, in 1951, syndicated columnist and author Robert C. Ruark noted the transatlantic circuit of Baker's career, observing that her return "marks the end of a cycle.... It is a different immigration from the old world—the reverse of the wholesale exodus which sent the rich and exotic, the beautiful and the damned away from corny old America in the early twenties.... She comes by way of Cuba and Miami Beach, both foreign countries. She is doing her bold songs in a theater called Strand now, and intends to barnstorm the country.... It could be that we could use symbols like Miss Baker politically abroad, for she seems to have conquered all that she has seen."[19]

In 1951, Baker commenced her American tour, tied to her civil rights advocacy and her utopian project of the "rainbow tribe." The force of her agency in its relation to the traumatic Real can be glimpsed in the New York Amsterdam News's somewhat uncanny advertisement for her Broadway stage show at the Strand Theater, performed between viewings of the Hollywood film Storm Warning featuring Ginger Rogers, Doris Day, and Ronald Reagan. Briefly, Storm Warning is a 1951 B-movie that recounts the visit of an urban career woman (Ginger Rogers), to her pregnant sister (Doris Day) living in a provincial American town lorded over by the Ku Klux Klan. By chance, Rogers witnesses a Klan murder of a white investigative reporter and is in turn persecuted by the Klan and then rescued by the district attorney, played by Ronald Reagan. In the film's climax, Doris Day's character is accidentally shot and killed by her Klansman husband, who had perpetrated the murder Rogers had witnessed.

Following on Baker's successful desegregation efforts at the Copa City nightclub in Miami, the Amsterdam News observed that "the pairing of Miss Baker with the Strand's new stirring screen story of the Ku Klux Klan, Storm Warning, was an indirect tribute to the artist," a tribute that the paper linked to her service as a secret agent for the French Resistance during the war.[20] Significantly, in the ad [Figure 2], Baker as cosmopolitan performer—as a symbol of the "provocative and exotic rage of Paris"—does not just bear the look of high fashion. Equally important, the self-possession of her stance reaches beyond the spectacle of entertainment, leading the viewer's gaze to the scene of trauma perpetrated by a gang of Klansmen on a white woman, and projects an agency that sharply offsets Doris Day's helpless and complicit status as a powerless bystander to Ginger Roger's victimization. Baker's real-life celebrity projects a masterful ownership of the gaze. Moreover, the force of Baker's look arguably reframes the conventional social relations of power among gender, race, and sexual politics in America's postwar, pre-civil rights culture.

Figure 2 [Back to text]

If it is true, as Hazel Carby has argued, "that white men used their ownership of the body of the white female as a terrain on which to lynch the black male,"[21] then the Storm Warning ad uncannily exposes and collapses the latent lure of this sexual oppression onto the manifest narratives of Klan whippings and mob violence, whose coded signs typically act out the racial oppression of black men, not white women. In stark contrast to this provincial scene, Baker's stance as a cosmopolitan witness is susceptible to neither its sexual nor racial narratives of violation. Coming full circle, the "frenzy of possession" that originally drives Josephine Baker's stage artistry, the "primal measures" that haunt Countee Cullen's otherwise formalist verse refrains, the "passionate gaze" that transfixes McKay's poet-observer of "The Harlem Dancer," and the lived affect of what Gwendolyn Bennett discerns in the "surging /Of my sad people's soul, /Hidden by a minstrel-smile" together testify, by way of a complexly mediated and "masked" performativity, to the traumatic legacy of the middle passage: a transatlantic crossing that Baker, through her performative agency, came to re-cross and so conquer.

Endnotes

1. Michel Fabre describes Josephine Baker as a "cultural beacon" whose artistry makes her a lasting lieu de mémoire. See "International Beacons of African-American Memory: Alexandre Dumas père, Henry O. Tanner, and Josephine Baker as Examples of Recognition," History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O'Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 122-149. [Return to text]

2. Gwendolyn B. Bennett, "Heritage," in Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Maureen Honey (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989), 103. [Return to text]

3. Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 23. [Return to text]

4. Sterling Brown, "Contemporary Negro Poetry 1914-1936," An Introduction to Black Literature, ed. Lindsay Patterson (New York: Publishers Co., 1969), 146. [Return to text]

5. See James Clifford, "Negrophilia: February, 1933," A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 904. For a discussion of modern primitivism and Josephine Baker as a modern sauvage, see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 197-200. [Return to text]

6. Paul Gilroy, "'To Be Real': The Dissident Forms of Black Expressive Culture," in Let's Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 22. [Return to text]

7. Claude McKay, Selected Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Bookman Associates, 1953), 61. [Return to text]

8. In Capital, Karl Marx defines the "mysterious character" of the commodity not according to its physical usefulness but rather in terms of the "fantastic form" of its exchange value shaped by its "autonomous" relations with other commodities. "I call this 'fetishism,'" he writes, "which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities." Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 165. For a discussion of how commodity fetishism in the modern age of photography, film, advertising, and cinematic propaganda marks a decline in the visible aura of aesthetics, see Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. (London, Fontana, 1992), 211-244. [Return to text]

9. For a discussion of the visual phenomenology of the traumatic Real experienced in the address or regard of the other's possessing gaze, see Jacques Lacan, "The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze," in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 67-78. [Return to text]

10. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire," History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O'Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 284-300. [Return to text]

11. In this vein, Paul Gilroy writes that "[d]iaspora accentuates becoming rather than being. ... Foregrounding the tensions around origins and essences that diaspora brings into focus, allows us to perceive that identity should not be fossilized or venerated in keeping with the holy spirit of ethnic absolutism. Identity too becomes a noun of process and placed on ceaseless trial. Its almost infinite openness provides a timely alternative to the authoritarian implications of mechanical-clockwork-solidarity based on outmoded notions of 'race.'" Paul Gilroy, "'To Be Real': The Dissident Forms of Black Expressive Culture," Let's Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance, 25. [Return to text]

12. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 188. [Return to text]

13. bell hooks, "Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition," Let's Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance, 210. [Return to text]

14. Report to the House of Lords on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (2 vols; London: 1789), quoted in Lynne Fauley Emery, Black Dance from 1619 to Today (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 1988), 6. [Return to text]

15. Josephine Baker, quoted in Josephine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Josephine (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 1. [Return to text]

16. Josephine Baker, Josephine, 51-52. [Return to text]

17. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 59. [Return to text]

18. On the resources of melancholia for new modes of representation and identification, see Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), and Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997). [Return to text]

19. Robert C. Ruark, "She Died on Purpose for a Cause," Richmond Times Dispatch, March 5, 1951. [Return to text]

20. "The Fabulous Josephine Baker," New York Amsterdam News, March 10, 1951, 18. [Return to text]

21. Hazel V. Carby, "'On the Threshold of Woman's Era': Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory," Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985), 270. [Return to text]

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