In both the United States and France, the image of Josephine Baker endures: from a bronze simply entitled Joséphine in a small regional museum to her invisible yet omnipresent image in the Princesse Tam-Tam lingerie boutiques across France. Still images capturing Baker, even when included in films such as Princesse Tam Tam, remain problematic; while they often appear to glorify her beauty and talent, they also fix her image—fix her as an image—rather than as a producer of multiple, variant, mobile images, capable of using the medium to transform herself and transcend national, racial, and social boundaries. Representations of Baker by artists such as Paul Colin have led to readings (for example, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Karen C.C. Dalton) that risk confusing Josephine's work with her image. Such readings focus on the representation of her performances rather than their performance history, the nature of her stages, her public, and her adaptability to different forms of performance media. Focusing on such artistic representations, even critically, we remain within the domain of what the literary theorist Homi Bhabha has identified as the photographic fixity of the colonial stereotype.

Admiring dancers' images, focusing on how they look rather than what they do, we often forget the work that they do to create themselves—the work of creating images in movement. The cinema, Gilles Deleuze argues in L'image-mouvement, followed dancers in creating those moving images. Underneath their iconic images, the work of dancers is ignored or undervalued because it is invisible, or is not seen as work because it is indistinguishable from their art. Recent research in dance studies has explored how concert dance in the 1920s and 1930s took labor as its theme and identified itself with labor movements. Baker's dancing, in this age of machines, is both mocking labor as entertainment and representing labor: she is the human motor, a hybrid dancing machine. Against the commodification of her labor or her image, she will also use that other dancing machine, the motion picture camera, the moteur cinematographique, to get beyond photographic fixity even while playing to colonial stereotypes.

In France in the 1920s and 1930s, Baker's dancing was seen as at once liberating and pathological. In Paul Colin's volume of lithographs, Le tumulte noir, and in the preface by Rip (satirist George Thenon), her movement images were read doubly, representing without contradiction what Petrine Archer-Straw has called "'the primordial,' with all the exotic notions that primitive innocence suggested," as well as the "urban lifestyle" of "postwar modern man." In Michel Leiris's homage to Baker, she represents a spirit of freedom to be gained, ironically, through technological modernity, "an abandonment to animal joy while under the influence of modern rhythm" that brings with it the probable "insanity" of a fascination for comfort and progress, along with the aspiration to a "new life of impassioned frankness." Leiris's complex formulation of what jazz brought to Europe emphasizes its African religious or ritual roots and its American modernity; Josephine's image would come to figure both. Leiris sets up the terms within which her Africanness as well as her Americanness would be measured: the postwar technological fantasy recovery from the technological trauma of the Great War; the pathology of the "dying civilization" in thrall to the Machine; the insanity of European war passing for the establishment of order; the violence of that order imposed by the machines of war and work; and the submission to the violent rhythms both of work and leisure typified in jazz.

Leiris makes clear that the popularity of La Revue Nègre—as well as its negative reception as a "contagion" or sickness—were far from innocent; that French culture projected onto African American dance forms its own pent-up passions as well as its anxieties, and that Baker's "primitivism" was also an effect of a "decaying," technologically fascinated, industrialized society. Although a limited European colonial imagination casts Africa as a utopia removed from an overly mechanized society, the broader imagination of French ethnographers such as Leiris, who were Baker's contemporaries, gains a different perspective from working on African cultures that reconnect technology to ritual. From this perspective, Baker's performances enact a recontextualization of African material that allows Europeans to see their own high-tech savagery. A reading of Baker's performances in their French artistic and intellectual context may serve to emphasize her status as an object on exhibit. But it also allows an understanding of the way the components of her dancing—connecting her art to both African and American-inflected modernisms—bring it into direct relation with technology understood through both ritual and work, in African as well as American contexts.

Baker's dancing onstage and onscreen can be read against a background of fascination with African art, made fashionable by young artists and displayed in Paris galleries beginning in 1917, with ethnographic museological concerns about whether to display primitive artifacts as technological or sacred objects, and with the elaboration of an ethnographic cinema. Her particular mix of primitivism and urbanity, glamour and naturalness, and "high" and "low" culture aligns her work—at least on the surface—with what James Clifford has called "ethnographic surrealism." But Baker's work, especially in the thirties, lends itself to another reading.

Opposing the idea of the existence of such a "surrealist ethnography," Denis Hollier has argued that the concerns of French avant-garde writers and museologists were very different. In the displacement of objects from Africa into French museums, and in the avant-garde interest in such objects, Hollier finds two very different driving passions. Against Clifford, he argues in "The Use Value of the Impossible," introducing the re-edition of the 1930-31 ethnographic review Documents, that the ethnographic museology of the thirties was a reaction against French Surrealist and formalist interest in African art in the twenties. Clifford's conclusion that ethnography and Surrealism share an erasure of the difference between high and low in culture does not, in Hollier's view, take into account the shock provoked by the ethnographic review Documents. Contributors Georges-Henri Riviere, undertaking the rehabilitation of the Musée d'Ethnographie, and Paul Rivet, the museum's director beginning in 1927, both declared themselves opposed to the primitivism à la mode of artists, poets, and musicians. For Hollier, what drove the organizers of Documents was a return to the "primitivism" of use value as opposed to exchange value, in a resistance to twenties formalism and to the "mercantile decontextualization" of African art that marked the French thirties.

For the Documents collective—Rivet, Marcel Mauss, and Lucien Levy-Bruhl of the Institut Ethnologie, with George Bataille, Leiris, Marcel Griaule, Andre Schaffner, and others—nostalgia for use value followed two inclinations, what Hollier calls "secular" and "sacred." Ethnographers' interest in use value takes them back to the technical, social, and economic utilization of objects; others, like Leiris, are interested in what Bataille calls the "unproductive use" of sacred objects. Without being orthodox, Documents follows Marx's opposition between use value and exchange value set out in the opening of Capital. The ethnographers wanted a museum that would not automatically reduce objects to their formal or aesthetic properties but would rather exhibit, at some remove from the culture of the object's actual use, what would be a "use value on vacation" or a use value endimanché—in its Sunday best. The ethnographers' resistance to exchange value and exhibition value led them to elaborate new techniques of collection and presentation of objects as re-creating a use value of art that "cannot be transposed or transported."

Jean-Paul Sartre's formula for cultural consumption, "Jazz is like bananas—it must be consumed on the spot," suggests another twist on the question of mercantile decontextualization. Baker's famous banana costume that put Paris in thrall was at once a mercantile gesture of her white promoters and a subtle commentary on colonialism and consumption. Capitalizing on Baker's color, her management and choreographer gave her a "savage" setting on a concert stage in which to present both her natural talent and her constructed stardom. Transporting both her bananas and her audience, deferring the consumption of the first while offered for the consumption of the second, Baker's dancing both mocks Parisian concerns about "authentic" African art and at the same time creates cultural capital.

Through the twenties and into the thirties, Baker's art was not simply one of juxtaposition, piecing together a step from Harlem with a Paris costume and an African drummer, but one of inclusivity that expressed the merging of forms from three continents. This was also the operating procedure of Documents as Hollier describes it. The ethnographers were not so much engaging in the juxtaposition or collage of cultural artifacts, but in a kind of classification that eluded restrictive and exclusive norms of classifying. The principle organizing the collection and exhibition of Documents would be that of psychoanalysis—the notion that every detail counts. The ethnographers sought to rehabilitate the lowly, to "show everything," and "tell it all" in the museum. Yet for Bataille and Leiris, it was the unsayable that remained important; as Bataille formulated it: "everything has to be said ... but on condition that everything may not be said." Baker's merging of the beautiful and the comic, the exotic and the everyday, can be understood in similar terms: not as a simple collage of images but as the inclusion in her dancing of both choreographed form and elusive formlessness, what Georges Bataille called l'informe. While flouting conventions about the body, Baker nevertheless respected the discipline and distance of the stage; her freedom of movement seemed to "say it all," but it, too, was based on the understanding that "everything may not be said."

While the Colin posters ostensibly commodified her as a performer (one had to pay admission to see her dance), and while the banana costume represented the ultimate colonial fantasy, we have to credit Baker's ability to save something from her commodification while in so many ways submitting to it. We might use the short film that exists of her in the banana costume, along with her comments about how tired she was of this number by the time of the filming, to read into the film a certain resistance to the mercantile decontextualization of the banana. It is tempting to read this image, across the span of more than half a century, by superimposing onto it the slogan from a current publicity campaign in France. "Banane de Guadeloupe et Martinique: Rien ne peut la battre" markets another import from the New World and signals, within the commercial terms of the French market, a certain Antillean resistance. Sometimes a banana is just a banana, and the campaign for Martiniquan and Guadeloupean bananas, on which so many families depend for their livelihoods, reminds us of the symbolic capital of commodities. The film of Baker's banana dance, seen in the context of this document, allows us to compare Baker across time to the star Antillean athletes who have been mobilized to sell bananas to France, albeit for different reasons.

Baker's live performances—consumed "on the spot"—should be read against her creation of an exportable image, that of an international cinema star, who could use the medium to transcend the restrictions imposed on live performers and on their public in her home country, as well as to travel through time. The cinematic elaboration of her image, in movement and sound, allowed Baker some resistance to the kind of static representation that effectively made her an art object. Instead, she used cinema—even as it used her—to create a fantasy of naturalness held in place by the apparatus, and to preserve that image of naturalness for another market, a future film public. Baker's success in film was in understanding, better than most dancers of her age, what cinematography could do for her art. Translating herself, singing, acting, as well as dancing on celluloid, she created representations that demonstrate more of her agency. Dancing for the camera in Paris or on location in North Africa, she was also tapping into the already 30-year-old enterprise of filming colonial "others."

While Baker's dancing was in many ways unique, African and African American dancing had been seen in Paris a generation before she arrived, live and in the cinema. Her dancing and acting covered a huge range of styles, from comic clowning and tap, to percussive traditional dance moves, to glamorous theatrical dance. While seen as a "natural" talent bringing a new excitement to the stage, Josephine's dancing in the Revue Nègre and into the thirties fit into a niche that had been created by such acts as the cakewalking Mr. and Mrs. Elk; the traditional African dance featured at the universal expositions, also seen in early films by the Lumière brothers; and in avant-garde performances by the Ballets suédois that imitated or were inspired by African and diasporic dance forms.

For a European public, the "authenticity" of African dance was as much a cinematic construction as an effect of live performance, and with cinema's growing popularity, more and more people would see such dance on film. By transferring her live art to film, Baker was working like an ethnographer, linking "authentic" traditional forms such as dance with decontextualized photographic representations. This transposition is what the pages of Documents also did, by printing a photo captioned, "Bessie Love dans le film parlant Broadway Melody" above a photo of West African children titled "Enfants de l'Ecole de Bacouya, Bourail," reprinted from an album dated 1869-71.

With the African material, dance steps transposed into a different context, we could say that Josephine's dancing creates a use value endimanché: these moves mean something else, somewhere else, even if here (in Europe, onstage) they are on display. These moves might also be seen as ultimately rejoining an African space that is the space of Africa created by photography and on film, the only way many Europeans would ever see it, as a filmic construct. The African material is not simply cited by Baker but, on film, reconnects to the space of Africa as it had been and was being filmed: bringing the world to the world, le monde tout proche, in the formulation of Louis Lumière.

This displacement of moves, the notion of the natural created by and through the artifice of film, what Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinématheque Française, described as "the natural that only 'primitives' manage to maintain in front of the camera"—is clearly seen in two cinematic moments from Josephine's oeuvre. First, there is the famous scene from Princesse Tam Tam in which Alwina strips off her glamorous garb and, presumably shaming her Pygmalian mentor, Max de Mirecourt, reveals her real identity to the Parisian elite gathered at the maharajah's ball.[video] But, of course, the entire scene is the creation of Max's novel and the set is a movie stage; Alwina's dance is a huge success, a Busby Berkeley-type floor show that reveals the Princesse de Parador, alias Alwina, and ultimately, Josephine as its star.

Princesse Tam Tam: Maharajah's Ball [Back to text]

Baker's dancing in the film serves as the key to her perception as an "uncivilized" colonial; it is posited as telling some inevitable truth about identity that dressing up cannot hide. The notion of dance as a revealing gesture, betraying origin and identity, is acted out as Alwina easily sheds the layer of proper European femininity and descends into a dance that turns out to be a high-tech industry spectacle, a "natural" in sync with the drums, but also highly produced. In Le Cinéma colonial au maghreb, Abdelkader Benali emphasizes the positioning of Alwina as uncivilized, dancing at the opening of the film for a group of children at the ruins at Dougga, a site of Roman civilization. It should be noted that the authenticity of the location shot is belied by the lack of concern about the cultural specificity of the music and dancing.

In Zou Zou, Baker plays both a free-spirited circus freak and a glamorous industry star. But the two stereotypes are also represented by two other actresses we see on screen: the "natural" uncredited dancer of color [video] who appears in a port in Manila and the "industry product," Miss Barbara, the platinum-haired star played by Ila Meery. In the scene immediately following the dance in the Manila port, the action shifts to Zou Zou in France. As she clowns for a little French girl [video], her freedom of movement—although not the moves themselves—recalls that of the woman we have just seen with the label "born dancing." Zou Zou jumps from the table, picks the child up in her arms, spins her around, and lands her on the ground. Then, during the ensuing dialogue, Zou Zou reaches to pull down her skirt, caught between her legs, and leaves her hand on her skirt, a small gesture, but with tremendous resonance.

Zou Zou: Dancing Girl [Back to text]

Zou Zou: Clowning [Back to text]

Baker's back is to the camera, and the skirt is pulled down not for the viewer, but for an internalized public, represented here by the little girl. Beyond the film's story of the mainstreaming of Zou Zou the circus performer, her "whitening" alongside the French working-class women in the laundry, and the caging and staging of her talent, this gesture reads as one choreographed by Josephine herself. This small gesture, which would be unthinkable in her tiny feathered costume on her swing in her birdcage, reveals that freedom of movement includes a gesture of propriety as natural as a movement of abandon. While the bird costume, like the banana costume, stages the question of the liberation of the body (needing to be caged, or consumed), the "Haiti" number [video] enacts the structure of this already-present censure, or self-restraint, that constructs the frame of Josephine's liberating moves. This self-possession is the other side of the possession often projected onto her dancing.

Zou Zou: Haiti [Back to text]

Is this not also a use value on exhibit, in its Sunday best; a concept of proper femininity that works from St. Louis to Paris? Belying the image of the primitive, this gesture suggests that there is no "natural" movement that is not also constructed, conscious of context. The bird outfit and the birdcage may be someone else's idea, but what Baker makes her own, with her hand on her skirt, is the idea that she submits to the machinery of the industry and is fully aware of its liberating and essentializing powers. Through her use of cinema, as documented in her memoirs, she seems to transcend the imposition of the still frame and the pose, the stereotypes created for national, colonial, and commercial interests, and the fixity of the "cliché." If she embodied and sold the concept of the bananas or whatever else her managers dreamed up for her, she also invented herself as a producer of images. In the words of the contemporary dance critic Andre Levinson, "Her personality exceeded the genre."

Despite their apparent freedom of movement, professional dancers are always trying to negotiate some agency within the frameworks that present them as bodies on display. Is the cinema less commodifying than a still image? One part of the answer is that Baker is playing herself; this is how the actor functions in cinema, as Walter Benjamin points out in his essay "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction." But it can also be seen—as Benjamin argues—as the progressive shift of the means of production, the progressive opening up of authorship, to the actors in film playing themselves. Baker understood, better than other dancers of her generation, how cinema could translate dance from the stage, how it reaches across time and space, the ways in which it allowed her image to travel, and its effectiveness in reaching an unsegregated audience of the future, the focus of so much of her life, the very children she was clowning for and with.

The "use value" of Josephine Baker refers not to the use value she might have come to represent as an icon, but to the use value she creates, or re-creates, by revalorizing moves through their displacement and recontextualization across continents and then into a cinematic space. In a tiny gesture, apparently thoughtless, as well as in the broad strokes of her liberating movement, she creates a naturalness that is crafted for and by cinematic technology. While negotiating the stardom constructed for her by the industry and the apparatus, Baker maintains an aura of authenticity reserved for modern dance in the face of machine culture. That she does so while herself "submitting to the machine," in Leiris's phrase, points to the complexity of a modernist formulation of naturalness held in place by the industry's massive machine.

This paper is developed from Felicia McCarren, Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Stanford University Press, 2003.