Over the past decade or so, studies of Josephine Baker have shifted in emphasis from discussions of her life in general to analyses of the roles she played on stage and screen. This change from biography to performativity has brought new insights into the life of this celebrated musical star, conceptualizing her as a symbol of the black aesthetic, of jazz dance, of the African diaspora, or of the tensions of modernity as a whole.[1] In this paper I hope to contribute to our views of Josephine Baker, performer, by exploring a specific theme that characterized many, if not most, of her characters. To put it bluntly, I wish to consider why the women Baker portrayed never got the guy; that is to say, never achieved success as romantic leads. Time and time again, when we see Baker on stage and screen, she is eating her heart out for a white Frenchman who generally remains completely ignorant of her desire, and who ends up instead with a white Frenchwoman, leaving Baker sad and alone. This constant failure contrasts strangely not only with Baker's own love life, but also with her prominence as a music hall and movie star, since a key definition of such stardom, especially for women, is romantic success. So how can we explain the fact that the woman who not only exuded sexuality on stage but also generally got top billing, nonetheless lost out in the race for love?

The most obvious answer, of course, is the observation that French society in the interwar years was not willing to accept, let alone celebrate miscegenation, and that Baker's performances respected powerful social norms. The fear of race mixing certainly had a lot to do with the limits on Baker as a performer, but I would contend it is not the entire story. For if one refused to countenance the possibility of love across the color line, then why make Josephine Baker a star at all, and in particular why encourage her to exhibit such demonstrative and alluring sensuality on stage and screen? Baker could never have performed such roles in contemporary America, and certainly never could have achieved stardom in doing so, thanks to that country's strict taboo against interracial sex.[2] The question is, therefore, why did French producers and audiences enjoy the sight of Baker flaunting her beauty and sexuality before their eyes yet refuse to accept the logical consequences of such appeal?

I believe that the answer to this question is found in the tensions of interwar French society and culture, in particular in the intersection of two phenomena that reflected the problematic legacies of the Great War. The first was the New Woman, the prospect of liberated young women who rejected prewar social conventions and set out to shape their own destinies. As a global phenomenon in France, it often symbolized not only freedom but also danger, unmoored sexual boundaries that could threaten society as a whole. To a certain extent, Josephine Baker's prominence in France represented a triumph not just of primitivism and blackness but also of this new vision of femininity, and her performances illustrated both its positive and its negative sides. The second phenomenon was the new relationship between France and her overseas colonies. The war had created the beginnings of postcolonial society in metropolitan France, and during the interwar years the French people, to a much greater extent than before, wrestled with both the appeal and the Otherness of empire. In portraying a kind of colonial Everywoman, Baker's characters mirrored the ambivalence many French felt toward their subjects and the imperial project in general.

In taking this approach, I wish to address two broader themes that arise when one considers the life and work of Josephine Baker. The first is the question of how we conceptualize black Europe and black European studies.[3] Blacks in Europe belong both to the African diaspora and to European society, history, and culture; in foregrounding the latter relationship in this paper, I do not intend to neglect or undervalue the former. Rather, I ask another question: How do blacks and blackness reflect and shape the life of the "white continent" in general? The other theme is the relationship between gender, race, and colonialism. Feminist scholars have both challenged the traditional idea that white women bore primary responsibility for introducing racial segregation into Europe's colonies, and also explored the ways in which not only European women but feminism itself at times contributed to the colonial project and to the racialization of the Other.[4] Baker's performances mirrored anxieties about the blurring of boundaries between métropole and colony at the same time as they asserted a modernist ideal of woman, and thus present an ideal site for exploring interactions of different types of alterity.

Such broader reflections seem to take us far from the tragedies of unrequited love. Yet ultimately the loss was not Baker's, but that of a society unable to address successfully the contradictions of the world it had created. Interwar France may have made Josephine Baker a star, but it could not portray her simply as a human being who loved and was loved in return.

The New Woman and New Views of Empire in Interwar France

The rise of the New Woman as a social and cultural trope in interwar France was intimately linked to the gender dislocations caused by the First World War. Most significantly, the war produced a tremendous gender imbalance by killing over 1 million Frenchmen and disabling many more.[5] People spoke of the "man shortage" after the war, and cultural commentators poured forth reams of advice for young woman on the best ways to secure a husband in such a competitive market.[6] At the same time, the war had spurred the entry of young women into jobs previously reserved for men. Although the nation quickly dispensed with the female subway car conductors and steelworkers after the Armistice, it soon became acceptable for young, unmarried, middle-class women to work as clerks, typists, and salesgirls, and even to live away from their parents' homes.[7] Finally, the idea of the New Woman also became a fashion statement. Wartime shortages of cloth and the dangers of working in factories surrounded by heavy machinery discouraged the kind of voluminous dresses that dominated prewar women's fashions. In the early 1920s, designer Coco Chanel pioneered the new look in women's clothing: short skirts, collars, short hair, and a minimalist waist and bust. Imitating both masculine fashion and Cubist mechanical aesthetics, this new fashion look became the sine qua non of the modern young Parisienne.[8]

Thus was born la garçonne, the bachelor girl, whose outer appearance supposedly mirrored a new social and sexual daring and independence. According to popular stereotypes, the woman who cut her hair short also worked outside the home and earned her own money, which she often used to support an extravagant, dissolute lifestyle that included drink, drugs, jazz, and sexual experimentation.[9] She represented the refusal of youth in general to return to prewar social norms, and the widespread desire to enjoy life to the fullest while one still could. The bachelor girl also represented a blurring of gender roles that graphically illustrated the war's destruction of tradition and the cultural anxieties of the 1920s. Both the greater freedom and the greater uncertainties of the interwar years became encapsulated in the bachelor girl, the ultimate symbol of the modern age.

Yet the specter of the New Woman was more a cultural fear than a social reality. While fashions certainly changed after the war, most young middle-class Frenchwomen continued to live lives rigidly circumscribed by propriety and tradition. Simone de Beauvoir, who grew up in Paris during the 1920s, tellingly titled her autobiography Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.[10] The garçonne may not have existed in large numbers, but she provoked a great deal of worried commentary from social and political authorities in France. As one Parisian law student wrote in 1925, "These beings—without breasts, without hips, without 'underwear,' who smoke, work, argue and fight exactly like boys, and who, during the night at the Bois de Boulogne, with their heads swimming under several cocktails, seek out savory and acrobatic pleasures on the plush seats of 5 horsepower Citröens—these aren't young girls! There aren't any more young girls!" (cited in Roberts, 20).[11] Many in France felt that the victory in the war should be complemented by a renewed emphasis on domesticity and traditional gender roles; as a consequence, France became one of the very few Western nations to deny women the vote after 1918.

In 1922, Victor Margueritte published his novel La garçonne, which chronicled the life and adventures of its heroine, Monique Lerbier.[12] In the novel Lerbier rejects her bourgeois provincial family and flees to Paris to lead a dissolute life that includes drug and alcohol abuse, sex with both men and women, and dancing the night away in jazz clubs. The archbishop of Paris denounced the novel, which was formally banned by the French government. This, of course, made it more popular than ever; the novel sold over 1 million copies by the end of the 1920s. If the novel shocked and titillated Parisians, the exploits of a real live bachelor girl ten years later horrified them. In 1931 a Parisian teenager named Violette Nozières poisoned her parents, having been abused by her father. She then stole 1,500 francs from them and fled to Montmartre, where she spent a week hanging out in the clubs and living with a variety of men. When apprehended, she demonstrated absolutely no remorse, claimed her right to live her own life, and was nearly lynched by a mob on her way to court.[13] Both Lerbier and Nozières represented the garçonne as decadent and ultimately a danger to society and the family.

If the New Woman threatened the underpinnings of French society during the interwar years, the empire posed a different kind of challenge. In defending herself against Germany during the war, France had relied on her empire to a far greater extent than ever before in her history. In particular, French authorities imported hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects to fight on her battlefields and man her factories and farms during the hostilities. Many Frenchwomen and men saw nonwhites for the first time in their lives during the war years, and in a very real sense World War I constitutes the beginning of the postcolonial era in modern France. This unprecedented presence of the colonized in the métropole both reaffirmed the global greatness of France and called into question some basic assumptions about French identity.[14]

Many saw the new importance of empire as a positive development. One result of the war was the popularization of the idea of France as a land of "100 million Frenchmen." Conscious of the fact that their nation of 40 million people faced a vengeful and potentially powerful Germany of 70 million, theorists of empire and others argued that by including the inhabitants of her colonies, France really had a population of 100 million and was therefore much stronger than her German rival.[15] The most prominent example of this kind of thinking in interwar France was the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris, perhaps the greatest advertisement for imperialism ever staged. Attracting tens of millions of visitors, the exposition showcased the cultures and achievements of France's empire, most notably by building a full-scale model of Cambodia's Angkor Wat on the outskirts of the capital.[16] This interest in colonialism also helped fuel the wave of exoticism and fascination with "primitive" cultures central to French avant-garde culture after the war. The fact that Josephine Baker portrayed so many French colonial natives during her career was merely one example of this thirst for far horizons and exotic shores, as was the influence of jazz and African sculpture on modernist music and art.[17] Although the average Frenchwoman and man still paid little attention to imperial affairs, for policy makers and members of the avant-garde, the colonies became central to their vision of 20th-century France.[18]

Yet this vision was not always positive. If the colonies represented opportunity and excitement overseas, they also posed a potential danger to French identity at home. Increasingly, many in France argued that the much-vaunted civilizing mission was a failure, that it was ultimately impossible for black and brown natives to become truly French. The colonial theory of assimilation largely gave way by the 1920s to a new theory, association, which emphasized separate paths to development and the fundamental inequality of different races of men.[19] Such fears of native savagery targeted in particular the prospect of colonial subjects coming to France. At the end of the First World War, public authorities decided to expel the colonial workers who had come to France during the war, in spite of the economy's crying need for healthy young men, judging that the nation was not yet ready for an experiment in multiculturalism.[20] Even the exoticism of the postwar era not only reinforced traditional stereotypes of colonial peoples but also, by underscoring the contrast between them and the French, gave a certain racialized idea of French national identity. The empire could indeed be useful, but only if the boundaries between métropole and colony remained firmly in place.

Anxieties over the New Woman and the empire during the interwar years converged around fears for the very future of the nation. This was not only a military but also above all a demographic concern. Not only had France lost over a million young men in the war, but she also had one of the lowest birthrates in Europe, and was in fact experiencing negative population growth by the 1930s.[21] The image of France as a nation of old men and empty cradles became widespread in the interwar years and for many signaled their country's grave peril. One response was pro-natalism, the determination to boost the birthrate by any means possible. These included not only abundant propaganda in favor of motherhood, but also state subsidies for large families and increasingly severe penalties for the dissemination of birth control information.[22] In such a context, the garçonne who left home to lead a wild and single life became nothing less than an enemy of society. It is telling that Margueritte's heroine Monique Lerbier ended up sterile, not only the ultimate punishment for a woman, but also a clear warning of the dangers to women and to France in general posed by female liberation.[23]

As the idea of the "nation of 100 million Frenchmen" demonstrated, demographic concerns also engaged the empire. Yet colonial natives could not really contribute to the renewal of the French race. The rise of a new school of racist eugenics in the 1930s emphasized the natives' inferiority and their unsuitability for the national gene pool.[24] However, the empire did offer possibilities for the re-creation of French family life overseas. Whereas before the war most French residents of the colonies had been men, authorities increasingly promoted the emigration of Frenchwomen to the empire in the interwar years. Advances in tropical medicine and a general maturation of colonial society made it more possible than ever to conceive of submitting white women to the rigors of empire. The promotion of white female settlement also involved appealing to a new kind of woman. In the past, most Frenchwomen in the empire had been adventurers, convicts, or camp followers of colonial regiments. The task now was to make the colonies suitable for respectable white women, their (hopefully numerous) white children, and white family life in general.[25]

In order to do this, it was necessary to domesticate male colonial settlers. As the case of Paul Gauguin demonstrated most famously, the French colonies (like the American West) had often served as a place where young men could escape the limitations of bourgeois domesticity and go wild in the tropics. No aspect of white colonial masculinity received more comment or censure than sexual relations with native women. These included not only numerous fleeting encounters but the more stable mariage à la mode de pays, common-law marriages between Frenchmen and black and brown women. By the interwar years, colonial officials had concluded that all such arrangements were no longer acceptable, and were launching ever more aggressive campaigns against miscegenation in the colonies. French male settlers in the empire possessed a vitality and virility essential for the well-being of the nation. Whereas in earlier years they had served France well by conquering new territories, now this masculinity must be harnessed to the service of domesticity, in order to ensure the continuity of the French race. This meant bringing more French women to the colonies. The white female settler both rebuked and parodied the New Woman of the 1920s: like her, she dared to go where few of her sisters had gone before, but unlike her she placed female agency at the service of marriage and motherhood. At the same time, making France's colonies a space for white reproduction meant getting rid of the native concubine, who should serve the colonial white family as a domestic but not as a sexual partner to the French male. Ending the custom of mariage à la mode de pays would ostensibly enable the colonies to assure the very survival of the French race and renew the vitality and fecundity that metropolitan France had seemingly lost.[26]

This exploration of French attitudes about race and gender should help us examine Josephine Baker's on-screen love affairs. Let us now proceed to an analysis of her three feature films: La Sirène des Tropiques (1927), Zou Zou (1934), and Princesse Tam-Tam (1935).

Josephine Baker: Unlucky in Love

Josephine Baker's films have a lot in common, most notably the repeated opportunities afforded Baker to demonstrate her singing and dancing talents. Moreover, in spite of different plot twists, they all end more or less the same way, with Baker realizing that she cannot have the man of her dreams. In La Sirène des Tropiques, Baker portrays Papitou, a young woman in the French Antilles who falls in love with André, a visiting engineer from France. She follows him back to Paris, along the way achieving fame and fortune as a star of the music hall, but ultimately realizes that the object of her devotion loves a Frenchwoman, and that she must graciously give way to their love. Sirène provided the template for Baker's romantic failures: Zou Zou and Princesse Tam-Tam both followed this basic script, but added some interesting and complex wrinkles to it. In Zou Zou the man Josephine Baker loves happens to be her adoptive brother Jean, played by Jean Gabin, adding a certain incestuous theme to the story. This love is doomed both because family ties make Baker and Gabin's characters too close, and because race makes them too different: Such a paradox perfectly reflected French ambivalence about empire. The film ends with one of Baker's most famous scenes, mournfully singing of loss while imprisoned in a cage.[video] Princesse Tam-Tam presents the most complex romantic scenario of Baker's three feature films. It constructs an extended dream sequence in which Baker follows a French writer, Max de Mirecourt, to Paris. When Baker realizes she can't have her man, the fantasy dissolves, and she reverts to being the anonymous native woman observed at the beginning of the film.

Zou Zou: Haiti [Back to text]

One key reason for Baker's failure to win love is her identity as a New Woman. Many aspects of her public persona, both on and off the screen and stage, made her an example of the supposed revolt against traditional female roles during the interwar years. Let us start with her appearance. Quite apart from her costumes during her performances, in her films Josephine Baker dressed in the modern style pioneered by Coco Chanel, with skirts up to the knee and boyishly slimming dresses. Her hairstyle in particular revealed this: Cut short and straightened in the best garçonne style, it won many admirers and enabled Baker to launch her own line of hair pomade, Bakerfix.[27] Baker's image as a New Woman went beyond fashion. Her films portrayed her as a dynamic individual, someone who did not shy away from aggressively pursuing what and whom she wanted. Whether it be stowing away on a ship to follow the man she loved to Paris, as in La Sirène des Tropiques, or dashing onto the dance floor in defiance of all convention, as in Princesse Tam-Tam, Josephine Baker's characters were strong-willed women who demanded recognition and asserted their rights to happiness.

And yet in Baker's films this very assertiveness generally boomeranged. Time and time again, Baker's characters lost the competition for love to passive women who sat at home and waited for their lovers to pursue them. In La Sirène des Tropiques Papitou saves her hero's life by climbing a tree and shooting his opponent in a duel. This brave act avails her naught, however; in the next scene she surrenders her love for him [video] to the Frenchwoman who demurely acknowledges her sacrifice while standing in her bourgeois parlor. In Zou Zou the eponymous heroine secures Jean's release from prison, only to see him fall into the arms of the woman who did nothing to save him. Baker's flamboyant and triumphant performance in Princesse Tam-Tam forces her rival to flee, but this act of flight ultimately wins her husband back.[28] In all three films, Baker as the New Woman loses out to the woman who represents tradition and modesty, the woman who allows the man to be pursuer instead of pursued. Fittingly, these scenes of lost love are followed by performances by Baker, underscoring the contrast between the music-hall star and the wife.

La Sirène des Tropiques: Final Scene [Back to text]

If the contrast between Baker and her white rivals represented conflicts over traditional versus modern ideas of femininity, it equally symbolized the colonial struggle between the white female settler and the native concubine. In an empire struggling to create a safe space for white domesticity, it made sense to acknowledge the attractions of native women while ultimately demonstrating the impossibility of interracial relationships. The critique of miscegenation is especially noteworthy in La Sirène des Tropiques. In this film, Baker's character Papitou not only desires a relationship with a Frenchman, but is also the product of one. Her father symbolizes the degeneracy of the white man who takes a native concubine: He is an indolent alcoholic who rarely bothers to get out of bed, a classic example of the colonial cafard. Papitou desires the Parisian white man, André, who is clean, upstanding, and in general everything the white colonial settlers are not, yet these very qualities also render him immune to the attractions of a black woman.[29] Papitou clearly has no chance of winning André's love or persuading him to stay in the Caribbean; her only option is to follow him to France. In Princesse Tam-Tam, Baker's character Alwina is bluntly informed by a mysterious maharajah that "East is East and West is West"; that her love for Max de Mirecourt has no future, is a fantasy. In both films, and to a lesser extent Zou Zou as well, Baker portrays the would-be native concubine whose desire is frustrated by the triumph of white domesticity.

And yet all of these scenes take place in France as well as the colonies. This blurring of boundaries between empire and métropole in Baker's films mirrors the tensions surrounding the idea of the "nation of 100 million Frenchmen" in the interwar years. It also illustrates a phenomenon stressed by many scholars of colonialism: the fact that social and cultural practices traveled from the colonies to Europe, as well as vice versa. In her films, Baker portrayed colonized women whose romantic aspirations were doubly transgressive, challenging the frontiers of both race and empire. The native woman could come to Paris as a spectacle and, as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting has pointed out, Josephine Baker in this role belonged to a tradition that went all the way back to the Hottentot Venus.[30] However, she must not be permitted to bring the tradition of mariage à la mode de pays with her. At the same time, the ideal of the female colonial settler represented not just an intention to establish white domesticity in the empire, but also a challenge to the very idea of the New Woman. Baker's characters' white rivals defended the integrity of the French race by defeating the enchantments of exoticism. More than before World War I, interwar France was a nation vainly striving to untangle colonial and metropolitan concerns.

If Baker's films underscored the interrelationships between France and her colonies, they also testified to the determination of many French to keep the borders between the two firmly fixed. The central theme in her movies of return to the colonies illustrates this dramatically: in them Baker's character ends up leaving France in one way or another. La Sirène des Tropiques is the most straightforward in this regard: Papitou simply tells André's fiancé that she's going far away, back to America. In Princesse Tam-Tam, the return takes part in the context of the end of the dream sequence: Baker both returns home and in reality never came to France at all. Zou Zou gives us the most complex scenario. Zou Zou remains in Paris, but her last scene shows her singing mournfully, in a cage, of her lost Haiti. This scene in particular encapsulates much of interwar France's ambivalence towards its empire. Given that in this film Baker never appears in a colonial setting, it is noteworthy that she only mentions the colonies once she has clearly failed to win the love of a white man. Zou Zou wishes to return to Haiti but can't, as she is trapped in a cage. At the same time, she sings of a former colony that is itself lost to France, so the idea of colonial nostalgia here works on two different levels.[31] Even the last scene of La Sirène des Tropiques does not show Papitou sailing back to Martinique, but rather dancing the Charleston in a Parisian music hall, which can be read either as a symbolic return to empire via exoticism, or alternately as an affirmation of the permanence of postcoloniality in France. The French valued their imperial possessions on a number of levels, but at the same time (correctly) feared that they could not keep them isolated, that they had the power to transform the very nature of French identity.

Both questions of gender and of colonialism and race shaped Josephine Baker's screen performances in general and the romantic options of her characters in particular. One must above all consider the interaction between these two levels of alterity in order to appreciate fully their impact on Baker's films. For example, the scene in Princesse Tam-Tam where the maharajah effectively tells Alwina to go home certainly seems like a condemnation of miscegenation and postcolonialism. Yet as other parts of the movie make clear, the maharajah himself frequently and successfully engages in interracial romance. Here, colonial and gender norms combine to circumscribe Alwina's hopes for love. The issue of reproduction also illustrates this process of interaction. Only Alwina in Princesse Tam-Tam succeeds in the end in finding a husband, a native Tunisian like herself rather than a white Frenchman. Alwina is also the only one of Baker's characters to bear children, a highly significant fact in two respects. Childlessness, the failure to perpetuate the French race, was perhaps society's greatest reproach against the New Woman. At the same time, Baker's failure to reproduce recalled earlier racist ideas about the inability of different races to produce children. In none of Baker's films do we see mixed-race children (except perhaps Baker herself as a child in Zou Zou). As many interwar eugenicists argued, the race must be fertile, but it must also be pure.

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]