Tyler Stovall,
"The New Woman and the New Empire: Josephine Baker and Changing Views of Femininity in Interwar France"
(page 6 of 7)
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.
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