… [P]opular culture, commodified and stereotyped as it often is, is not all, as we sometimes think of it, the arena where we find who we really are, the truth of our experience. It is an experience that is profoundly mythic. It is a theater of popular desires, a theater of popular fantasies. It is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to ourselves for the first time.
—Stuart Hall
… [I]dentities are about questions of using the resources of history, language, and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not “who we are” or “where we came from,” so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves. Identities are therefore constituted within, not outside representation. Above all … identities are constructed through, not outside, difference.
—Stuart Hall
Culture is an embodied phenomenon. This implies that one’s cultural location is not fixed to any one geographical space. Cultures, in other words, are not inherently provincial by nature. They move and evolve with the bodies that create and live them.
—Jennifer Rahim
My earlier work on Josephine Baker positions her performances within the historical and cultural context of early twentieth-century French modernist primitivism. In “Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre: From Ethnography to Performance,” I argue that although Baker’s early representation is cast in the dye of ethnographic primitivism, her performances are manifestly modernist in their conceptualization and staging. In the present essay, I seek to “flip the script,” as it were, and examine Baker’s eroticized and parodized dance performances as a set of mediating, self-constituting, and potentially oppositional practices shaped within the context of black vernacular and diasporic culture.
It is important, however, to recognize at the outset that Baker was not only a product of the French colonial imaginary, but also the producer of an image that contributed toward shaping that imaginary. And although my work has been largely predicated on the assumption that the image of Baker is shaped across the intersecting and sometimes antagonistic discourses of French colonialist and modernist aesthetics, I also establish Baker’s agency as a self-authorizing text and self-constituting subject who is herself liable to diverse and sometimes contradictory and paradoxical readings.
Staged as popular entertainment and produced for profit and pleasure, Baker’s public dance performances conform to popular culture critic Richard Dyer’s definition of entertainment as “a type of performance produced for profit, performed before a generalized audience (the ‘public’) by a trained, paid [individual] who [does] nothing else, but produce performances which have the sole (conscious) aim of providing pleasure.” Arguing that this form of production embodies the “usual struggle between capital (the backers) and labor (the performers),” Dyer insists that it is nevertheless the performers themselves who exercise the “dominant agency” for defining the form because, in entertainment, the workers—or the entertainers themselves—are “in a better position [than many others in the workforce] to determine the form of [their] product [and notably here the product is a “form” and not a “thing”]” (Dyer, 372).
Such a definition underscores how the performer, in this instance Josephine Baker, is able to exercise a degree of agency even when the conditions of performance and production are governed by the dynamics of the entertainment marketplace. The relationship between this mode of cultural production, especially as it marks and markets ethnic and gender difference, and the demands (consumption and regulation) of the dominant and hegemonic order in the ‘circuit of culture’ [Hall 1997] remains complex and often problematic. Notably, Dyer’s larger argument turns on the escapist and wish-fulfilling, or utopic, functions of popular entertainment that “[offer] the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide” (Dyer, 373). Baker’s early stage performances—epitomized in the iconic danse sauvage, the finale of La Revue Nègre, and in the persona of the native girl Fatou in La Folie du Jour, whose sexualized banana dance represents the fulfillment of the sleeping explorer’s dream fantasies—mirror and arguably constitute colonial desire as a longing for otherness imagined in terms of sexual and colonial conquest. It was the manipulation of such “utopian” imagery (“under Western eyes”) that allowed Baker to exercise control and agency in the marketing of her image in an entertainment economy and cultural circuit based on the production and consumption of otherness.
As Paul Gilroy and others suggest, the “pleasure and danger” offered by black performers to the white spectator often found fulfillment in what anthropologist James Clifford calls “escapist exoticism.” And demonstrably, Baker’s artistic and commercial successes were not always “incompatible” with racist, patriarchal, or colonial assumptions. On the contrary, the dominant order would expect of such performances the ritual re-enactment of what Gilroy calls the “grand narrative of racial [and I would add sexual] domination” (Gilroy, 21). In fact, Baker’s early performances were deliberately packaged to meet such demands and expectations. Further, important to understanding the impact of Baker’s performances is the recognition that like any other signifying system and practice—language or music, for instance—dance plays a special role in the production of social and cultural identity. And arguably, it is the fluidity of dance as movement and modality that serves as a metaphor for articulating the migratory and transformative nature of culture, as well as the instability and contingency of corporate and social identities as they get produced in cultural and artistic performance.
For some critics and theorists, including Jacques Derrida, dance as a cultural and artistic form of expression functions to challenge static notions of identity by disrupting conventional binary constructions of the self. In his interview with Christie McDonald, Derrida speaks theoretically of the liberating and revolutionary potential of dance by invoking Emma Goldman’s famous remark, “If I cannot dance, I will not be part of your revolution”—an observation that, as I read it, provides a metaphorical link between political transformation and the circular turns of dance movement. And although in his interview Derrida focuses on the deconstruction of sexual binaries, the function of dance as form and metaphor would seem to apply equally to other binary constructions of identity. Thus, Baker’s dance performances—the form for which she was best known—position her as a kind of iconic signifier of identity “in the process of becoming rather than being” (Hall 1996).
