In order to situate Baker in the French cultural and racial imaginary at the moment of her legendary emergence in Paris in the year 1925, I begin with two paradigmatic readings of Josephine Baker, one by the noted French dance critic André Levinson, and the other by the renowned American poet e.e. cummings. In his fittingly entitled “The Negro Dance under European Eyes,” a review of Baker’s performance in La Revue Nègre—which no doubt contributed to making this remarkable and historical event the succès de scandale that it became—André Levinson captures the extraordinarily seductive vitality of Baker’s dance aesthetics while at the same time exposing the ethnocentrism of the colonial male gaze. Describing Baker as “an extraordinary creature of simian suppleness—a sinuous idol that enslaves and incites mankind,” Levinson writes:
There seems to emanate from her violently shuddering body, her bold dislocations, her springing movement, a gushing stream of rhythm … In the short pas de deux of the savages, which came as the finale of the Revue Nègre, there was a wild splendor and magnificent animality. Certain of Miss Baker’s poses, back arched, haunches protruding, arms entwined and uplifted in a phallic symbol, had the compelling potency of the finest examples of Negro sculpture. The plastic sense of a race of sculptors came to life and the frenzy of African Eros swept over the audience. It was no longer a grotesque dancing girl that stood before them, but the black Venus that haunted Baudelaire. The dancer’s personality had transcended the character of her dance. (Acocella and Garafola, 74; originally published in Theatre Arts Monthly, April 1927)
The implicit reference to l’art nègre invoked in Levinson’s description of la danse sauvage aligns African ceremonial art with African-American popular and vernacular dance culture, while the atavistic signifiers of animality and wildness locate Baker within a European primitivist frame of reference. Moreover, by positioning himself as observer of an object d’art, Levinson effectively both domesticates the dance and, simultaneously, executes a defensive maneuver designed to shield himself (but apparently only himself and not the rest of “mankind”) from the “frenzy of African Eros [that] swept the audience.” Clearly, his narrative strains to contain the threat of difference represented by the powerful phallicism and feral animality encoding his reading of Baker’s performance.
Further, bearing out Dyer’s thesis, Levinson’s reading would seem to construct Baker as surrogate for the colonies and their conquest (or seduction through the French mission civilisatrice). Reflecting the historical moment of France’s interwar period, the representation of Baker functions here as the utopic object of what critic Elizabeth Ezra designates, in another context, as the “colonial unconscious.” Ezra points out that “the apotheosis of la plus grand France was also its swan song”—the beginning of the end of the vast overseas empire comprised by the Third Republic’s expansive colonialism, which extended from the colonies and protectorates in Indochina to central and North Africa, and the South Pacific. In Levinson’s reading, however, the dangers of Baker’s hypersexualization as a surrogate object of colonial desire are offset, as we shall see, by the safety afforded in her imaginary disembodiment, staged proleptically at the moment of France’s future loss of empire.
Comparing Baker’s seductiveness to that of Jeanne Duval, the mulatto woman with whom the French poet Charles Baudelaire was obsessed, the French critic’s appropriative gaze transforms what he construes as “grotesque” [read: strange, bizarre, ludicrous, out of place, fantastic] into a kind of spectral presence (“the black Venus that haunted Baudelaire”). Here, Levinson metaphorically disembodies the performer (“the dancer’s personality had transcended the character of the dance”) and in doing so separates the “dancer” from the “dance.” In his reading, the French critic grounds Baker’s performance in the material body, but then proceeds to disembody or dematerialize the subject, and by extension, the performer. Because Levinson is unable to separate representation from embodiment, he cannot know the dancer from the dance.
