By thus consigning Baker’s performance to the illusory or “unreal” domain of the phantasm or phantasmagoria, Levinson is able to safeguard what he regards as “real” or “authentic” dance, presumably represented by the more traditional European concert or balletic dance, as the standard by which this category of performance must finally be adjudged. Further, Levinson’s imperial account encodes Baker as a representation of savagery or exotic-erotic otherness within a dominant discourse representing the black woman as an object to be looked at rather than as a self-constituting subject.
Thus, while Baker’s raucous, sensual, polyrhythmic Africanist (to appropriate dance critic Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s useful term denoting “African-derived”) performances may disrupt and transgress the balletic codes of performance on the one hand, they are also made to serve and reinforce the dominant standards and paradigms that define the signifier Dance in the French colonial imaginary, demonstrating author Toni Morrison’s observation that “definitions [belong] to the definers—not the defined” (Beloved, 190). In other words, the ability to produce and exercise control over the dominant codes of signification is precisely what defines power and hegemony. From the perspective of dominance that Stuart Hall calls “compulsory Eurocentrism,” Baker’s dance performance can only be adjudged as “deviant, bizarre, unreal, or fantastic.” Thus, Baker’s performance and Levinson’s reading together construct a scenario in which an ostensibly transgressive and potentially liberating performance can be re-signified to recuperate the signs and serve the meanings determined by the dominant order.
From a somewhat different perspective, the American poet, e. e. cummings, in his Vanity Fair review (“Vive la Folie!”) of Baker’s performance in the 1926 production of La Folie du Jour in which she debuted her famous banana girdle, recalls Baker’s 1924 performance in Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s New York production of The Chocolate Dandies:
As a member of the Dandies chorus, she [Baker] resembled some tall, vital, incomparably fluid nightmare which crossed its eyes and warped its limbs in a purely unearthly manner—some vision which opened new avenues of fear, which suggested nothing but itself and which, consequently, was strictly aesthetic. (Firmage, 161; originally published in Vanity Fair, 1929)
As many readers will recognize, cummings’ description here of Baker resembles nothing so much as Topsy, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “wild child” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin—described by the American author (in tones eerily invoking Levinson’s French colonialist reading) as “odd,” “goblin-like,” and “unearthly.” Presenting Topsy to his cousin Ophelia as “a funny specimen in the Jim Crow line,” her amused master, Augustine St. Clare, instructs the little slave urchin to “give us a song, now, and show us some of your dancing,” an invitation to which Topsy responds with a ‘performance of blackness’ that is unmistakably evoked in cummings’ description of Baker’s performance in Chocolate Dandies. Stowe describes her character thusly:
The black, glassy eyes glittered with a kind of wicked drollery, and the thing [Topsy] struck up, in a clear shrill voice, an odd negro [sic] melody, to which she kept time with her hands and feet, spinning round, clapping her hands, knocking her knees together, in a wild, fantastic sort of time, and producing in her throat all those odd guttural sounds which distinguish the native music of her race. (Stowe, 271)
