As an idiosyncratic Africanist dancer, Baker created a diasporic and cross-cultural medley of dance performance that was fundamentally constitutive and mediatory. Baker’s most identifiable strategy was her polyrhythmic and improvisatory response to diverse forms and traditions—improvisatory in the sense that her moves are often based on freestyle and fundamentally non-reiterative patterns of repetition with a difference. Notably, most of the vernacular routines “quoted” in Baker’s performances were choreographed for musical performances, although the dancers were not “trained” in the current sense of the term. After all, black dancers learned their moves not only from the stage, but also in the rural, southern juke joints and their northern, urban counterparts, the local dance halls. Baker added to these venues through her appropriation of Parisian music halls and colonial expositions as sites of training and learning.
However, in contrast to the smoother balletic moves of the French chorines who characteristically performed in French variety shows, Baker’s dance performances were based typically on black social and vernacular dances like the acrobatic “flash acts,” the shimmy sha wabble, the black bottom, the itch, the heebie jeebies, the eagle rock, the quiver, the bump and grind, the mess around, the funky chicken, and the ever-popular Charleston. Significantly, these dances featured “improvised torso and limb movements” that, according to Gottschild, “rhythmically articulate the breasts, belly, and buttocks” (Gottschild, 158-9).
Like other forms of black expressive culture, social and vernacular dance functions potentially as a marker of collective, or corporate, social identity, a vehicle of social consciousness, and an avenue of transgression and cultural critique (Levine). At the same time, however, Baker’s diasporizing and creolizing of black social and vernacular dance notably both confirm and (implicitly) challenge some of Stuart Hall’s notions regarding identity and performance—insofar as her performances rework black diasporic dances not necessarily “by imposing an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation,” nor by “[restoring] an imaginary fullness or plenitude to the collective experience [of diaspora],” but by exporting, disseminating, and creolizing black diasporic dance (Hall 1996).
I would argue, then, that Baker’s social and cultural identities—insofar as these get constituted in a black vernacular and African-derived dance—are grounded in a diasporic culture, shaped by migrating and creolized dance forms and conventions that began, in fact, as early as the sixteenth century with the forced transit of the African slaves to the Americas, and that continues in the current migrations of Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino, Afro-Brazilian, and African-American dance culture. It is then arguably in large part due to Josephine Baker’s performances in the 1920s and 1930s that black vernacular and social dance has continued the transatlantic migration, this time extending and reversing the journey back across the Atlantic from the Americas to Europe and Africa. As such, it would seem appropriate to fashion black diasporic dance—and its triangulated, transatlantic migrations—as both an embodiment and trope for the global migration of a black cultural identity that continues to impact contemporary world culture.
