Emerging from a tradition of minstrelsy and burlesque, Baker brought to her performances a comedic and often carnivalesque turn. And as I argue elsewhere, Baker’s signature mugging (her funny faces and crossed-eyes) not only provided comic relief in her provocative performances, but also had the effect of ironizing her highly sexualized and frequently acrobatic antics. It is evident that the diasporic medley, or pastiche, that characterizes Baker’s performances was grounded in the American vaudevillian and burlesque traditions that had provided the early training ground for her comedic improvisation. The compositional strategies driving her performances are thus based on the tactics and techniques of exaggeration, caricature, pantomime, mimicry, pastiche, and parody. However, what sometimes renders Baker’s performances controversial—subjecting them to recuperative readings that arguably reinforce dominant race and gender stereotypes—is precisely her appropriation of the strategies by which parody does its work.
Parody is constituted by an alternate system of signification by which codes designated as “parodic” enter into, engage, and interrogate the dominant and hegemonic systems of signification. However, it is precisely the dominant discursive order that controls and produces the available primary codes or signs of signification. The parodic performer must therefore appropriate the dominant codes of signification, even when the aim is to re-signify meaning. Thus, when mocking, satirizing, parodying, or otherwise subverting and calling into question the dominant and hegemonic signifying system, the employment (or redeployment) of these available signs and codes unavoidably risks validating, if not indeed valorizing, the original system of signification. Thus, in translating black vernacular and diasporic performance into a rhetoric of parodized pastiche, Baker’s performances inevitably risk reproducing gender and race clichés, caricatures, and stereotypes as they are produced by the dominant and hegemonic discourse. In a performance vocabulary based on repetition with a difference—that is, repeating the dominant structures of signification, but with an articulation of transgressive difference—the repetition runs the risk (depending on the reader, the reading position, and the scene of reading) of reinforcing dominant codes, while the difference often gets diminished or overshadowed. It is therefore possible for the reader—Levinson or cummings, for example—to decode/recode the grammar and vocabulary of performance according to the dominant (aesthetic, critical, or political) codes of signification. Consequently, such readings often resist or overlook the intended performative re-signification, resulting in the perpetuation and circulation of signs and codes that essentialize, naturalize, and fix difference (Hall 2003).
In summary, the conflicting and sometimes controversial readings of Josephine Baker’s performances—past and present/post(colonial) and diasporic—demonstrate the complex interplay between popular culture, representation, and social identity. Such responses also facilitate an understanding of the politics of reception to the parodic performances of blackness typified in contemporary black popular culture—particularly hip-hop culture—in its risky subversion/recuperation of dominant racial, gender and sexual stereotypes and clichés. In an attempt to subvert popular and demeaning historical stereotypes of black masculinities and femininities, hip-hop performances often risk the (re)production of stereotypes that become susceptible to re-appropriation by the dominant order to serve its own racist, sexist and ethnocentric structure of meaning and signification.
This essay, composed in commemoration of the 100th birthday of Josephine Baker, thus concludes on a celebratory but cautionary note that is meant to call attention to the ways in which performance—the arena in which we are other-identified and self- imagined—contains the power and potential to be simultaneously transgressive and recuperative, repressive and liberating, constraining and enabling—a source of danger and pleasure.
This essay is part of a larger project on Josephine Baker as performing artist and political activist. I would like to express my genuine appreciation to Thomas F. DeFrantz, Peggy Phelan, and David Palumbo-Liu for their generous and thought-provoking responses to this phase of my project. I also wish to thank the staff at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library for granting me access to the Josephine Baker papers.
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