Indeed, why Josephine Baker? Or rather, how? How is it that, of all the half-naked chorus girls to appear on the stages of Montmartre during the Roaring Twenties, Parisians chose to make Josephine Baker into a star without parallel? How was Baker transformed, in what seems a matter of mere moments, into the incarnation of Africa, America, and even Paris itself? How is it that a 19-year-old black girl from St. Louis, Missouri, who was neither the most beautiful nor the most talented entertainer to hit interwar France, was able to captivate the European cultural capital in 1925 and then to keep it mesmerized for nearly half a century, until her death in 1975 at age 68? These are questions that have fascinated me, and many others, about the phenomenon that was and in fact still is Josephine Baker. She is a moment that has yet to be repeated.
Josephine Baker circulated in the rarefied circles of twentieth-century celebrity, at one point becoming the highest-paid entertainer in Europe. She sat for Picasso; had an affair with Le Corbusier; was raved about by Colette, Langston Hughes, e.e. cummings, and Jean Cocteau; and was proclaimed by Ernest Hemingway “the most sensational woman anybody ever saw. Or ever will.” The architect Adolf Loos designed a house that would showcase Baker’s naked body from every angle, and the artist Alexander Calder created several wire sculptures of her form. Among Baker’s benefactors were heads of state from Princess Grace and the Pasha of Marrakesh to Juan and Eva Péron.
Living as we do at a cultural moment in which entertainers seem able to become famous for little more than being famous, we cannot help but recognize the extent to which societies produce celebrities, the extent to which the public creates the icons that are our artists. It seems particularly fitting, then, to consider Baker’s meteoric rise to stardom in the light of the sociocultural realities that conditioned her audience. The negotiation of the exchange that underlies performance—this at once mutually exploitative and mutually gratifying interaction between spectator and spectacle—is what has always most intrigued me about Josephine Baker’s story. It was my desire to suss out its specifics that motivated the September 2006 international colloquium out of which this issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online emerged.
