On the one hand, Josephine Baker: A Century in the Spotlight was meant to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the last century’s most important and widely celebrated artists. In some ways, though, Josephine Baker’s birthday was a pretext, an ideal point of departure from which to examine a whole host of issues and phenomena that have marked both Europe and the Americas over the course of the past 100 years. American-born, French-bred, and world-renowned, Josephine Baker shines a revealing light on the transatlantic spaces and moments through which she moved. And so, much more than a centenary celebration of one woman’s exceptional life, this event—and the pages of this web journal—were designed to explore in as many ways as possible Baker’s Parisian triumph and her persistent impact on the international cultural scene. While Baker’s story is perhaps most spectacular—both literally and figuratively—in the 1920s and 1930s in Paris, her influence can be felt in art, in literature, in the media, in politics, in architecture, and in academia on both sides of the Atlantic up to the present day. She has been the subject of several biographies, an Emmy Award-winning film, and countless critical studies. She has been recovered and imitated by entertainers and advertisers alike, reflecting curious attitudes even now toward commercial and performative appropriations of American blackness. Facilitating reflection on the function of black, “foreign” womanhood—quintessential “otherness”—in the European-North American world, Josephine Baker offers a beautiful springboard from which to examine French and American politics of race, gender, and entertainment in the twentieth century. The various components of her identity provide a veritable mirror in which “our” culture is reflected.
Josephine Baker is in many ways problematic: she is postmodern and postcolonial, and she is as controversial and difficult to define as these terms themselves. To comprehensively account for her initial and enduring celebrity means looking closely at the many facets of her artistic and political identity while also addressing larger questions concerning the French and American social, cultural, and political parameters that have so determined relations between Whites and Blacks, France and the United States, Europe and its colonies, and “Us” and “Them” over the course of the twentieth century. It means acknowledging that Baker’s contribution to world culture went far beyond the infamous banana skirt forever associated with her name; it means accounting for the numerous roles that she played over the course of her lifetime. End-of-the-line dancing girl and music hall diva, painter’s muse and businesswoman, mother of 14 and civil rights activist, secret agent and movie star, Baker moved fluidly between identities and arenas. Ever the artist, she continuously repackaged and reinvented herself, and this chameleon-like adaptability was ultimately as revealing of the environments and audiences she encountered as it was of the woman herself. Perhaps even more so.
Given this, Josephine Baker: A Century in the Spotlight considers the big picture of Baker’s life, focusing on the many ways in which her trajectory coincided and intersected with some of the most significant artistic and political phenomena of the last hundred years. Scholars from a broad range of disciplines have come together here to reflect not only on what Baker offered to and represented for Paris as a black American, but also on her function and reception in the United States as an empowered international media darling. We have concentrated on Baker’s handling—both intended and unwitting—of the various categories she occupied.
We begin this exploration with a section titled “Reflections in Josephine’s Mirror.” This section features “The Intelligent Body and Erotic Soul of Josephine Baker,” Margo Jefferson’s thoughtful look at the many contradictory facets of Baker’s persona and at her ambivalent reception by her international public. Jefferson convincingly articulates the fantasies and anxieties Baker evoked in those who witnessed her über-modern, New Negro, femme fatale productions. Taking us from Baker’s St. Louis childhood and comedic ventures on black Broadway, through her personal tragedies and diva-like overcompensations, to her change-making social and political activism, Jefferson offers up the whole Baker, in all her messy and endearing glory. And because Jefferson infuses these comments with her own performative nuances, we decided to offer the actual footage of her presentation here.
