The final section of this issue, “From Josephine Baker to Other ‘Others,'” considers Baker in the light of other black or “brown” women navigating the French public’s very particular perspective on and perception of non-White, non-European persons. Geneviève Fabre, Michel Fabre, Maryse Condé, and Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina—all world-renowned scholars of the African American and African Caribbean experience—look at Baker’s strategies for survival and success as they compare with those employed by her predecessors, her contemporaries, and her heirs, those to whom she owes a debt for her achievements as well as those for whom she ended up tracing a path. Geneviève Fabre’s “Katherine Dunham on the French Stage (No Repeat of La Revue Nègre)” evokes the parallels in Baker and Dunham’s biographies and the persistent tendency of Parisians to read one alongside the other, despite the two women’s very different approaches to performance and to the black American dance tradition. In “Rediscovering Aïcha, Lucy and D’al-Al, Colored French Stage Artists,” Michel Fabre offers a hard-won accounting of the lives of three “uncertainly black” women who, much like Baker, played with exoticist ethnic and racial stereotypes to build careers in the French capital but who, unlike Baker, never achieved much more than a moderate degree of fame. Maryse Condé compares and contrasts Josephine Baker’s strategy and reception with those of the Martinican bourgeois intellectuals Jane and Paulette Nardal in “Body and Soul: Josephine, Jane, and Paulette” (a talk we’ve also chosen to include as it was delivered during the conference). Condé presents here some thoughts on the why of the Nardal sisters’ popular neglect as compared with the unmitigated celebrity of their contemporary, Josephine. Also included in this section is a video of Gretchen Gerzina’s multimedia presentation, “After Josephine: Black American Women in the French Music Scene.” Gerzina moves beyond Baker in her presentation to recount the life choices of black American women entertainers who, decades after the Josephine Baker sensation had left town, sought to create their own fairy tale in a very different Paris. Part 6 closes with “And She Set the Stage for Us,” a performance tribute to Josephine Baker featuring eight “brown” women tap dancers from the Studio Museum in Harlem’s “Hoofer’s House” program. A medley of improvised numbers more and less inspired by Baker’s legacy, the dancers performed this homage as a visible example of the resonance of Baker’s spirit in the black female dance tradition as it continues to develop today.
Both the colloquium and this issue of S&F Online were a thrill to put together. With a birthday party as the foundation and a bona fide superstar as main attraction, how could it not have been? But beyond allowing me to indulge my longstanding star-struck fascination with this marvelous woman, Josephine Baker: A Century in the Spotlight satisfied my desire as a brown female intellectual and admitted Francophile to consider—from a variety of highly original perspectives—France’s relationship to the “Others” in its midst. Questions of race and gender, of the exotic and the erotic, of inclusion and exclusion, of art, celebrity, and political engagement were all raised and addressed, if not answered, by the brilliant scholars I had the privilege of working with on this project. And I am very content to say that in the end, though Baker was perhaps the one on stage, it was truly the whole of the twentieth century in the transatlantic world that we were able to fix in the spotlight.
Enjoy the show.
