Josephine Baker, Performance, and the Traumatic Real

Other atrocities and cruelties are recounted in Baker’s experience of the St. Louis riots that merge into a cumulative impression of apocalypse. Not insignificantly, it is precisely such searing knowledge of the traumatic Real—which, according to Lacan, “burns where it falls”—that Baker encounters, symptomatically, in the “scorching” eye and burning “fever” of La Revue Nègre spotlights. As a rising black star for a multicultural public sphere, Baker experienced, like Cullen, her audience’s demand for the fetish of black skin as an encounter with sublime terror: “The first time I had to appear in front of the Paris audience,” she recollects:

I had to execute a dance rather … savage. I came onstage and a frenzy took possession of me; seeing nothing, not even hearing the orchestra, I danced! … Driven by dark forces I didn’t recognize, I improvised, crazed by the music, the overheated theater filled to the bursting point, the scorching eye of the spotlights. Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever. Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained the earth it seemed to be mine alone.” ¹

From Baker’s subjective position, black dance has less to do with the psychically charged space of colonial desire—what Fanon characterized as the hybridity of Western negrophobia/negrophilia—than it does with experiencing what Lacan would describe as the gaze of the Real. The spotlight’s “eye” is not coincidental with the point of view of the colonial audience. Unlike the colonial look, which relies on fetishistic spectacle, the gaze of the Real exceeds any representation. It scorches and burns with an extralinguistic intensity: one that elicits for the dancer “crazed” emotions and “dark forces.” That horizon of the Real exceeds both the Imaginary investments of colonial desire and the range of symbolic expression available to experimental modernism and, more radically, splits conscious subjectivity with the force of what Lacan describes as a traumatic encounter. In Seminar XI’s well-known reading of Freud’s dream of the burning child, Lacan defines the nucleus of the Real as that which escapes conscious understanding precisely in the child’s burning reproach “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?” Not just a representation of trauma, [t]his sentence,” Lacan writes, “is itself a firebrand—of itself it brings fire where it falls—and one cannot see what is burning, for the flames blind us to the fact that the fire bears on the Unterlegt, on the Untertragen, of the real.” ²

In a similar encounter with the Real as “firebrand,” Baker experiences its “scorching eye” as a blinding sublime where both the framing of Miguel Covarrubias’s avant-garde set designs and the scene of her Parisian viewers fall away. “Seeing nothing, not even hearing the orchestra,” she testifies, “I danced.” It is only in a later moment that the ecstatic dance negotiates that gaze of the Real through “improvisation.” The first moment, however, belongs to a “frenzy” whose “possession” radically exceeds Baker’s identity as an entertainer. The intensities of Baker’s Afrocentric performance practice find their roots in her personal childhood trauma of the St. Louis Riot, which itself is just one episode in a deeper collective history of institutional racism whose violence marks the expressive culture of black dance with a traumatic “heritage” reaching back to the middle passage.

As Judith Butler, David Eng, and others have recently argued, trauma and loss can produce, paradoxically enough, new modes of aesthetic and cultural representation, social identity, community, and political agency. ³ If the heritage of black dance encrypts the trauma of the middle passage as part of its expressive culture, then Baker’s crossings and re-crossings of that transatlantic performative space allowed her an agency that served as a powerful, cosmopolitan symbol of emancipation from the contained culture of postwar America on the eve of the civil rights and women’s movements. Indeed, in 1951, syndicated columnist and author Robert C. Ruark noted the transatlantic circuit of Baker’s career, observing that her return “marks the end of a cycle…. It is a different immigration from the old world—the reverse of the wholesale exodus which sent the rich and exotic, the beautiful and the damned away from corny old America in the early twenties…. She comes by way of Cuba and Miami Beach, both foreign countries. She is doing her bold songs in a theater called Strand now, and intends to barnstorm the country…. It could be that we could use symbols like Miss Baker politically abroad, for she seems to have conquered all that she has seen.” ⁴

1. Josephine Baker, Josephine, 51-52.[↑]
2. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 59.[↑]
3. On the resources of melancholia for new modes of representation and identification, see Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), and Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997).[↑]
4. Robert C. Ruark, “She Died on Purpose for a Cause,” Richmond Times Dispatch, March 5, 1951.[↑]