The New Woman and the New Empire:
Josephine Baker and Changing Views of Femininity in Interwar France

If the contrast between Baker and her white rivals represented conflicts over traditional versus modern ideas of femininity, it equally symbolized the colonial struggle between the white female settler and the native concubine. In an empire struggling to create a safe space for white domesticity, it made sense to acknowledge the attractions of native women while ultimately demonstrating the impossibility of interracial relationships. The critique of miscegenation is especially noteworthy in La Sirène des Tropiques. In this film, Baker’s character Papitou not only desires a relationship with a Frenchman, but is also the product of one. Her father symbolizes the degeneracy of the white man who takes a native concubine: He is an indolent alcoholic who rarely bothers to get out of bed, a classic example of the colonial cafard. Papitou desires the Parisian white man, André, who is clean, upstanding, and in general everything the white colonial settlers are not, yet these very qualities also render him immune to the attractions of a black woman.¹ Papitou clearly has no chance of winning André’s love or persuading him to stay in the Caribbean; her only option is to follow him to France. In Princesse Tam-Tam, Baker’s character Alwina is bluntly informed by a mysterious maharajah that “East is East and West is West”; that her love for Max de Mirecourt has no future, is a fantasy. In both films, and to a lesser extent Zou Zou as well, Baker portrays the would-be native concubine whose desire is frustrated by the triumph of white domesticity.

And yet all of these scenes take place in France as well as the colonies. This blurring of boundaries between empire and métropole in Baker’s films mirrors the tensions surrounding the idea of the “nation of 100 million Frenchmen” in the interwar years. It also illustrates a phenomenon stressed by many scholars of colonialism: the fact that social and cultural practices traveled from the colonies to Europe, as well as vice versa. In her films, Baker portrayed colonized women whose romantic aspirations were doubly transgressive, challenging the frontiers of both race and empire. The native woman could come to Paris as a spectacle and, as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting has pointed out, Josephine Baker in this role belonged to a tradition that went all the way back to the Hottentot Venus.² However, she must not be permitted to bring the tradition of mariage à la mode de pays with her. At the same time, the ideal of the female colonial settler represented not just an intention to establish white domesticity in the empire, but also a challenge to the very idea of the New Woman. Baker’s characters’ white rivals defended the integrity of the French race by defeating the enchantments of exoticism. More than before World War I, interwar France was a nation vainly striving to untangle colonial and metropolitan concerns.

If Baker’s films underscored the interrelationships between France and her colonies, they also testified to the determination of many French to keep the borders between the two firmly fixed. The central theme in her movies of return to the colonies illustrates this dramatically: in them Baker’s character ends up leaving France in one way or another. La Sirène des Tropiques is the most straightforward in this regard: Papitou simply tells André’s fiancé that she’s going far away, back to America. In Princesse Tam-Tam, the return takes part in the context of the end of the dream sequence: Baker both returns home and in reality never came to France at all. Zou Zou gives us the most complex scenario. Zou Zou remains in Paris, but her last scene shows her singing mournfully, in a cage, of her lost Haiti. This scene in particular encapsulates much of interwar France’s ambivalence towards its empire. Given that in this film Baker never appears in a colonial setting, it is noteworthy that she only mentions the colonies once she has clearly failed to win the love of a white man. Zou Zou wishes to return to Haiti but can’t, as she is trapped in a cage. At the same time, she sings of a former colony that is itself lost to France, so the idea of colonial nostalgia here works on two different levels.³ Even the last scene of La Sirène des Tropiques does not show Papitou sailing back to Martinique, but rather dancing the Charleston in a Parisian music hall, which can be read either as a symbolic return to empire via exoticism, or alternately as an affirmation of the permanence of postcoloniality in France. The French valued their imperial possessions on a number of levels, but at the same time (correctly) feared that they could not keep them isolated, that they had the power to transform the very nature of French identity.

Both questions of gender and of colonialism and race shaped Josephine Baker’s screen performances in general and the romantic options of her characters in particular. One must above all consider the interaction between these two levels of alterity in order to appreciate fully their impact on Baker’s films. For example, the scene in Princesse Tam-Tam where the maharajah effectively tells Alwina to go home certainly seems like a condemnation of miscegenation and postcolonialism. Yet as other parts of the movie make clear, the maharajah himself frequently and successfully engages in interracial romance. Here, colonial and gender norms combine to circumscribe Alwina’s hopes for love. The issue of reproduction also illustrates this process of interaction. Only Alwina in Princesse Tam-Tam succeeds in the end in finding a husband, a native Tunisian like herself rather than a white Frenchman. Alwina is also the only one of Baker’s characters to bear children, a highly significant fact in two respects. Childlessness, the failure to perpetuate the French race, was perhaps society’s greatest reproach against the New Woman. At the same time, Baker’s failure to reproduce recalled earlier racist ideas about the inability of different races to produce children. In none of Baker’s films do we see mixed-race children (except perhaps Baker herself as a child in Zou Zou). As many interwar eugenicists argued, the race must be fertile, but it must also be pure.

1. The relationship between André and the corrupt Frenchmen of the colonies, especially the overseer Salazar, whom he prevents from raping Papitou, is also complex. On the one hand, André represents the classic naïve young Frenchman who arrives in the colonies full of good intentions only to be seduced and corrupted: Papitou’s father is a vision of what will happen to André if he remains in the Caribbean. On the other hand, the contrast between André and Salazar alludes to a major theme in the French Caribbean, the contrast between the “good” France of the métropol and the “bad” France of the colonial planters and slave masters, so that freedom is to be achieved by leaving the Caribbean for France. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). [↩]
2. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). [↩]
3. On colonial nostalgia, see Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Alec Hargreaves, ed., Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). [↩]