To conclude, Josephine Baker’s three feature films present the paradox of an attractive leading lady who always failed to land the leading man. Baker’s identity as both New Woman and native concubine, at a time when France entertained grave reservations about both, doomed her characters to a life without love. Such a conclusion not only helps us to understand the dynamics of Josephine Baker’s films, and the way their French audiences might have viewed them, but also suggests new insights into the culture of interwar France. It underscores, for example, the idea of the New Woman as savage, and traditional gender roles as inscribed in a context of civilization versus barbarity. It illustrates the ways in which primitivism and exoticism were bound up at times with colonial nostalgia, so that celebrations of empire at the same time anticipated its loss. And it reveals the gendered nature of French ambivalence about colonialism in the interwar years; the native woman in particular seemed to symbolize both the joy and vitality of the colonies, and the inability of France to accept them as equals. It shows how the tendency of some French feminists to support colonialism as a way of advocating for colonized women could have the paradoxical effect of undercutting models of female liberation in the métropole. Finally, such an understanding reaffirms the idea that the study of blackness in Europe is central, not peripheral, to the European experience as a whole.
To discuss the limits placed upon Josephine Baker’s film characters is not to reduce her simply to an automaton of historical context. Quite the contrary, it should deepen our appreciation of Baker’s skill as a performer that in spite of these limitations she succeeded in infusing her characters with humanity and dignity. It is very much to her credit that in spite of the nearly impossible situation in which discourses of race and gender in interwar France placed her, she was able to triumph as a star of the Paris music hall. The final scene of Zou Zou leads one to ask the question, Who was in the cage: Baker, or those whose view of her was so circumscribed?
