Josephine Baker and La Revue Negre: from ethnography to performance

Abstract

This essay examines the emergence of Josephine Baker in 1920s Paris in the context of an expansive French colonialism, combined with the onset of modernity. Baker's performances in the 1920s and 1930s marked a continuity as well as a break with the tradition of “ethnographic display.” Her stage performances enacted events in which both the audience and the performer participated, the former compelled by a powerful voyeurism coupled by the latter's equally powerful exhibitionism–a dialectical performance reenacting the obsessive need of the colonizer to “look” and the obsessive desire of the colonized to be “looked at.” The argument here is that Baker's performances both secured and unsettled the colonial relations reenacted in her performances. And while her talent and skill as a performer marked the Baker body as a site on which were interrogated notions of essentialized racial difference, the me´tissage of modernism and primitivism produced by the location–modernity–of her erotic/parodic performance of “primitivism” combined to produce a powerful iconography of modernist primitivism.