Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe, by Matthew Pratt Guterl

Abstract

Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe, by Matthew Pratt Guterl. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014. i, 250 pp. $28.95 US (cloth). She wore a skirt made of bananas. With this theatrically spare, Mickey Spillane-esque, opening sentence, Matthew Pratt Guterl begins an intellectual, political, and emotional quest the object of which is to untangle the complex strands of Josephine Baker's distinctive and confounding personal life story. His determination to appraise the second half of Baker's life -the mysterious decades that lay between her explosive inter-war career as a world renown dancer and stage performer in the 1920s and '30s and her return to the stage and death in 1975--is sincere and deeply felt. Guterl insists we should not let the memory of Baker's seeming idiosyncrasies obscure her political significance and the potency of her cultural interventions. His book offers readers a judicious reckoning regarding Baker and her decision in the 1950s to gather together from all corners of the globe a large group of orphaned children to form a rainbow tribe as a challenge to the accepted mindset that racial and national differences should divide the human race into competing and naturally divergent groups. As is evinced in the generous autobiographical asides with which the book is peppered, the author's determination to climb through the mountains of rumor, calumny, and legend that surround Baker's memory in order to present an accurate rendering of the second half of her life story is unmatched. With detailed and unexaggerated documenting of Baker's sporadic involvement in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s and adamant resistance to Jim Crow segregation, Guterl's aim appears to be to convince his readers that Baker was more than a self-serving and thoughtless seeker of fame. Guterl's work insists we take seriously not only Baker's adoptions, but also her sensationalist profile as a semi-nude performer and satirist of racial stereotypes--all of which can be made sense of and are worthy of commemorating as enterprising interventions in a racist and sexist globalized media culture that otherwise repressed and denigrated black women. His most useful insights reveal the politicized idealism that lay behind Baker's decision to embark on what otherwise might be viewed as an irresponsible or at least pointless scheme to invent a family out of devotion to a set of ideological principles. Comparisons between Baker's large scale adoptions and those undertaken by well-meaning celebrities and charitably inclined parents of large adoptive families in the post-war era and since help to provide a context counter-posing the public narratives that write off this period of Baker's history as nutty, entirely unique, and wholly incomprehensible. …