Josephine Baker's Colonial Pastiche

Abstract

This essay explores the first full-length film featuring Josephine Baker: La Sirene des tropiques, produced in 1927. It emphasizes the film’s display of myriad facets of in terwar French colonial culture and the place of that display in Baker’s life and evolving celebrity. Baker’s genius, it argues, lies in her playful juxtaposition of the full range of roles defined by the French empire. W hen she was almost twenty years old, Josephine Baker personified sex. Well-dressed older men, thoroughly middle class and civilized in their everyday lives, would gasp, tightly gripping the armrests of their chairs, their hearts pounding with excitement, when the bright stage lights first settled on her dark, naked body. White women, if they were present, were horrified and greeted her appearance with clenched teeth and a scan dalized sneer. The dusky temptress—some called her the “black tiger”— had come to Paris at an early age, leaving behind her birthplace in the American heartland and claiming the Jazz Age charms of Harlem cabarets, the Broadway stage, and, finally, the Folies Bergere and La revue negre. She had come of age at an unusually perverse moment in American and European history, when whites hungered for undiluted “African” or “Negro” art as a panacea for the “overcivilization” that had so recently driven the world to war. With preternatural cunning, Baker exploited this eagerness for something real, something not so refined and restrained, and transformed herself into an icon of race and sex. With her electrifying “caramel” skin tone and her association with the various primitivisms of the sensational danse savage, she became the world’s first colored super star. At the peak of her celebrity, she would stroll down the Champs-Elysees with a cheetah on a leash, two exotic creatures, objects of obsession and fear, spectacularly out of place amid the neoclassical buildings that lined the grand boulevard. 1