Nella Larsen's Quicksand: Untangling the Webs of Exoticism

Abstract

In 1925, when Josephine Baker went to Paris to perform Revenue Negre, she drew attention for her comic faces and ways which she could move her body. Baker's biographer Phyllis Rose writes, Every part of her seemed to go a different direction, flung from some central volcano of spirit. She made faces and flailed about. She shook her year end, then drew it and strutted place. The radiance of her personality and her joy life seemed to express themselves her (4). The female body is frequently figured as text--the uncontrolled body that flails around is frequently sexualized. That body described by these lines is a black body adds yet another dimension to this already problematic figuring of body. Josephine Baker's body has become, for her audiences, personification of exotic primitive.(1) When managers of Theatre de Champs-Elysees, where Revue Negre was to be performed, first saw performance that dancers and musicians from Harlem had brought to Paris, they were reportedly in despair. To remedy situation they brought an outside producer to spice up show. Jacques Charles agreed that show needed something. It was noisy and inelegant, and worst of all it wasn't black enough (Rose 5). The blackening of Revue Negre was a move to domesticate and homogenize black American performers show--to create authentic blackness as already figured stereotypes of It can be read as a move to sensationalize and dramatize blackness--the move to personify and embody stereotypical performances of blackness for pleasure of an audience. Black performers needed to be blacker. By this definition, blackness was constructed as exotic, coming from jungle. No performer has signified this move more than Josephine Baker, whose famous banana dance had its origins Paris. Originally called Danse Sauvage, Baker's trademark topless dance came from this move to authenticity. Rose reports, For this piece of Josephine Baker and her male partner were dressed Charles's notion of African costume--bare skin and feathers (6). Baker, female exotic, was to dance topless, and the Revue Negre excited its audiences by reminding them of a world that was both mysterious and sexually available, alien, yet subject. Rose quotes a review of show which states, |As for reality, we like it exotic' (23). Baker's Danse Sauvage situates theoretical points of intervention I want to make into discussion of black female sexuality and ways it is always already figured as exotic. The move toward construction of jungle discussed above is illuminating its attention to specific already circulating notions of what constituted and still constitutes blackness. This complex relationship between female bodies and notions of black authenticity is a tangled web. As a critique of authenticity, James Clifford, examining New York's 1984 Museum of Modern Art show entitled |Primitivism' 20th Century Art: Affinity of Tribal and Modern, asserts that if there had been different stories told exhibition, then they might have been stories of race instead of art. What was constructed for show, however, was a story of art which neatly situated high and low art by juxtaposing with modern. Under this umbrella, Clifford writes, modernism is thus presented as a search for |informing principles' that transcend culture, politics, and history.... tribal is modern and modern more richly, more diversely human (191). By presenting show this manner, drive for humanness, other questions are shut out. What show's configuration does not permit are questions of history, race, and politics. Instead exhibit is presented as a non-problematic desire on part of West to collect world--the notion that tribal arts did not any way exist as arts before they were discovered by modernist painters, specifically Picasso (Clifford 1%). …