To Stockholm, with Love: The Critical Reception of Josephine Baker, 1927-35

Abstract

T he Swedish people demonstrate a longstanding fascination with the exotic even if as a nation their imperialistic ambition has been relatively limited when compared with with many other European countries. As a 12-year-old, the minor regent Karl XII kept a ‘blackamoor’ page in 1694. This seems to have set off a veritable craze for keeping black boys as pages or jesters among the Royal family and members of the court, a trend that lasted well over two centuries. One of the most well-documented instances of a black presence on Swedish soil was F.A.L.G.A. Couchi (1750?–1822), who was taken as a boy from the Caribbean island of Saint Croix and given as a present to Queen Lovisa Ulrika in 1760. He became the object of a Rousseau-like experiment in free upbringing by the doting Queen and her entourage, and quickly received the nickname ‘Badin’ for his unruly behaviour. His life and adventures in and around the Swedish Royal Family were chronicled by M.J. Crusenstolpe in the six-volume, The Blackamoor, or The House of Holstein-Gottorp in Sweden (1840–44), where Badin appears at the margins of the narrative as a demonic and scheming court jester. Edvard Matz claims that many of the letters, memoirs and diaries of the eighteenth century testify to an outspoken interest in ‘blackamoores’ and ‘Negroes’, especially in Stockholm. They were brought to the capital by transatlantic trading companies such as the East India Company, and became welldocumented local sights. According to various accounts and portrait paintings of these young blacks, they were frequently dressed in oriental, colourful costumes, and sported by their masters as exclusive possessions. Frequently, they were both the objects of, and providers of entertainment; one of Badin’s responsibilities, for example, was to handle laterna magica shows for the Queen’s guests. In an oft quoted passage in Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon describes his presence on French soil as hypervisualised. He imagined himself being doubled, even tripled by the way he was constantly made to appear as an exception among the white Parisian majority. To draw an anachronistic parallel, a similar hypervisibility may have framed these exceptional blacks’ daily experience, yet their spectacularised existence in Stockholm also entailed various degrees of independence and integration into the social fabric of the city. They were, for example, baptized and in some cases married into Swedish families. Badin married twice, and enjoyed the protection of the Royal Family until his death in 1822. During the following hundred years, more diasporic blacks came to Stockholm but, since they were few in number, their presence remained exceptional and repeatedly visualised, first in portraits and later in photographs and films. This essay takes the instance of Fanonian ‘overpresence’ as the point of departure for a discussion of white fascination with blackness as epitomised by the revue star Josephine Baker who was celebrated by Stockholm audiences in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In an essay on the cultural construction and deconstruction of Baker’s star image, Charlene Regester claims that the European audiences Film History, Volume 17, pp. 125–138, 2005. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America