Chapter One

Prologue Josephine Baker's cultural legacy is still alive beyond the hundredth anniversary of her birth in 1906. It exists in live performances, art, photography, fashion, film, literature, and social activism. Baker mesmerized audiences during her lifetime and continues to attract and mystify biographers. Much recent scholarship on Baker has placed her in a pantheon of black feminist heroines, which often has produced a larger-than-life, one-dimensional image. Regardless of the reasons for such depictions, there is a need to remove Baker from reductive stereotypes and to humanize her legacy. This book explores the complex construction of Baker's multiple images in art and life. It is concerned with how art transforms social life, and how life imitates art. Although it presents and evaluates carefully researched biographical facts, it is not a biography. Rather, it offers critical reflections on the symbolic Baker and the images that she and her collaborators constructed during the era of modernity and for the postmodern future.

On a bright spring day in 1997, I first visited the Chateau des Milandes, Josephine Baker's medieval castle in southwestern France. While climbing the chateau's labyrinthine staircases, I was struck by the ways in which the narrative of Baker's life had been transformed into a tourist attraction. Baker's story, which began with her move from the United States to Paris in 1925, extended through her meteoric rise to fame in the Parisian music halls of the late 1920s and ended with the sobering moment of her eviction from the chateau in 1969. Yet, Baker's presence still permeates the chateau and, like an underground spring, provides it with a source of survival and renewal. Spectacular wax dioramas I saw at the chateau made her seem more real than ever and reinforced her status as a cult icon. When Baker lost the chateau in 1969, parts of the original Jorama-a wax museum that she had organized to represent her career-were lost or destroyed, but they were recreated for the new display. The chateau's owner and the Association Josephine Baker of Castelnaud-la-Chapelle joined forces to revive and maintain Baker's dream, but the carefully crafted touristic narrative left many research questions unanswered.

Constructed Images and Nested Narratives

Driven by curiosity about my new subject, I returned to Paris to explore archives containing copious records of Baker's life. Spread across three major archives, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal, and the Bibliotheque Richelieu, the voluminous records form the rich fabric of Baker's life. I waited for hours as the librarians delivered to me fragments of a life on crumbling yellowed paper and microfilm. As I pored over stacks of faded press clippings, theater programs, novels, and obscure biographies, I realized that the narrative was far more complex than the story outlined by panoramas in wax at Les Milandes. As early as 1927, when Baker was only twenty-one years old, she collaborated with Marcel Sauvage on her first biography, Les Memoires de Josephine Baker. It was as though destiny had a plan for her that would be illustrated by an archetypal tale.

Born Freda Josephine McDonald to an impoverished family in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 3, 1906, Josephine Baker escaped to France in the fall of 1925 as a dancer with the black American vaudeville troupe called La Revue negre. Its first show opened on October 2, 1925, for a three-month run at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. Baker was an instant success with her danse sauvage, which she performed first in feathers and later in a banana belt. Within two years, she rose to fame in Paris and became the toast of the worlds of art and musical theater. She resided in France for the rest of her life, and, in her later years, she became a humanitarian with a unique vision of Paris and the world.

The heyday of Baker's early performance career lasted from 1925 to 1935. Under the guidance of her companion and manager Giuseppe (Pepito) Abatino, Baker achieved status as a music-hall, recording, and film star and a model for France's "new woman," a position that was consolidated during the 1930s. Afterwards, while continuing to perform, she became a militant, a political activist, and a philanthropist. Disparate forces from the worlds of avant-garde art, museum culture, politics, and commerce would coalesce to make her a household name in France and throughout the world. With Pepito, she was able to purchase a mansion, Beau-Chene, and to live her Cinderella dream. The fairy-tale narrative mapped a pathway to assimilation and social success. This master trope was crosscut by sensationalistic images of the primal Baker as a savage dancer and as the Black Venus. In most biographies of Baker, and in her own accounts, these images are treated as external constructions, which she nonetheless readily accepted and learned to manipulate. How much control did the young Baker have over the image- making process and what was her role, her agency, in making the dream come true? While music-hall impresarios, managers, fashion cartels, artists, photographers, and biographers all contributed to the construction of the primal Baker, and later the mature star ("La Bakaire"), Baker cleverly took advantage of and responded to these forces in creating her public persona and the narrative of her life.

Colonial discourse and anthropometric theories of race lay behind the primal image of Fatou, the character made famous in Baker's danse sauvage. These theories created a climate in which the sexualized figure of an exotic black woman released atavistic fantasies repressed by modernism's mechanical rationality. The character of Fatou was modeled on Fatou-gaye, the bewitching African mistress of the French explorer Jean Peyral, known as le spahi, in Pierre Loti's popular 1881 novel Le Roman d'un spahi, which was made into a film in 1936. Loti's novel had been serialized, and the image of Fatou was still well known to popular audiences in the 1920s. Black Venus, which was a subtle permutation of the primal Fatou, embodied neoclassical aesthetics; French literary narratives drawn from Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Zola; and the fascination for African art in cubist and surrealist circles.

Although the primal dancer and the Black Venus are closely related images relying on exoticism, they are distinct in Baker's case and have different implications as nested narratives and strategies of representation for her in literature, criticism, photography, and film. The core meanings of these images persist over time, but their surface manifestations were subject to constant and frequent manipulation by Baker and her collaborators. The primal dancer was based on raw eroticism and sexuality, while the Black Venus was a sophisticated and seductive exotic goddess. The first image is "hot," and the second is "cool." While the surrealist Jean Cocteau is credited with dreaming up the banana skirt Paul Colin created for Baker's 1926 performance at the Folies-Bergere, George Hoyningen-Huene, a Vogue editor, popularized the statuesque Black Venus image in a 1929 photograph. Both of these images subtly undermine the Cinderella story by casting the fairyland princess back into the empire of nature, creating what the literary theorist Gerard Genette has called an entangled narrative structure with multiple dimensions. At key turning points, Baker responded to and modified her own images by imbuing them with a sense of pathos, joy, irony, and ecstasy. Baker's early audience in France was in the music hall, but she expanded and exploded these stereotypical images through recordings, film, photography, and fashion. Baker inspired audiences not so much in single performances as through her magical ability to communicate her ideas and transform herself with the creation of each image.

Another narrative recurring throughout Baker's life is that of the Marian, or Madonna, motif. In her 1931 novella Mon sang dans tes veines (My Blood in Your Veins), recounted to and adapted by Felix de la Camara and Pepito Abatino, Josephine devises the character of Joan (also called Jo), a young mulatto girl whose mother is the maid in the home of a Boston millionaire, Ira Cushman Barclay, and his son, Fred. Joan selflessly saves Fred's life through a blood transfusion. The primal Baker and the new saintly image meld in Mon sang dans tes veines. Baker continued to develop this image as part of her humanitarian self-sacrifice in World War II and in the domestic experiment with her adopted Rainbow Tribe at Les Milandes. The Marian motif also became part of Baker's public persona through statues, photographs, and paintings. Transcending the Cinderella trope, she moved to a larger humanitarian and religious narrative of sacred devotion and sacrifice. This narrative also involves issues of race since the ultimate goal of her sacrifice was to pave the way for an egalitarian, interracial society. According to the Baker biographer Lynn Haney, one of Josephine's friends stated, "Josephine thought of herself as a member of the Holy family ..., but it was not always clear which role she thought she was playing. Sometimes she pictured herself as the black Madonna, other times as the child of God, and the Virgin Mary."

All of these narratives culminate at Les Milandes, both in life and in touristic simulation. At Les Milandes, Baker reconstructed the experiences of her Parisian youth in lavish dioramas and created a symbolic representation of her rise to fame in a world apart from the rest of France. While much recent scholarship on Baker's primal images considers a period that ends in 1935, the roots for the later Marian motif of Sainte Josephine were already established by 1931 and can be seen as a proleptic anticipation of what was to come decades later. This complex interplay and layering of images and narratives provides a palette from which the picture of Baker's life may be painted. French and international audiences have developed contrasting responses to these narratives over the years, contributing to a further cross-cultural and cross-generational layering of Baker's images. I argue that the search for the true Baker (la veritable Josephine), while compelling, is less fecund than an exploration of the constructed images and nested narratives that constitute her persona and the social strategies that she used to bring these images to life. The various permutations of primal, glamour, political, and everyday images propel the master performances and narratives of Baker's life.

Semiography as a Method

Biographies assemble the fragments of a life-historical documents, relics, and archival materials-into a unified narrative. Every biographer, including the autobiographer, has a point of view, a goal, and even an ax to grind. Biographies consist of signifying profiles that situate subjects in terms of their lived experiences. In recounting their narratives, some biographers try to tell seamless stories, which, while they may include ruptures and the counterpoints of a subject's successes and failures, end with a clear moral message about the impact of a life. There is another genre of biography that may be labeled more broadly as analytic. Jean-Paul Sartre used an analytic study in his biography of Jean Genet and in his own self-analysis in Les Mots. In both cases, he attempted to show how social forces of marginalization influenced individual psychology. In his studies of Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi, the psychologist Erik Erikson also employed analytic biography to illustrate phases of the identity cycle during a life's course. These analytic biographies use the subject's life as a template for theories of the life cycle and accounts of socialization in a historical and political context. Frantz Fanon also drew on autobiographical elements of description to illustrate the clinical aspects of racial consciousness and how it affects the individual.

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Excerpted from "Josephine Baker in Art and Life" by Bennetta Jules-Rosette. Copyright (C) 2007 by Bennetta Jules-Rosette. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.