Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (review)

Anne Anlin Cheng's extraordinary book is both a tour-de-force and a real workout. Wrapped around the body of—and the body of performances by—Josephine Baker, Cheng asks readers to think about the ways that Baker's surfaces became an object of intense focus in modernist thought. So much of the work on Baker, Cheng notes, has emphasized her exploitation/ embodiment of the primitive. As a consequence, the most famous woman in the early twentieth century has been reduced to a banana-clad, topless, brown-skinned illustration for textbooks, documentaries, and slide shows. She is a product, it seems, of the ethnographic eye. "When we move Baker outside of [this] well-rehearsed framework," Cheng writes contrarily, "and juxtapose her celebrated naked skin...next to other surfaces and other techniques of display in the first quarter of the twentieth century, what we find is a radically different account of what constitutes the Baker phenomenon"(6-7). Such a repositioning, she concludes, is the story of "the modern skin and its distractions." With a wide-ranging, ambitious, sophisticated style, Cheng tracks this "skin" and its "distractions" across the visual landscape of modernity.

The concept of the modern skin sits at the heart of the book, but it is elusive, too. For Cheng, the modernist interest in clean, unadorned lines, materials, and surfaces is also the root of the interest in Baker's naked-but-still-costumed presentation. Further, through the alchemy of this interpretation, Baker's brown skin becomes the most famous expression of modernism, the rough equivalent of a smooth façade on the side of a skyscraper. Paratextually, Cheng and Oxford University Press helpfully illustrate this reinterpretation by putting an undressed Baker on the cover of Second Skin, and then wrapping the book in a nearly transparent cover that superimposes the outline of a skyscraper over the performer's lithe form.

Second Skin covers a lot of ground very fast. In one example, the chapter titled "Housing Baker/Dressing Loos" begins with a chance encounter between the performer and architect Adolf Loos. The house that Loos designed, Cheng submits, emphasizes "containment and theatricality"(51); it obstructs interior sightlines and presents a "peep show"(52) of Baker to some viewers, while also masking her location, making it a challenge to find her. Introducing Baker's Depression-era film, Siren of the Tropics, Cheng dwells on the famous "hide and seek" scene, wherein Baker's character Papitou dons costume after costume, representation after representation, before stripping them all off—but for the skin—in a bathtub. Delving deeply into theories of space and geography, Cheng concludes "the specular dynamics of the Baker House begins to look less like an inscription about Baker than an inscription that aims to be like Baker" (66; italics in the original). Turning to the exterior of the house, she notes that Loos cunningly clad the building in alternating black and marble stripes, making it difficult to know which, in the end, was the dominant, "true" color and which was the adornment. She considers the psychodynamics of prison uniforms, also striped in black and white, and then wonders, in an amazing set of paragraphs, what it means when a woman wears a suit (or lives in a house) that looks rather like a convict's uniform. "The skin of the Baker House," she concludes, "reveals that there is no such thing, in the end, as a naked house, just as there can never be a truly naked body" (78). Alternatively, as she paraphrases in theory-rich prose, "[w]hen it comes to the racialized body, the literal is always metaphorically manufactured, even as that fabrication bears a literalness of its own" (78).

It would be wrong, then, to suggest that this relentlessly sweeping, densely written, and intellectually probing book is as simple as its cover. Writing of Le Corbusier and Loos—two architects fascinated by Baker's body—Cheng reminds us that "both Baker and the skyscraper represent American difference to...