Josephine Baker’s “Rainbow Tribe”: Radical Motherhood in the South of France

The politics of Josephine Baker’s adopted family cut cross the conventional divides between radical and conservative, transnational and national, and European and American. In studying her family, then, we can come to better understand the practices of diaspora and transnationalism in the twentieth century. We can more brightly illuminate the process of circulation, mediation, and translation that sat at the heart of Baker’s assemblage. And we can provide a more sharply focused analysis of Baker’s distinctive, celebrity-inflected feminism.