Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (review)

Although Josephine Baker, the African American performer who shot to stardom in 1920s Paris, is primarily associated with the Jazz Age, her influence is alive and well one hundred years after her birth. In September 2006 pop star Beyoncé Knowles performed in Baker’s signature banana skirt against a backdrop of Baker’s likeness at the Fashion Rocks concert at Radio City Music Hall in New York.¹ Several years earlier, in an interview with USA Today, the actress Angelina Jolie invoked another side of Baker, citing her as a model for the multiracial, multinational family she was beginning to create through adoption.² These two aspects of Baker are what Bennetta Jules-Rosette refers to in her new book Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image as the primal (or exotic) image and the Marian (or saintly maternal) image. While the examples of Knowles and Jolie do not appear in the book, they lend support to Jules-Rosette’s compelling argument that the images that Baker created and disseminated during her lifetime are multifaceted and of continuing relevance at the start of the twenty-first century.

Baker’s legacy is also evident in her ongoing appeal to scholars and biographers. Jules- Rosette mines and builds on the numerous biographies of Baker already in existence,³ but her book is emphatically not a biography. Instead, Jules-Rosette, a sociologist who is the author of Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape, among other books, offers a “semiography” of Baker. As she explains, “semiography is a research method that uses the tools of sociosemiotics to excavate the narratives, images, and representations that constitute the public and private lives of biographical subjects” (5). This means that her book is less concerned with discovering the “real” Josephine Baker than with exploring the “symbolic Baker and the images that she and her collaborators constructed during the era of modernity and for the postmodern future” (1). In an appendix, Jules-Rosette does provide a helpful chronology of major events and productions pertinent to Baker’s life and legacy, from her birth in St. Louis in 1906, through her death in Paris in 1975, to the publications and celebrations that marked her centennial in 2006. The primary concern of Josephine Baker in Art and Life, however, is to offer readers an “archaeology” of the core images and “nested,” or entangled, narratives that recurred over the course of Baker’s life and through her memorialization.

Jules-Rosette identifies and explores three central images that shaped Baker and were shaped by her: the primal trope and Marian motif, mentioned above, as well as the glamour icon. To a certain extent, these images corresponded to distinct phases of Baker’s career. When she burst onto the Parisian theatrical stage in 1925 as part of La Revue nègre, Baker’s scantily clad performance in the danse sauvage played into French colonialist fantasies about the exotic “other” and resulted in Baker’s association with primitive stereotypes for the rest of her life. By the early 1930s Baker had created a persona for herself at the opposite extreme; donning high fashion gowns, dancing less and singing more, Baker became a symbol of the chic, modern woman. The saintly, self-sacrificing image emerged during World War II when Baker worked as a counterintelligence spy for the French Resistance; this image took greater hold in the 1950s when she began forming her Rainbow Tribe of adopted interracial children. Yet, rather than replace one another sequentially as Baker’s career progressed, the primal, glamour, and Marian tropes crosscut and fed off each other, providing a repertoire for Baker to draw from throughout her career. As Jules-Rosette argues, Baker’s ability to “slip from one image to another in the flash of a costume change” was key to her success (183).

The structure of Josephine Baker in Art and Life allows Jules...