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  • Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface by Anne Anlin Cheng
  • Nancy P. Nenno
Anne Anlin Cheng. Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 234 pp. $24.95.

As aesthetic object, Anne Anlin Cheng’s Second Skin is a stunning book. The cover art—a wax-paper sheath imprinted with a skyscraper that both conceals and reveals the naked body of Josephine Baker in one of the most famous portraits of the performer by George Hoyningen-Huene—alerts the reader to the relational politics of the book. Its subtitle, Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, sets up the tensions between European modernism, primitivism and the racialized, sexualized body. The theatrical identities created by Baker at the beginning of the twentieth century serve as inspiration and provocation for earlier modernist considerations of the surfaces and what they cover as well as uncover, what Cheng characterizes as the dynamic between interior and exterior, essence and appearance. Cheng’s use of Freudian psychoanalysis in the reading of architectural theory and praxis show these negotiations simultaneously in operation on aesthetic, philosophical and political planes.

Fundamental to Cheng’s strategy is the dismantling of accepted wisdoms about the politics of Josephine Baker’s performances and personae, and she deftly deposes the binarism that characterizes much of this reception. Displacing the simplistic subject/object dichotomy, she asks “what would it mean to see Baker not as an example of but a fracture in the representational history of the black female body?” (3). Unlike previous studies of Baker, Cheng’s interest does not lie in seeking subversion and agency in Baker’s performances. Instead, her exploration is investigative as it examines crises of vision, of civilization and of racial identification as originary moments of modernist theory and practice. In psychoanalytic fashion, Cheng proceeds to pose questions that probe the relationship of (early) modernism to imperialism and to the raced objects of these practices. Casting doubt on the seemingly self-evident difference signaled by skin color, Cheng argues that the baring of skin for which Baker was famous was less an unveiling than an act of concealment, one that invited and created a scene of identification for her European audience. From nude bodies to the denuded structures of modernism, Cheng aligns the phenomena of both erotic and “scientific” displays of non-Western bodies in order to illuminate the debt modernist architecture owes to the racialized and sexualized body. Instead of reading the phallic displays for which Baker was famous (think banana skirt) as either compensatory or threatening, she sees them as staging “an imaginary scenario where one gets to have and be that otherness” (97)—in other words, as a “second skin” for the modernist to inhabit.

It is no surprise that in her excavation of the role that the nonwhite, nonmale body plays in modernist narrative, Cheng begins at the beginning of that story: the ur-scene of primitivist modernism, namely Picasso’s 1907 encounter with African art in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, which allegedly inspired “Les Démoiselles d’Avignon.” In the artist’s reaction to the tribal objects on display, Cheng reads a double movement: both a rejection of and a desire for the primitive—that is, the feminine and the violent—a scenario that opens up “sites of contamination” (19) and a crisis of modern vision. Emptied of their meaning by Western science, the tribal objects in the ethnographic museum serve as the signal event in the Modernist melancholy for the naked and the exposed—a nostalgia that finds expression in painting and architectural designs that emphasize the surface as covering and prosthetic body which is also always in tension with what is being housed. Herein lies the connection she reads between Baker’s image and modernist visual praxis: that the object viewed is completed as the viewer projects himself into and onto that surface. [End Page 176]

From her consideration of Baker’s deflective play with surface, Cheng then turns to examine the role that surface plays in the theories and practices of two major figures of modernist architecture: Austro-Hungarian Adolf Loos and the Swiss-born French architect Charles...

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