Blog #4

Josephine Baker came from a poor family in East St. Louis, where she eventually became a street kid and learned how to hustle. She also put a hat down in front of her and sang or danced around for money, and this is how she acquired her skills early on (Haddow). The “[Black children’s] eye crossing and angular bodily poses were iconic, and Baker adopted them as her own” (Brown). Josephine Baker used her street smarts and newly acquired skills to to get out of her city. It was a dangerous place in the early 1990s, and the only jobs available to her in St. Louis were domestic or agricultural jobs. So according to “Chasing a Rainbow”, she followed a group of black dancers called the Dixie Steppers into Harlem where she started her career and became a well known extraordinary black artist.

In the United States, she performed mostly as the “black stereotype”, where she acted dumb, uneducated and clumsy. Because she had to portray a negative image of the African American culture, I do not think that W.E.B. Du Bois would have thought too kindly of her because of the fact that he wanted the black population to be equal to the white population and no longer be discriminated against. Josephine Baker reinforced the racist perspectives of the white population and had to emphasize no sex appeal because the American idea of beauty was the opposite of what black was equated to.

She entered modernism as an example of “primitive Africa” in the United States by exploiting this black stereotype, and when she moved to Paris, her representation of her colonial body was another example of the primitive culture (Haddow). This idea was that African Americans were viewed as uncivilized people that the French colonized, and Josephine eventually used her colonized body and turned it into a sexual object.

When she expanded her career into Paris, things were different -- she became a sexual object where she performed in plenty of shows and her sex appeal got her the status of the number one female act. Her performances catered to the male audience, as she was dressed in scandalous costumes and danced in sexually arousing ways. In a way, in France she accepted her Black beauty and used it to get power and status, as she then eventually became a French ambassador. As Jayna Brown mentions in Babylon Girls, Baker’s representational roles were “multiple and contradictory; she represented the USA abroad during the war she performed at segregated US officer clubs in North Africa. While she represented the colonies in Paris, she also represented Paris in the desert, even as France’s colonial subjects remained unfree”. The “Banana Dance” is an example of how she exploits herself as an ethnic primitive woman into the modernized world that ruthlessly colonizes her own race.

 I think that Du Bois would not think that Josephine was the ideal representative for the black race since she was an entertainer instead of an educated professional. Since Alain Locke advocated for the reconstruction on the black perspective, I think that she would have seen Josephine Baker as an example of propaganda because of the black stereotypes she consistently performed as. Locke wanted black people to create their own image of their race and instead Baker just reinforced the pickaninny idea of black people.