Josephine Baker Critical Reader

Mae G. Henderson is a professor emerita of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of innumerable articles, essays and books on African American and feminist literary criticism and theory, pedagogy, theatre, popular culture, travel, Afro–diaspora, and black cultural studies. Charlene B. Regester is an associate professor in the Department of African & African American Studies and affiliate faculty with the global cinema minor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

“collection contains 18 historical and critical essays on entertainer and activist Josephine Baker’s life, career, and impact in the context of modernism, feminism, race, gender, and sexuality”—ProtoView.

• Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: “Josephine, woman of a hundred faces”Mae G. Henderson and Charlene B. RegesterPart I. Reception and Perception in the Transatlantic ImaginaryTo Stockholm, with Love: The Critical Reception of Josephine Baker, 1927–1935 (Ylva Habel)“Of la Baker, I Am a Disciple”: The Diva Politics of Reception(Jeanne Scheper)Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre: From Ethnography to Performance (Mae G. Henderson)The Construction of an Image and the Deconstruction of a Star—Josephine Baker Racialized, Sexualized, and Politicized in the ­African-American Press, the Mainstream Press, and FBI Files(Charlene B. Regester)Part II. Modernism, Primitivism, and Embodied PerformanceAn Intelligence of the Body: Disruptive Parody through Dance in the Early Performances of Josephine Baker (Michael Borshuk)Embodied Fictions, Melancholy Migrations: Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Celebrity (Terri Francis)Colonial, Postcolonial, and Diasporic Readings of Josephine Baker as Dancer and Performance Artist (Mae G. Henderson)Part III. Filmic Fictions and Narrative DesireUncanny Performances in Colonial Narratives: Josephine Baker in Princess Tam Tam (Elizabeth Coffman)Josephine Baker and Pierre Batcheff in La Sirène des tropiques(Phil Powrie and Éric Rebillard)Nationalizing and Segregating Performance: Josephine Baker and Stardom in Zouzou (Scott Balcerzak)Part IV. The Architectural ImaginaryHistoric Architecture: Adolf Loos in Paris—Radical Residences for Josephine Baker and Tristan Tzara (Thomas S. Hines)A House for Josephine Baker (Karen Burns)The Josephine Baker House: For Loos’s Pleasure (Farès ­el-Dahdah)Subversive Figurations of Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Josephine Baker: A Speculative Reading (Stephen Atkinson)Part V. Staging Civil Rights and Human Rights GloballyJosephine Baker, Racial Protest, and the Cold War (Mary L. Dudziak)Adoptive Affinities: Josephine Baker’s Humanist International (Jonathan P. Eburne)Josephine Baker and Utopian Visions of Black Paris (Bennetta ­Jules-Rosette)Josephine Baker’s “Rainbow Tribe”: Radical Motherhood in the South of France (Matthew Pratt Guterl)Works CitedAbout the ContributorsIndex