Introduction

Josephine Baker is probably best remembered for her flamboyant performances as singer, dancer, and actress. In popular representations as in scholarly discourse, her image has been dominated by the iconography of her early dance acts and particularly the (in)famous banana skirt which is “forever associated with her name” (Glover, 2007–2008, 2). In the 1920s and 1930s, the time of her meteoric rise to international stardom, Baker came to represent American culture for European audiences and, simultaneously, European modernism for American audiences. In both contexts, she was frequently understood as an embodiment of a “primitive” culture lost to modern Western societies. For Europeans she was a foreign novelty, “representative of all that was the opposite of European urban modernity” (Nenno, 1997, 150). She represented their “stranger within” so that European audiences could imaginatively explore their “internal Africa” without, ultimately, destabilizing racial boundaries or challenging their white superiority (Dayal, 2004, 41). Baker became a “floating signifier” for “just about any kind of racial, ethnic, or national otherness” (Ngai, 2006, 166) or, at least, a “slippery signifier in the racial and sexual spectacles of Jazz Age popular culture” (Borshuk, 2001, 55). As a cultural icon, she was highly mobile and apparently easily appropriated and commodified in different contexts: in Weimar Germany, for example, her beauty secrets were revealed in women's magazines, Baker dolls were sold in stores as early as 1926 (Nenno, 1997, 157), and her life inspired Josef Sternberg's 1932 film Blonde Venus, which stars Marlene Dietrich and retells Baker's story in “almost perfectly symmetrical ‘reversal’” (Ngai, 2006, 149). Baker was imitated, for example, by the African-American dancer Ruth Bayton, who posed in a banana costume and was consequently called the “Josephine Baker of Berlin,” or “German comedian Ilse Bois [who] did her grotesque dances and ironic comments on the jazz craze […] ‘Afro’-hairstyled and banana-girded at the Kabarett der Komiker in Berlin” (Naumann, 1998, 103). Baker herself contributed to her currency as an icon and to her successful commodification. Andrea Barnwell even claims that she “was always the principal agent of her reception, compelling her audience to examine the binary oppositions she created” (1997, 88).