The Josephine Baker Critical Reader: Selected Writings on the Entertainer and Activist

by Mae G. Henderson, Charlene B. Regester

Overview

Star of stage and screen, cultural ambassador, civil rights and political activist--Josephine Baker was defined by the various public roles that made her 50-year career an exemplar of postmodern identity. Her legacy continues to influence modern culture more than 40 years after her death. This new collection of essays interprets Baker's life in the context of modernism, feminism, race, gender and sexuality. The contributors focus on various aspects of her life and career, including her performances and public reception, civil rights efforts, the architecture of her unbuilt house, and her modern-day "afterlife."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476665818
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date:	06/21/2017
Pages:	380
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: “Josephine, woman of a hundred faces”
Mae G. Henderson and Charlene B. Regester
Part I. Reception and Perception in the Transatlantic Imaginary
To 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 Performance
An 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 Desire
Uncanny 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 Imaginary
Historic 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 Globally
Josephine 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 Cited
About the Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

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.

From the Publisher