Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism by Terri Simone Francis

Author:Terri Simone Francis [Francis, Terri Simone]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780253223388
Google: SH2IzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2021-01-15T03:29:22+00:00

BAKER’S EXOTICIST PRISMATIC

The surviving film material of Baker’s banana dance at Folies Bergère, the performance for which she is best known and which I examined in the introduction, provides a rare if mediated opportunity to examine Baker’s eclectic and anthological dance style outside of a feature film narrative. Yet the banana dance, the focal point of Baker’s fantasy sequence in La folie du jour, set on a Caribbean banana plantation, is itself part of a story drawn from Baartman as well as characters from colonialist literature. Baker’s performance in Zouzou is nested in prisms with preexisting colonialist types. Baker’s characters Fatou, Papitou, and Zouzou are repetitious, drawn from a shared core of types, informed by Baartman and taking form in a variety of expressions of colonialist culture.

Baker’s Zouzou evokes her music hall character of Fatou, who in turn evokes Fatou-gaye, an African woman character at the center of the romance plot in the French novel Roman d’un Spahi (1881), known in English under multiple titles including A Spahi’s Love-Story (1907) and The Sahara (1921). Written by French novelist Julien Viaud under the pseudonym Pierre Loti, Roman d’un Spahi went through dozens and dozens of editions, helping to cement the author’s reputation for living an adventurous life as well as penning romantic travel writing and exoticist fiction. In the novel, a European everyman, Jean Peyral, is engaged to a girl from his village, but before the wedding takes place, he is sent to Africa. There he meets Fatou-gaye, “a negro girl, half goddess, half monkey,” as she is described in the introduction to the 1907 English edition.34 Unsurprisingly, Fatou is sexualized; for the genre, her appeal is a sign of Peyral’s denigration under the African sun. However, Loti’s prose conveys Jean Peyral’s perhaps genuine attraction to Fatou-gaye and to the desert landscape. At the same time, he is also repelled and wants to return home to his fiancée. Such back-and-forth communicates Peyral’s sexual confusion and the larger cultural ambivalence reflected in it. A Spahi’s Love-Story crackles with descriptions such as, “Fatou-gaye knew what catlike caresses to lavish on her angry lover,—how to throw round his neck her black arms with their silver circlets, finely moulded as a statue’s, how to press her naked bosom against the red cloth of his jacket, to rouse presently the hot fevers of desire, that would make him forget and forgive her transgression.”35 Fatou-gaye here functions as a test for the preservation of Peyral’s European character. Loti writes of Peyral, “It is one of those strange passing moments, when memory is dead within him, when this land of Africa seems to wear a smile and the Spahi surrenders himself.”36 Landscape and character meld. A similar formulation becomes essential to the templates of exotic Othering in the films that Baker becomes a part of. In playing Fatou, Baker portrayed a new version of Fatou-gaye, a citation of the already-made or the stereotype of nonwhite women as available, enticing, and the stuff of an ambivalent goddess-monkey sexual fantasy.

Historian Richard M.

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