Review by Choice Review
Jules-Rosette (sociology and African and African American studies, Univ. of California, San Diego) describes this intriguing book as a "semiography"--i.e., not primarily a life story but rather an analytic "biography" of the life of the images that influenced, and were associated with, her subject. In Baker's case these images lingered beyond her life. The author offers a sensitive analysis of the many permutations of the risque banana skirt that made Baker famous in 1920s Paris and then carries the same level of analysis through the many permutations of Baker's image--sophisticate, resistance fighter, adoptive mother--through to her death in 1975. This book will interest Baker enthusiasts, of course, though it does not add greatly to the basic biography conveyed in Phyllis Rose's outstanding Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (CH, Mar'90, 27-3811). It will also be relevant for those pursuing study of black Paris, the promises and pitfalls of multiculturalism (Jules-Rosette provides acute analysis of the "rainbow tribe," the multiracial adoptive family Baker created), and the sociology of fame and celebrity (particularly African American in a global context). Summing Up: Recommended. Ambitious upper-division undergraduates through faculty. A. L. Knight The College of William & Mary
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
JOSEPHINE BAKER wasn't the first young woman to shake a scantily clad brown bottom for the music-hall audiences of Paris during the Roaring Twenties. Chorus girls of every make and model had been strutting up and down the stages of Montmartre for more than a decade by the time Baker hit the scene in 1925, and African-American writers and musicians had been arriving by the boatload since the war. Still, no other American entertainer - male or female, black or white - was ever to achieve as phenomenal a stardom as Baker. Her 50-year-long triumph was a sociocultural moment yet to be repeated. The story of how an untrained, unexceptionally talented 19-year-old black girl from Missouri managed to enthrall the capital city of Europe from the 1920s until her death in 1975 at 68 - transforming herself into a world-renowned artist in the process - is worth telling and retelling. After all, Baker traveled in the rarefied circles of 20th-century celebrity: Picasso, Le Corbusier, Colette, Langston Hughes, E.E. Cummings, Jean Cocteau and Ernest Hemingway were all admirers. Adolf Loos designed a house to showcase her body from every angle, and Alexander Calder created wire sculptures of her form. Among her benefactors were Princess Grace, the Pasha of Marrakesh and Juan and Eva Péron. Still, Baker has inspired several biographies and documentaries, and the question arises about the need for yet another. But Bennetta Jules-Rosette, the author of "Black Paris" and other books, makes a solid case for just one more with her well-researched and original "Josephine Baker in Art and Life." Like many writers before her, Jules-Rosette is clearly captivated by her subject, but she manages to temper her star-struck curiosity with impressive intellectual rigor. Her success just might be because what she's written is not, as she insists, an actual biography. Picking up, in some respects, where Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Karen Dalton left off in "Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre: Paul Colin's Lithographs of 'Le Tumulte Noir' in Paris 1927," Jules-Rosette concentrates on the stories pictures tell. She offers a scholarly reading of Baker that focuses less on constructing - chronologically - who she "really was" than on deconstructing - thematically - the artful production of her legendary persona. In so doing, the author cleverly exposes Baker's manipulation of race, class and sex (that's gender and sexuality). This is not to suggest that Jules-Rosette neglects the particulars of Baker's life. There is enough biographical detail here to satisfy even the most demanding of aficionados. Jules-Rosette begins with the infamous danse sauvage, Baker's "wildly erotic" show-stopping debut in "La Revue Nègre." Adorned with only a few beads and feathers placed around her hips and ankles, dancing suggestively on and around the large, black, equally underdressed Joe Alex, she gave the audience, hopped up on Picasso's primitivism and its attendant "escapist colonialist and modernist fantasies," something that appeared to have emerged straight from the deepest African jungle. Little did her public realize that much of her hip-thrusting, jello-limbed act was a product of her St. Louis childhood and tours on the vaudeville circuit. In fact, it was only after one too many disappointments in America - too light for black St. Louis, too black for the "high yellow" chorus line - that Baker decided she had nothing to lose by trying her luck in Paris. Poster for Josephine Baker's show at the Olympia, Paris 1959. After the success of "La Revue Nègre," Baker spent the next two years performing her exotic/erotic numbers in music halls throughout Paris, and by 1927 was one of the highest-paid entertainers in Europe. She'd hooked up with Pepito Abatino, a self-invented Italian aristocrat who turned out to be a brilliant manager. Aware that Parisians would eventually tire of the native sexpot routine, Baker and Abatino set out to forge her image along different lines. And so at the peak of her stage success, the couple went off on a world tour during which Baker honed her craft. She took singing and etiquette lessons. She learned French. She even trained with George Balanchine. Baker had left town an exotic dancer; she returned an international star. Throughout the 1930s, Baker's image was diffracted in every possible direction. Abatino thrust her into the marketplace with a range of products and promotional gimmicks, of which the biggest hits were Bakerfix hair gel and Bakerskin darkening lotion - both meant for Parisian women hoping to achieve that famous Baker look (no matter that much of her own beauty routine was devoted to skin-lightening milk baths and lemon rubs). Brown incarnation of the flapper aesthetic, Baker became the model-muse of the celebrated Parisian stylist Paul Poiret, who was greatly responsible for the death of the corset. She'd begun taking flying lessons and was photographed zipping around Paris in her roadster. She had refined her performance of the modern. At the same time, she continued to portray the insouciant native girl on stage, and even transferred this performance to the movies, becoming a star. But while she played the exotic Other in theaters, she would show up at movie premieres in creations by Dior and Balenciaga, often with her pet leopard, Chiquita, in tow. Balancing the playful native girl and the Parisian sophisticate was crucial to the "image invention and racialized gender transcoding" that kept Baker in the spotlight. Jules-Rosette devotes a good portion of her book to the established artist who made her mark in other arenas. During World War II, Baker worked with the Red Cross and the French Resistance and performed for the troops in the Middle East and Africa. She was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1961. She also embarked on a civil rights crusade in the United States. She spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, wearing her French uniform. She forced theater owners to desegregate venues where she performed. Concomitant with all this was her adoption of the "Rainbow Tribe," 12 children of diverse ethnic and national backgrounds whom she intended to raise together to prove people's capacity to coexist in harmony. She installed her multicultural brood at Les Milandes, a castle in the French countryside, and created an entire village and tourist destination around this exemplary embodiment of the human family. Jules-Rosette offers an intriguing academic analysis of this social experiment, describing the site as a place where "innocent viewers" are "trapped inside a labyrinth and are transformed into pilgrims caught up in the intricacies of Baker's myth." As she cobbles together Baker's life story, Jules-Rosette takes care to portray her subject as an active participant in the shaping of her own career, as much more than a quivering posterior wrapped in a banana skirt. Of course, the effort to place Baker behind the scenes, pulling at least some of the strings, is particularly difficult because she never seemed to want to get off the stage, preferring to live every aspect of her life as an elaborate, pathos-filled public performance. Jules-Rosette understands and embraces this about her. "Baker's life," she writes, "is a microcosm ... for the study of assimilation, acculturation and identity invention. As a celebrity, Baker intensified and focused these processes by performing her identity transformations in public spaces." Comparing her with chameleons like Madonna, Michael Jackson and Grace Jones, Jules-Rosette paints Baker as the ultimate "postmodern homegirl cosmopolitan." Determining where the diva ended and the woman began is a daunting task, and Jules-Rosette answers the challenge with skill. Abandoning the quest for transcendent truths, she focuses instead on decoding the wide array of Baker's performances - both on and off stage. With Josephine Baker, determining where the diva ended and the woman began is a daunting task. Kaiama L. Glover teaches French literature at Barnard College.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Josephine Baker, a sexy and glamorous expat African American, took Jazz Age Paris by storm and left behind an array of sparkling images. Here she is, svelte and jubilant, dancing topless in a little banana-skirt; resplendent in a slinky beaded gown; smiling mischievously in tuxedo and top hat. Sociology professor Jules-Rosette saw Baker in person during the March on Washington in 1963, imposing in her French air force uniform. A century after her birth in St. Louis, Baker--revolutionary performer, cabaret owner, movie star, fashion plate, hero of the French Resistance, humanitarian, and mother of 12 adopted children of diverse backgrounds--is an indelible icon. And it is that status that Jules-Rosette so thoroughly analyzes as she deconstructs Baker's self-mythologizing ability to transform her theatrical performances into social and political statements, and dream of universal brotherhood. Jules-Rosette's rigorously academic approach, replete with priceless illustrations, is enlightening in spite of its pedantry. If readers turn first to Josephine: The Hungry Heart (1993) or The Josephine Baker Story (2000), they will more fully appreciate Jules-Rosette's insightful exegesis. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Savage dancer, Black Venus, exotic Jazz Age star, liberated new woman, gender-bending cross-dresser, mother, socialist, war hero and writer-Josephine Baker (1906-1975) was all of those in life and in the images she projected. In this vibrant if academic portrait of Baker, Jules-Rosette alerts the reader that this is "not a biography" but an exploration of "the complex construction of Baker's multiple images in art and life." The first part opens with the tourist attractions that Baker sparked, not with her birth, then moves through her stage performance history, and concludes with an analysis of her films and films about her. In Part II, Baker emerges as a fully independent figure, influencing the art and fashion worlds, and in Part III, Jules-Rosette discusses the obstacles Baker confronted as she struggled to promote her ahead-of-its-time multicultural worldview. Jules-Rosette's scholarly deconstruction, generously documented (including more than 50 illustrations) and supplemented with a chronology, particularly helpful in a thematically structured work, will reward Baker fans. As well, the book's careful documentation, ample bibliography and discography add tremendous value for readers engaged in cultural, ethnic, diaspora or women's studies. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This is a thoughtful, scholarly study of Josephine Baker (1906-75)-performer, writer, activist, and philanthropist-whose life and fame embraced numerous contradictions, ranging from her 1925 role as the savage dancer Fatou in La revue n?gre and her onstage shows at the Folies Berg?re to her alliance with French Counterespionage Services and her work on behalf of children and global harmony. Jules-Rosette (director, African & African American studies, Univ. of California, San Diego; Black Paris) includes thoroughly researched details about Baker's engrossing life. Using sociosemiotic methods, she goes well beyond biography to explore skillfully the symbols and images Baker created and projected. She elicits their broader meaning and influence in terms of art, gender, race, politics, universal brotherhood, and more. Through Jules-Rosette's review of diverse materials-including posters, photographs, scripts, Baker's own writings, costumes, and humanitarian and political pursuits-a sensitive and in-depth story emerges, revealing the cultural relevance of a remarkable woman whose impact still reverberates. Fifty-one photographs enhance this innovative volume, which should be a welcome addition to large academic and public collections as well as to university reading lists.-Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
