Vaudevillian, Countess, Spy, Activist: The Complicated Life of Josephine Baker

5 Cs of History: Complexity, #2 of 4. Josephine Baker’s life story - both what we know and what we don’t/can’t know - is fascinating. For our purposes today, her life story is a perfect case study for complexity in historical thinking. Not only was she an icon of contradictions, but the way she lived and interacted with the world has allowed historians and feminist scholars to really tease out the complexity of her lifetime. Josephine Baker lived from 1906 until 1975. She was both a Civil Rights activist and a performer who used blackface and racialized tropes to entertain. She was both a woman who had intimate (probably sexual) relationships with other women, and exiled an adopted son when he came out to her as gay. She was both a deeply private woman and opened her home to the public like an amusement park. And for most of her life she lived in France, which was both deeply enamored with Black American culture and music and deeply racist. As Josephine Baker shows us, historical moments, like life stories, are rarely simple.

Bibliography

Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase, Josephine: The Hungry Heart, (Random House New York, 1993). 

Peggy Caravantes, The Many Faces of Josephine Baker: Dancer, Singer, Activist, Spy (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015) 151.

Luca Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny, and Franz Kerschbaumer, Eurojazzland (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 2012)

Ed. Mae G. Henderson and Charlene B. Register, The Josephine Baker Critical Reader

FBI Records: The Vault — Josephine Baker

Patrick O’Connor. “Josephine Baker.” American National Biography Online

Mary McAuliffe, When Paris Sizzled: The 1920s paris of hemingway, chanel, cocteau, cole porter, josephine baker, and their friends (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated, 2016)

Alan Schroeder and Heather Lehr Wagner, Josephine Baker: Entertainer (New York: Chelsea House, 2006)

Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time, (DoubleDay, 1989). 

Jennifer Sweeney-Risko, “Fashionable ‘Formation’: Reclaiming the Sartorial Politics of Josephine Baker,” Australian Feminist Studies 2018, VOL. 33, NO. 98, 498–514

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