Under a Paris moon: Transatlantic black modernism, French colonialist cinema, and the Josephine Baker Museum

Josephine Baker's film career from 1925 to 1935 foregrounds the representational dilemmas that attended black women's creativity at the height of transatlantic black modernism. My dissertation addresses black women's performance and authorship in an international context. I examine Baker's portrayal of "black Venus," specifically her dual "Africanity" and "civilized" American blackness in French musical comedies. Baker's trajectory from obscurity and poverty in the United States to fame and wealth in France, the mythic haven for black Americans, is well known, while her movie roles have yet to be sufficiently examined in the contexts of transatlantic black modernism, colonialist cinema, black women's film roles, and writing by black women. Yet, Baker's leading roles in Les Hallucinations d'un Pompier (1928), Zou Zou (Marc Allegret, 1934) and Princess Tam Tam (Edmond Greville, 1935) constitute a significant under-utilized archive for interdisciplinary, transatlantic study of the invention of "black Venus" and its relation to black stardom. Through close analyses of Baker's dancing, singing, and acting and her films' narratives, I have found that the colonialist screen roles through which Baker channeled her performance and authorship mirror the off-screen limitations on her agency, illuminating the shared circumstances of black female protagonists and actors in film, literature, museums, and theater. Chapters one and two describe the American black performance world from which Baker emerged on to the Paris scene as a novelty dancer. Next, the comedy short, Hallucinations , is interpreted as a reflexive tale about Baker's aesthetic influence as modernist muse. Then I read the circus, cruise ship entertainment, and music hall in Zou Zou as sites of ethnographic spectacularization and substitutions for the domesticity that the protagonist is denied ultimately. Last, Princesse Tam Tam is considered a parable about France's contradictory stances on assimilation: possible and desirable but ultimately impossible and threatening. Linking the films with Nella Larsen's Quicksand, I address the larger issue of representations and perceptions. While protagonists Alwina and Helga Crane both reach the limits of Primitivist enthusiasm, their returns home lead to different endings. Therefore, my dissertation genealogizes Baker's film roles as it complicates the myth of black freedom in Paris.