At the height of her success in interwar Paris, Josephine Baker was a millionaire at the age of just twenty-four. Dubbed in the French press as La Bakaire, her roles on stage in La Revue nègre/The Negro Revue (1925) and La Folie du jour/The Day’s Madness (1926) and in film in La Sirène des tropiques/The Siren of the Tropics (Nalpas/Etiévant, 1927), Zou Zou (Marc Allégret, 1934), and Princesse Tam Tam (Gréville, 1935) made Baker one of the most publicly visible figures in French cultural life until her death in Paris in 1975, where she was given a full state funeral. Baker was variously figured as the incarnation of Charles Baudelaire’s Jeanne Duval, the danseuse de bananes/the banana dancer and la petite Tonkinoise/the Tonkin girl who brought the Charleston and the Blackbottom to France, all performed against the backdrop of interwar France that was just entering its colonial golden age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNSEnQNfk9k
Born in 1906 to an impoverished family in the racially troubled city of Saint Louis, Baker received little formal education and was married at thirteen. She seemed destined for a life of poverty and drudgery in common with other African American women of her social class and education. However, a talent for performance at an early age took Baker into the potentially more lucrative world of the black musical revue, where she quickly recognized that she could use the performative value of the black female body to escape from domestic service and menial labor. Considered too dark for the traditional sexual appeal of the “high yallers” and the “sepia lovelies” in the chorus line, Baker attracted attention with her comic talent in a series of blackface comedy roles and soon became well known for her traditional “pickanniny” routines Shuffle Along (1923) and Chocolate Dandies (1924) in Harlem and on Broadway.
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