Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism

Josephine Baker, the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, was both liberated and delightfully undignified, playfully vacillating between allure and colonialist stereotyping.

Nicknamed the Black Venus, Black Pearl, and Creole Goddess, Baker blended the sensual and the comedic when taking 1920s Europe by storm. Back home in the United States, Baker’s film career brought hope to the Black press that a new cinema centered on Black glamour would come to fruition. In Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism, Terri Simone Francis examines how Baker fashioned her celebrity through cinematic reflexivity, an authorial strategy in which she placed herself, her persona, and her character into visual dialogue. Francis contends that though Baker was an African American actress who lived and worked in France exclusively with a white film company, white costars, white writers, and white directors, she holds monumental significance for African American cinema as the first truly global Black woman film star. Francis also examines the double-talk between Baker and her characters in Le Pompier de Folies Bergere, La Sirene des Tropiques, Zou Zou, Princesse Tam Tam, and The French Way, whose narratives seem to undermine the very stardom they offered. In doing so, Francis artfully illuminates the most resonant links between emergent African American cinephilia, the diverse opinions of Baker in the popular press, and African Americans’ broader aspirations for progress toward racial equality.

Examining an unexplored aspect of Baker’s career, Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism deepens the ongoing conversation about race, gender, and performance in the African diaspora.