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Fearless and free
Funny, candid and unconventional: the wildly famous but elusive Josephine Baker tells her own story in this enchanting memoir. She took Paris by storm in the 1920s, dazzling audiences with her humour, beauty and effervescence on stage. Hemingway, Jean Cocteau and Picasso admired her; Shirley Bassey adored her. It was told she strolled the streets of Paris with her pet cheetah who wore a diamond collar. Later, as one of the most recognisable women in the world, she became a spy for the French resistance, her celebrity working as her cover. She was awarded the Légion d'Honneur for military service. After the war she became increasingly interested in civil rights. In 1963 she spoke at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King. All this from a girl born in Missouri to a single Black woman and a white father she did not know. This book offers an insight into a beguiling figure of the 20th century.
BOOK
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 Bergère , La Sirène 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.
eBook
