Joséphine Baker Watches Herself

Abstract

The cultural phenomenon of international superstar and American ex-pat extraordinaire Joséphine Baker’s success in Paris is mediated primarily through its documentation on film transferred to video and digital formats. In many ways, Baker is a media marvel. Meanwhile, much of the engagement with Baker’s legacy, both written and embodied, takes place through well-established rubrics of theater, choreography, fiction, academic criticism, and even citation in poetry, film, and painting almost as though discussing unmediated material. Thus since we experience Baker’s legacy in reproduction, that is, in highly mediated (and ephemeral) digital formats, what would it mean to mine Baker as a repository that could be explored through digital interpretive practices? As Baker’s image endures as image, the video essay Joséphine Baker Watches Herself reframes Baker as a thinking spectator of her own work.