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Why Josephine Baker?

Abstract / Excerpt

“Indeed, why Josephine Baker? Or rather, how? How is it that, of all the half-naked chorus girls to appear on the stages of Montmartre during the Roaring Twenties, Parisians chose to make Josephine Baker into a star without parallel? How was Baker transformed, in what seems a matter of mere moments, into the incarnation of Africa, America, and even Paris itself? How is it that a 19-year-old black girl from St. Louis, Missouri, who was neither the most beautiful nor the most talented entertainer to hit interwar France, was able to captivate the European cultural capital in 1925 and then to keep it mesmerized for nearly half a century, until her death in 1975 at age 68? These are questions that have fascinated me, and many others, about the phenomenon that was and in fact still is Josephine Baker. She is a moment that has yet to be repeated.”