Lucy Moore at Literary Review:
Today we think of Josephine Baker as the personification of the Jazz Age – the skinny black kid from Missouri who took Paris by storm. In retrospect, her show-stopping Revue Nègre act can be read as a subversion of the prejudices of her age. At the time, however, it just looked like a heady cocktail of comedy, exoticism and sex. Scantily garlanded with feathers, dancing to ‘barbaric, syncopated music’, Baker was ‘black poetry’, according to Marcel Sauvage, who acted as her ghostwriter.
The fact that she had got to Paris at all was testament to her resilience and spirit. Born into poverty in St Louis in 1906, Baker never knew who her real father was. By the age of eight she was working as a maid. At eleven, she witnessed the devastating racist violence of the East St Louis massacre. Two years later, having dropped out of school, she was scraping together a living dancing on street corners. She was married – the first time at only thirteen – and divorced twice before she was twenty.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.