Josephine Baker is a fascinating, complicated Jazz Age figure, an icon of African American power and talent and an example of how white culture projected wildness and sexuality onto African American performers. One of the most liberated performers, she had to move to Paris to achieve any social equality, and to play the bare-breasted native to win applause. Wood's biography exhaustively recounts her rise from impoverished childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, to initial success in the segregated world of American vaudeville to international fame as a star of the Folies-Bergere. Wood clearly loves Baker and has spared no pains to gather as much about her as he can for this readable book. Still, he does gush, and it is hard not to wish he had spent a little more time delving into the cultural implications of Baker's success in a very overtly racist world. After all, none of her Caucasian cabaret contemporaries--Colette and Dietrich, among them--had to strip, don bananas, and pretend to be a "wild and free jungle nudist" to attract crowds.
Jack HelbigCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Kurzbeschreibung
Paperback edition of this biography of Josephine Baker, who was both a symbol for licentiousness and liberation, and a role model for young black women around the world.