Josephine Baker: psychoanalysis and the colonial fetish.
This paper traces an intricate path connecting racial fantasy, aesthetic judgment, and the larger cultural problem of inter-subjective recognition. In particular, the author examines the theme of fetishism, both sexual and racial, in a Western historical, colonial context, in order to unravel a set of disturbances that cohere around the racial fetish then and now. Taking the figure of an entertainment icon of the 1920s, Josephine Baker, as a case study, the author shows how the imagination of the colonizing white male was both articulated and disrupted by Baker as a ready-made representation of the cultural, racial, and sexual other.
Department of English, University of California, Berkeley 94720-1030, USA. anneacheng@gmail.com
Anne Anlin
AA
Cheng
D044383:Black People / Q000266:history; D018595:Colonialism; D003615:Dancing / Q000266:history; D005329:Fetishism, Psychiatric; D005602:France; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D011287:Prejudice; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D014481:United States; D044465:White People / Q000523:psychology*; D001741:Black or African American