Restaging respectability: the subversive performances of Josephine Baker and Nora Holt in jazz-age Paris

Abstract

This essay interweaves the narratives of Josephine Baker and Nora Holt in an exploration of African American women’s performance lives in jazz-age Paris. Baker landed in Paris by way of Harlem and the chorus lines of wayward showgirls (to evoke the words of Saidiya Hartman), while Holt arrived by way of Chicago and its Black concert scene of respectable Race women. Yet despite the seeming polarity of their backgrounds, Baker and Holt converged in Europe as artistic revolutionaries, gloriously blurring the respectable and the wayward. Through the 1920s, they staged bold Black womanhoods that were, I argue, both time-specific (i.e., of their time) and time-defiant (i.e., ahead of and beyond their time). With the Black Renaissances of Harlem and Chicago behind them, and the warped climate of European negrophilia ahead, Baker’s and Holt’s work in Paris sat squarely in the modernist zeitgeist. However, their presence spoke to more than the current moment and the vantage points of their European audiences. Colonialism, imperialism, and Jim Crowism were unrelenting in their domination over the Black female body, but Baker’s and Holt’s performance lives disrupted these claims to domination. This essay explores the ways in which Baker and Holt tore up the social script of early twentieth-century Black women’s respectability in the United States and scripted new visions and versions of Black womanhood on foreign shores.

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