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Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism

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Pub Date Jan 19 2021 | Archive Date Mar 31 2021

Darcie Rowan PR | Indiana University Press


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Description


An Awe-Inspiring Black History Month Read!

An American History Story Perfect for Women's History Month

Josephine Baker, the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, was both liberated and delightfully undignified, playfully vacillating between allure and colonialist stereotyping. 
 
Nicknamed the "Black Venus," "Black Pearl," and "Creole Goddess," Baker blended the sensual and the comedic when taking 1920s Europe by storm.

Back home in the United States, Baker's film career brought hope to the Black press that a new cinema centered on Black glamour would come to fruition.

In Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism, Terri Simone Francis examines how Baker fashioned her celebrity through cinematic reflexivity, an authorial strategy in which she placed herself, her persona, and her character into visual dialogue. Francis contends that though Baker was an African American actress who lived and worked in France exclusively with a white film company, white costars, white writers, and white directors, she holds monumental significance for African American cinema as the first truly global Black woman film star. Francis also examines the double-talk between Baker and her characters in Le Pompier de Folies BergèreLa Sirène des TropiquesZou Zou, Princesse Tam Tam, and The French Way, whose narratives seem to undermine the very stardom they offered. In doing so, Francis artfully illuminates the most resonant links between emergent African American cinephilia, the diverse opinions of Baker in the popular press, and African Americans' broader aspirations for progress toward racial equality. 

 
Examining an unexplored aspect of Baker's career, Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism deepens the ongoing conversation about race, gender, and performance in the African diaspora.

Terri Francis teaches film studies courses and directs the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University. A scholar of Black film and critical race theory, her work involves archival research, cultural history and visual analysis, set within the vicissitudes of performance and representation. Her essays appear in in Film History, Transition, Black Camera, and Another Gaze.



An Awe-Inspiring Black History Month Read!

An American History Story Perfect for Women's History Month

Josephine Baker, the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, was both liberated and...


Advance Praise

Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism explores Baker's films with unprecedented attention to details of production, reception, and Baker's performances and screen aspirations. Terri Francis does not choose sides, or situate Baker in an irresolvable tension between exploited exotic and self-determined artist. Instead, Francis reads Baker's cinematic work as the most significant, dynamic expression of her multifaceted aesthetic, in which she continually refracted imaginaries of race and gender, colonialism and Black success, through her screen labor and image.

-- Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity

Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism explores Baker's films with unprecedented attention to details of production, reception, and Baker's performances and screen aspirations. Terri Francis does not...


Marketing Plan

International and National Publicity Campaign

Podcast Interviews

Radio Interviews

Black History Month promotions

Digital and Print interviews


International and National Publicity Campaign

Podcast Interviews

Radio Interviews

Black History Month promotions

Digital and Print interviews



Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780253223388
PRICE $24.00 (USD)
PAGES 216

Average rating from 8 members


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