Reclamation of the Particular, Escape to the Universal, or a Second Skin?

• In Event: Poetics and Politics of Resistance

Abstract

This paper places the critical reception of Josephine Baker’s performance art and of Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand within the context of the dialectic Fanon stakes out in Black Skin, White Masks: of the Black man trapped by the forked path of either a hollow reclamation of negritude or the always-aborted attempt to lose himself in the universal. Fanon’s description of the ascriptive, then internalized, racialization the Black man faces as he moves from the Antilles to Europe is placed within context of interwar Paris’ avant-garde art scene, wherein modern artists appropriated African, ‘primitive,’ art as ‘raw material’ for new art forms. The reception of Baker’s performance art, focused upon either her work as dictated by European fascination with primitivism and the legacy of colonial fascination with the Black female body – or as evidencing a subversive agency and humor that rescues Baker from this constant positioning – is shown to map onto the thwarted dialectic that Fanon poses. In thinking beyond the bind of descriptively overdetermined vs. liberated subjects, this paper draws on Anne Cheng’s analysis of Baker’s work through the concept of a ‘second skin’ and Sianne Ngai’s analysis of Larsen’s through ‘epidermalization.’ Both resist the very ‘visual availability and legibility’ of the racialized body and racialized artist, as analyzed by critic and audience. This paper thus considers performance art and the novel as an intervention – not through the destabilization of subject-object relations, where the gaze gazes back – but as an intervention in the fixed ontology of the white gaze. Cheng and Ngai invite the reader to consider the right to opacity that Larsen and Baker’s art forms invite. The racialized character, author, and body are no longer subject to over-determined description, but insulated from transparent reading.

Author

• Elizabeth Gallay, University of California, Irvine