Second Skin

Abstract What does a Black burlesque star have to do with some of the most enduring and passionate ideas in modern aesthetic theory? Josephine Baker emerges in this previously untold story as a principal figure in the drama behind the making of Euro-American modernism. Instead of seeing her nude performances as a primitivist given, the author argues that Baker’s skin was central to heated debates about and desire for “pure surface” that crystallized at the convergence of modern art, architecture, machinery, and philosophy. Taking the reader across the Atlantic—through real stages and imagined houses; banana plantations and ocean liners; metallic bodies and radiant cities—this study tracks the ardent and protean conversation between the making of a modernist style and the staging of a new Black visuality. In this account, Baker and the modernists known to have adored and objectified her in fact share a common dream: the fantasy of remaking and wearing the skin of the other.