In the pantheon of “Black Paris,” Josephine Baker remains a largely controversial figure who is less known and honored in her country of origin, the United States, than in her beloved country of immigration, France. However, Baker's embrace of France elicits ire within sectors of the African diaspora brutally colonized by the French, even as her Black Cinderella narrative and flamboyance continue to inspire performers and segments of the world at large. Her cultural legacy has become inseparable from her signature banana skirt dance performed in the Folies-Bergère during the raging 1920s, les années folles, and she is often depicted as a primal erotic object born of Svengalian manipulation. Baker was, nevertheless, a complex and misread individual whose strategic agency in her own image creation is often overlooked.

Marking the hundredth anniversary of Josephine Baker's birth, Bennetta Jules-Rosette has written with remarkable clarity and insight a counter-restorative analysis of Baker as a rational, autonomous subject who instead played upon prevailing racial and gender stereotypes to criticize their very existence. Jules-Rosette uses “semiography” (not to be confused with biography) to achieve this end, “trac[ing] the story of a life through signs, symbols, and images” (5) in order to interpret their underlying meanings beyond surface representations. For the author, such archeological excavation entails dissecting the literary and visual documents produced by and of Baker, ranging from her poignant personal correspondence and photographs to a thorough examination of Baker's (auto)biographies and films. Baker, in Jules-Rosette's deft analysis, is rendered a fully fleshed human, one having both virtues and vices, who challenged escapist colonial illusions projected onto the black female body in ways reminiscent of a trickster subjectivity.

Jules-Rosette scrupulously illustrates that Baker's seeming complicity with the imposed representations of her era in fact masked great subversion of those selfsame ideas in her careful crafting of “La Bakaire,” the international celebrity. Josephine Baker was, however, more than a mere media sensation. She was also a pioneering, though often naive, multiculturalist and humanitarian whose utopian dream of universal solidarity fashioned not only her politics but also her maternalism. Baker's twelve adopted children of varying nationalities, her “Rainbow Tribe,” were symbolic of this dream, played out in her fairytale Château des Milandes in the Dordogne, now a museum in her honor.

It is difficult not to be seduced by this recipient of the French Medal of Resistance and the Légion d'honneur who was under FBI surveillance for seventeen years, owing greatly to her civil rights activism in the United States. Bennetta Jules-Rosette brilliantly captures Josephine Baker in all her lived contradictions, and in so doing unveils a woman and an icon who indeed had – as her classic hymn “J'ai deux amours” affirms – two loves, her “country and Paris.”