African American dancer Josephine Baker was one of the most iconic performers of the early twentieth century. She shocked interwar European audiences with her erotic, pseudo-exotic stage persona and black vaudeville-derived dance movements and became a muse to modernist artists and writers including Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway, who would call Baker “the most sensational woman anybody ever saw.”Footnote ¹ Yet, as Brent Hayes Edwards has noted, scholars have too frequently portrayed her as “a sort of inconsequential stage alien, untethered to the world around her.”Footnote ²Second Skin can be read as a direct response to Edwards's observation as it presents a radical reinterpretation of critical race theory with Baker at its heart. Anne Anlin Cheng argues persuasively that European modernism dreamed its fascination with pure white surfaces out of racialized corporealities. For Cheng, Baker represented a “dynamic fulcrum through which the very idea of a ‘Modernist style’ was wrought” (4).

Locating the boundaries of the body – and, by implication, skin – as one of the early twentieth century's chief philosophical and aesthetic concerns, Second Skin sets out to undermine the “fact of blackness” in both the racist imagination and critical discourse (12). Fundamentally, Cheng seeks to “radically implode the distinction of surface versus essence so central to both racist and progressive narratives about the jeopardized black body” (12). She shows how contemporary liberal scholarship repeats the racist assumptions that it seeks to challenge by adopting a reading of blackness in which it is “repeatedly invoked, socially and legally, as the sign of the inhuman and the other” (12). Cheng instead juxtaposes Baker's naked skin next to early twentieth-century display techniques, such as photography, film and architecture, to show how modernism turned to black skin “not for disavowal” but for inspiration and, more importantly, for “articulation” (13). Second Skin is not interested in resolving the tensions in Baker's image. Instead, Cheng confronts such tensions to show how they challenged supposedly incontrovertible divisions between surface and essence, fetishization and subjectivity, and thus to offer a way of thinking about how modernist artists were themselves transformed by stagings of black flesh.

Second Skin avoids direct engagement with Baker's performances so as not to repeat the critical readings that it seeks to challenge, which polarize the dancer either as a fetish or as a feminist icon. Cheng's circumvention of Baker's agency and emphasis on theory over archival material does create gaps in her argument, however. Modernism as understood in Second Skin is implicitly European modernism, yet black artists and writers, not least dancers such as Baker, played active and important roles in shaping early twentieth-century culture. In fact, Baker remains largely abstract in a study that seeks paradoxically to undermine superficial readings of fetishized display. In failing to attend to Baker's artistry in depth, Cheng ends up reasserting the interpretations of 1920s white European critics, in which the dancer was described as “part simian” and her original partner, Joe Alex, as a “black giant” (4). Cheng's conceptualization of fetishism as “the theme and the mode of [Baker's] career” (39, added emphasis) and description of the dancer as a figure for whom “art [was] exposure itself” (52) simplify Baker's complex borrowings of African American vaudeville and burlesque performance and assume without question that her stage image did not simply feature nudity but centred on it.

Second Skin also raises questions that remain largely unexplored, such as the ways in which Baker's relatively light skin tone and American identity further complicated simplistic definitions of racial otherness. Baker claimed on at least one occasion that her father was Spanish, and surrealist Michel Leiris suggested that Parisian audiences might not have embraced her so readily had her skin tone been darker.Footnote ³ Baker was a muse to leading Parisian designers, and another fascinating line of enquiry that could enhance Cheng's argument would be Baker's relationship with figures such as Paul Poiret, whose draping techniques and “exotic” themes were intended to both liberate and show off the previously corseted female body. Moreover, should not European middle-class women's imitation of Baker's image through clothing, hairstyles and tanning be recognized as “self-fetishizing” acts on a par with the artistic imaginings of their predominantly male contemporaries?

Nevertheless, Second Skin presents a bold and inventive approach to critical race theory that questions some of its core assumptions and offers instead a much more nuanced understanding of early twentieth-century racial ideologies. Although it reinscribes enduring misreadings of Baker's artistry, it provides an invaluable foundation for reconceptualizing her cultural influence and the complex significations of “raced skin” in the modernist era.