ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to examine singer-dancer Josephine Baker’s watershed 1929 tour of Latin American cities in light of what might be called portable cosmopolitanism. What made the tour so resonant with audiences, the author argues, was not only Baker’s explicit racial and sexual politics, but also the peculiar temporal, spatial and technological dimensions of the touring spectacle which made such provocations possible. With antecedents in travelling circuses and minstrel shows, Baker’s tour of Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro rendered these cities more modern by extending the locus of the Jazz Age from local cabarets and dance halls to larger, more “respectable” venues. In an analysis of essays, newspaper articles, and other sources, Borge shows how the jazz siren’s dazzlingly vulgar, high-production performances granted Latin American bourgeois audiences not only vernacular metropolitan citizenship but also sanctioned, if short-lived, furloughs from normative moral prohibitions. Finally, in so far as it celebrated cultural hybridity and impurity, speed and evanescence, Baker’s touring spectacle in many ways constituted a “commodification of uprootedness” (to invert a phrase coined by S. Greenblatt) which broke with primitivist epistemologies even as it appeared to reinforce them.
