Queering Modernist Classicism: Josephine Baker, Isadora Duncan, and Princesse Tam Tam

My paper zooms in on one of Josephine Baker’s less iconic scenes: in the 1935 French film Princesse Tam Tam (dir. Edmond Gréville), Baker dances on the Tunisian archaeological site of the ruins of Dougga, an ancient Roman settlement. This recalls the much more widely known 1903 pictures taken by Raymond Duncan of his sister Isadora dancing on the Acropolis. I would like to propose that Baker’s dance is an act of queering on two levels, of her own racialised, anatomically female body, and of the gestural imaginary of modern dance in the shape of one of its uber-mothers, Duncan. Queering here manifests in an overdetermined performance – or performance of overdetermination – that brings to the fore the racial, colonial, and sexual unconscious of modernist classicism.    

Lucia Ruprecht is Professor of Critical Dance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She has published widely on dance, literature, and film. She is the author of Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century (2019) and Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine (2006, special citation of the de la Torre Bueno Prize). She has edited (with M. Diagne and E. Wittrock) Speculations on the Queerness of Dance Modernism (special issue of Dance Research Journal 54/2, 2022), Towards an Ethics of Gesture (special section of Performance Philosophy, 2017) and (with S. Manning) New German Dance Studies (2012), among others. From 2004 to 2022, she was Lecturer in German literature and culture at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. She held an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Institute for Theater Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, and was the Inaugural Visiting Research Scholar at Boyer College of Music and Dance, Temple University, Philadelphia.