France is finally awarding the American-born cabaret dancer, French World War II spy, and civil rights activist JOSEPHINE BAKER an honor she so deserves. She will be the first Black woman to be awarded a place in the Pantheon monument overlooking the Left Bank of Paris. the final resting place of France’s most revered luminaries.
Whilst a coffin carrying soils from the U.S., France and Monaco — places where Baker made her mark — will be deposited inside the Pantheon, her body will stay in Monaco, at the request of her family. The decision by French President Macron was in response to a very large petition. In addition to honoring an exceptional figure in French history, it also sends a message against racism which was one of the real issues why her career stalled back in the US
By the time she arrived in France in 1925 she already divorced twice, had relationships with men and women, and had started performing her act
She met immediate success on the Theatre des Champs-Elysees stage, where she appeared topless and wearing a famed banana belt. Her show, embodying the colonial time’s racist stereotypes about African women, caused both condemnation and celebration. “She was that kind of fantasy: not the Black body of an American woman but of an African woman,” Theatre des Champs-Elysees spokesperson Ophélie Lachaux told the AP. “And that’s why they asked Josephine to dance something ‘tribal,’ ‘savage,’ ‘African’-like.”
Labels: 2021, cabaret star, French, Josephine Baker, Pantheon
