Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface

Cheng's revision of Modernism is a delight. She gives full credence to those scholars who have criticized the way Modernist architecture and art invented a self-serving ideology of "primitivism" that was the foil for their own claim to be the avant-garde of humanity. But she wants to rethink the relationship between Modernism and the racialized fetishism that it created.Modernists like Picasso, Corbusier, and Adolph Loos clearly had a fascination with Josephine Baker's sensual performances and her play with primitivist signifiers (animal skins, choreographic excess, stylized nudity). Much of their reaction to her fell in line with the mixture of aversion and desire that defines fetishism. But Cheng asks whether Modernist artists––and, indeed, Baker herself––were really concerned with expressing an essence ("civilization," "modernity," or "black femininity"), and instead may have been experimenting with formal ways to design a "second skin," a surface on which to create a palimpsest of contradictory identifications.To put it more schematically, Cheng wants to move away from a simple opposition between Modernist abstraction and Primitive ornamentation. She wants to think instead about how the idea of "skin"––both the unadorned architectural surfaces of Modernism and Baker's performance of nudity––can be a site of where different kinds of persons (white European men, women and people of color) tried to enact ways of being other than the "essence" assigned to them by colonial ideologies.This is a complicated but exhilarating thought experiment that combines history, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural histories of modern art and architecture. Cheng's clear and lively prose makes it a pleasure to follow her in this revisionary approach to race and primitivism within Modernist culture.

Beautifully written and considered. Thoroughly stimulating read.

Intelligent, perceptive new look at the Josephine Baker story, with none of the old cliches.

Beautifully written. Even better than her first, The Melancholy of Race.

It's hard to describe an academic book as a "page turner" but Second Skin is about as close as it gets. The decision to trace Baker as a figure of desire and surface of articulation onto which all of the complexities, ambiguities, and anxieties of modernism could be projected and read was brilliant. At every turn, Baker shows up in the most unexpected places--sometimes, even, in her own films. Under Cheng's pen, Baker becomes an index for reconsidering the entrenched narratives we have about race, architecture, colonialism, and subjectivity at the turn of the century. From the cross-dressing father of modern architecture to a strip tease that reveals another dress beneath, some of the threads picked up in this book literally couldn't be made up. Cheng uses each thread to weave a unique and visually exciting theory of modernism as an ambiguous historical moment when we desired as much to be master the other as we did to be possessed by them.