In March 1931, six years after her triumphant Parisian début in La Revue nègre, the African-American dancing sensation Josephine Baker was officially selected as Queen of the upcoming International Colonial Exposition, a large-scale exhibition designed to promote the vast resources of the French colonies and to engender in its French visitors a sense of pride in their empire. Despite her appointment as Queen, Baker did not, however, preside over this ambitious display of French imperialism: she was quickly deprived of her title after indignant critics protested that the United States was not a colony of France! The initial choice of Josephine Baker to officiate over the International Colonial Exposition suggests one of the ways in which her historical audience appropriated and used her star image. Studies of movie stardom as a social phenomenon have shown that stars typically function as the site of ideological contradictions that are either reinforced, reconciled, or more rarely, challenged, in the formation and evolution of their star text. As the preceding anecdote suggests, Baker's performance of blackness was historically resonant with what Homi Bhabha calls colonial mimicry, that is, the colonizer's " desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite." In the first years of the new decade, Josephine Baker's emerging star persona became increasingly enmeshed in the problematic re-imagining of French national community inherent in the process of empire building.

In my conference presentation, I propose to analyze Baker's little known film The French Way (Fausse Alerte, 1940), which, along with Zouzou, is the most congruent with her 1930s star image. Shot during the phony war, the brief lull between the official declaration of war in September 1939 and the onset of armed conflict in May 1940, Baker's last film functions as an allegory of national reconciliation, promoting social harmony and the transcendence of internal divisions. Baker is cast as the owner and star of a neighborhood cabaret who helps reconcile the feuding parents of a young couple before the son leaves for the war. In a revealing departure from her earlier film roles, The French Way reshapes Baker's screen persona in direct response to the historical exigencies of the period. Although The French Way never reached its target audience due to the German invasion in May 1940, this overlooked film constitutes a deliberate attempt to reconfigure the image of the colonial other within French popular culture in the face of national crisis.