Preface Transnational and Time-Travelling Divas

Preface Transnational and Time-Travelling Divas laura hein According to my dictionaries, the diva is defi ned blandly as “a famous female singer,” judgmentally as “a self-important person, typically a woman, who is temperamental and diffi cult to please,” and, fundamen- tally as “a goddess” (Stevenson and Lindberg 2005–2011, Cosgrove 1997). Moreover, as this book demonstrates, divas systematically draw our attention to the performative nature of identity, to gender, and to battles over control of female bodies and female sexuality. A diva is invariably a strong personality who “uses her body to speak when lan- guage fails,” as Laura Miller and Rebecca Copeland stress in the intro- duction to this volume. At the same time, “the diva represents disloca- tion,” something that presupposes a stable historical or geographic past and so is an excellent entry point into understanding social and political tensions in a specifi c time and place. Divas identify dissonance in a gen- eralizable way but they always do so by capturing unexpressed aspects of specifi c experiences. Moreover, by showing their perspective to rapt audiences, they wittily and theatrically make themselves impossible to ignore. Divas convey the point that their pain was unfairly infl icted; without social injustice, there could be no divas. As Miller and Cope- land put it, “divas are not born,” but rather, they are “generated” from “the friction produced when female genius meets social stricture.” Every diva has her own story to tell and a single individual can fi gure in a variety of narratives. Josephine Baker (1906–1975), the African American performer who became globally famous after moving to Paris xi xii | Laura Hein provides a glamorous example. Not only was she a magnetic and extremely sexy stage performer, she ran her life by her own rules and also used her prestige to desegregate American concert halls and to assist the French Resistance. Like the other divas in this book, she has never really died, most recently reappearing on her 111th birthday as a Google Doo- dle (Moyer 2017). Baker embodied an irrepressible creativity and self- expression despite enormous obstacles—the heart and soul of the diva’s social power. Since gender is baked into the defi nition of the diva, of course that creativity was inseparable from Baker’s female identity and especially her sexuality, off stage as much as when she was center stage. Baker exemplifi ed the 1920s global phenomenon of “the New Woman,” who delayed marriage and childbearing, worked for pay, and lived away from her family. She also was an international poster girl for the racier version of the New Woman, the short-skirted, short-haired, sexually active fl apper, moga, and la garçonne, to give only the derisive American, Japanese, and French terms. But Baker’s explosive impact on the twentieth century also derived from the variety of ways she engaged with the specifi c places where she—or her image—lived and visited. Baker destabilized gender, sexuality, race, and national identity in diff erent ways in her two countries of citizenship. In the United States, where she was born and grew up, Baker represented the struggle of African Americans for full inclusion in an aggressively hostile society, particularly after she refused to play seg- regated concert halls on a 1951 tour. Meanwhile her eff ect on interwar French culture was subtly diff erent, as analyzed by Tyler Stovall (2008). Stovall notes that Baker could freely perform topless and choose white lovers in Paris in contrast to New York, where such behavior contra- vened obscenity and miscegenation laws. Baker’s racial alterity as an African American garçonne was not enough to explain why the women she portrayed in French fi lms “never got the guy: that is to say, never achieved success as romantic leads.” Her cinematic characters actively pursued the men they wanted, and were invariably punished for doing so, much like Izanami in Copeland’s Chapter 1. While French observers were perfectly willing to acknowledge Jose- phine Baker’s transracial allure, unlike American cultural producers, they still could not treat her as worthy of long-term love with a Euro- pean man. That was because she challenged French anxieties about colo- nialism, not just about sexuality and race. Baker’s adoption of African and Caribbean dramatic story lines and dance steps in her performances— most famously in her banana skirt—associated her with France’s impe- Preface | xiii rial possessions even though at that point she had never visited any of them. The French state had only eked out victory in World War I by absorbing colonial labor, both as soldiers on the front and as farmers and factory hands imported into France itself. As Stovall notes (2008:3), “This unprecedented presence of the colonized in the métropole both reaffi rmed the global greatness of France and called into question some basic assumptions about French identity.” By 1919, convinced of the centrality of the colonies to national sur- vival, but increasingly anxious about the implications of that fact for national identity, French leaders promoted white family settlement in the colonies rather than the older pattern in which single men paired up with native women in marriages of convenience. “In an empire struggling to create a safe space for white domesticity, it made sense to acknowledge the attractions of native women while ultimately demonstrating the impossi- bility of interracial relationships” (Stovall 2008:6). The “native woman could come to Paris as a spectacle” (Stovall 2008:6), which acknowledged the colonial creativity and (wo)manpower that France so desperately needed, but fi lmmakers denied to the diva herself, or to the characters she played, fulfi llment of their hearts’ desires. Josephine Baker thus simultane- ously challenged and reinforced “the idea of the New Woman as savage,” enacted “celebrations of empire [and] at the same time anticipated its loss,” revealed “the gendered nature of French ambivalence about coloni- alism,” and showed that “blackness in Europe is central, not peripheral to the European experience as a whole” (Stovall 2008:7). That is a heavy weight for one pair of shoulders, no matter how shapely. Many of the Japanese divas gathered here, like Yoko Ono, Misora Hibari, IKKO, and Kanehara Hitomi also wielded infl uence across national boundaries. Ono was part of the phenomenally infl uential avant-garde New York art movement that included composer John Cage and video artist Nam June Paik, but never gained equivalent attention for her ideas. In part that was because her international audience saw her as a Japanese woman in ways that made her seem less of an artist, as Carolyn Stevens discusses in this volume (Chapter 6). At the risk of cari- cature, the ideal Japanese woman is reserved, calm, and exhibits great forbearance while cheerfulness, pep, and optimism—qualities associated with ideal women elsewhere—are the attributes of delightful children rather than adult females. When a Japanese diva commands attention, even when performing her art with “calm,” she is already breaking a social norm. By contrast, having a magnetic personality and “believing in oneself” is in itself less transgressive in the United States, masking the xiv | Laura Hein radicalism of Ono’s art. And while divas everywhere trust their own judgment over that of other people, IKKO seems very Japanese indeed, as Jan Bardsley argues in Chapter 7, when the celebrated beauty expert describes the key to her own personal growth as learning how to stop misinterpreting other peoples’ suggestions as bullying and instead “over- come her own stubbornness to learn from others.” Divas also build on each other’s performances. It seems highly likely that the much younger Misora Hibari (1937–1989) carefully analyzed Baker’s performance style and that her own self-presentation as “spunky orphan,” “nascent cosmopolitan” in tails and a top hat, and the embod- iment of “grit and determination” owed something to Baker’s com- manding diva presence. It seems even more likely that, when, according to Christine Yano in Chapter 5, Misora’s audiences felt “a certain kind of yearning for premodern sexuality,” she was aff ecting them in much the same way as did Baker her Parisian fans. The persistent rumors that one of Misora’s parents was Korean underscores that surmise, and also suggests that, just as Baker did in France, Misora’s performances opened up space in postcolonial Japan to wonder if national vitality might have been powered by colonial energy. The refusal of the modern Imperial Household Agency to excavate Himiko’s tomb, probably because doing so would reveal artifacts made in Korea or modeled on older Korean objects, raises similar issues. Moreover, fi gures such as Izanami, Himiko, Ame no Uzume, and Izumo no Okuni have served as potent sources of imagination in the modern period, as amply illustrated in this volume, because attempts to minimize their power and signifi cance are so obviously encoded in the offi cial record. Himiko was the fi rst Japanese ruler whose name we know from a contem- porary written source, suggesting that she was an ancestor of the current emperor. Women today are barred from ascending to the Chrysanthemum Throne and the current government is on record as committed to retaining that restriction, even though nearly all the young members of the imperial family today are female. That context means that invocations of Himiko in the twenty-fi rst century remind people that Japan was ruled—and ruled well—by a woman in the past. As Laura Miller suggests in Chapter 3, Himiko can never just be a focal point for lighthearted tourist activities, particularly after other divas from the ancient mythical record have cap- tured feminist imaginations.

Load more