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, sexual- ity, 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. Writing in 2008, Kirino Natsuo focused on the unfairness that Izanagi and Izanami experienced such diff erent fates after begetting a world full of gods and people. In Kirino’s retelling of Japan’s version of the myth of Preface | xv

Adam and Eve (another wronged diva), the traditions that banished Izanami to the dark underworld of death were nothing but cruel selfi sh- ness by cynically powerful people. Similarly, in an example not in Diva Nation, contemporary visual artist Tomiyama Taeko began her 2007– 2009 series, Hiruko and the Puppeteers, with the abandoned “leech- child,” the hiruko, born after Izanami and Izanagi’s fi rst sexual encoun- ter, which they put in a boat and sent out to sea. The leech-child drops out of the mythic record but, like Kirino, Tomiyama wondered what happened to the unwanted and cast-off people in these long-ago stories. She imagined the hiruko on a transformative sea journey during which it became the folk god Ebisu and joined other gods and puppets below the waves (Hein and Jennison 2017; Tomiyama and Takahashi 2009). Tomoko Aoyama (Chapter 2) skillfully invokes another powerful goddess hiding in plain sight in one of Japan’s creation myths. When Ame no Uzume lured the Sun Goddess back into the world, she enacted a creative performance that highlighted her sexuality and evoked laugh- ter, which both banished fear and purged the world of evil. Uzume was a “diva of the masses” in this reading, while Uzume’s twentieth-century champion, Tsurumi Shunsuke (2001), went even farther, framing her as Japan’s fi rst democrat, both because the changes she made benefi tted everyone and because she sparked an emotional connection that engaged all the members of her audience, laughing with rather than laughing at her. Moreover, the real kicker was that even the fi ercest warriors, like Sarutahiko, enjoyed the fact that Uzume was in charge. So does Tsurumi Shunsuke; he describes Uzume as, among her other virtues, “full of vital- ity, which brings out the life force in others.” These ancient stories—and their modern interpretations—suggest a world in which women una- shamedly celebrated their bodies and their creative and comic gifts. The men around them—with the exception of Susa-no-o—respected their productive labor as weavers, diplomats, and wise rulers. Perhaps such a world never existed, but imagining it still feels liberating. Divas from Japan’s more recent past also reveal women who were robbed of respect for their creative endeavors. Not all of them appear in these pages; another individual who would have fi t comfortably within this book is Hōjō Masako (1156–1225), one of the key people who established warrior rule in Japan. But, to return to Diva Nation, as Bar- bara Hartley explains in Chapter 4, when Ariyoshi Sawako stopped to think in the 1960s about the origins of kabuki, she soon imagined an entire novel from the implied narrative inherent in the bare facts: one woman whose name we know, Izumo no Okuni, applied her Shinto xvi | Laura Hein shrine-dance knowledge to secular themes in 1603 and created a new and instantly wildly popular performance genre. Because she had no access to then existing stage venues, she and the other women she trained had to perform in a dry river bed. More comfortably situated male per- formers regularly stole her ideas. Nevertheless she persisted. A quarter- century went by, during which the government was codifying and con- trolling social status to an unprecedented extent; in 1629 women were permanently barred from kabuki, a ban that continues to this day. Family life was notably inhospitable for these divas, beginning with Izanami, who was fatally wounded by her son and then reviled by her brother/husband. Both the sun goddess Amaterasu and Ame no Uzume were attacked and ritually defi led by Susa-no-o, Amaterasu’s brother. Uchida Shungiku, whose father attacked and ritually defi led her by rap- ing her and whose mother then wounded her by withholding protection tells a similar modern story in the chapter by Amanda Seaman (Chapter 8). Uchida’s reclaiming of her physical and emotional life after those betrayals matches the imaginative redress performed through Ariyoshi and Kirino’s novels but is all the more impressive because she is a real human being coming to terms with literal assaults. Successful divas are debt collectors—their honesty is a claim for reparations but their demands are rarely met with an equally honest response. Uchida achieves her own measure of redress by reclaiming both her body and a loving family life or, as Seaman puts it, “what sets Uchida apart . . . is the degree to which both sexuality and motherhood defi ne her dramatic persona and performances.” Like her sister divas, Uchida is phenomenally talented, creatively mixes prestigious and popular artistic forms, and foregrounds her own sexed body, but she also seems to have found a pathway through her own suff ering to nurture her chil- dren as well. As David Holloway reveals in Chapter 9, Kanehara Hitomi also now lives happily with her children, although she emigrated from Japan in order to do so. Asada Mao, the subject Masafumi Monden introduces in Chapter 10, retired from competitive ice skating in April 2017, opening up space for a future family life if she desires it. These women are inventing their own families as best they can. Chapter 7’s IKKO does something similar, in a way that draws on Japa- nese cultural resources, when she adopts an onē-kyarakutā stance as a helpful older sister. The idealized post-World War II Japanese family— the fi rst generation born after the wide dissemination of birth control— was composed of a girl and then a younger boy, so that big sister could help her little brother with tasks that girls were better at than boys, such Preface | xvii as arithmetic homework. When IKKO off ers to be a “big sister” to Japanese teens, everyone involved knows exactly what that relationship means. Josephine Baker, too, created a family more nurturing than the one she was born into and she went to Japan do so. While Baker met many Japanese individuals in interwar Paris, including painter Fujita Tsuguharu, for whom she modeled, the most meaningful such friend- ship for Baker herself was with Miki Sawada, whose husband worked in the Paris embassy. The two women met again in New York in 1935, when Baker stayed at Sawada’s apartment after being refused service at a hotel that catered only to whites. Their feminist union produced a transnational family in 1954, when Sawada arranged a tour to benefi t the Elizabeth Sanders Home for abandoned mixed-race children, which she had founded in 1948. Josephine Baker not only gave thirteen con- certs while in Japan, fi nancially supporting Sawada’s kids, she also adopted two boys from Sanders and took them to France, after sitting through a newly invented Shinto adoption ceremony invoking Amate- rasu, the sun goddess (Ara 2010). Baker went on to adopt ten more children from around the world, bringing to life on a small scale her utopian vision of a postcolonial, postracial global family.