Judith Brown

Borderline, Sensation, and the Machinery of Expression

Perhaps the most startling thing, on first viewing the 1930 silent film Borderline, is the image of H. D. (as Astrid), her face worn and gaunt, her frame looming and cadaverous, her hairline reaching precipitously toward the frowsy crown of her head.3 Telephone receiver in clenched hand, H. D. appears frenetic and mechanical in her first frame. Paul Robeson (as Pete), on the other hand, wears the smooth mask of celebrity, his face registering little emotion, Garbo-like in its frozen iconicity. (Figs. 1 and 2) Of course, Robeson is, already by this, his second film, a screen celebrity and more widely a celebrity of the sound media. He is modernism / modernity volume fourteen, number four, pp 687–705.

Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (review)

Anne Cheng’s brilliant new book, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, asks to be undressed. Sliding off its translucent sleeve, we see a shadowed and naked Baker, holding draped fabric and beads to her breasts. The light touches her trademark hair, her shoulder, a thigh, and radiates from the cloth that falls to the floor like a fluid and illuminated pillar. The book’s sleeve itself mutes this image, overlaying it with a skyscraper, as emblematic of the modern age as Baker herself. Combined, the Baker/skyscraper image is iconic, powerful, perhaps ambivalently phallic, and indisputably modern: indeed, as Cheng argues, both building and burlesque star function as “identical” markers of modern culture. The book thus begins with the play of its own sartorial skin as it delves into the complexities of race, skin, and visibility in the early twentieth century. There is no getting inside Baker; that is, there is no beyond her clothes, her ornamentation, her skin. Difference itself is collapsed in Cheng’s reading, becoming bound up in representation and the endless fascination and play of the surface. It is only on the surface – whether skin, cloth, architectural cladding, or modernist form – that meaning inheres, and it is in the interchangeability of these terms that Cheng finds new modes of interpreting modernism. Baker’s skin serves as a primary trope, from its golden hue to its golden encasement to its soiling in the gaze of a series of figures, including Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, who are simultaneously entranced and repelled by it. What, then, does Baker’s scandalous nakedness signify? Cheng moves around this question – and the greater questions of racial identity – with a critical vigour and creativity that is perfectly suited to her at once frenetic and statuesque subject. Baker famously and outrageously flirted with what have become the clichés of primitivism that made her a sensation in 1920s Paris. Whether to read this flirtation as parodic subversion of or blatant participation in racist discourse has long defined the critical conversation around Baker. Cheng moves us away from the twin poles of this debate and restages the question. What does Baker tell us about the theatricalization of naked skin, and what does this theatricalization, in turn, tell us about vision and racial difference in the early twentieth