"I see Josephine Baker as an American choreographer (translate: European choreographer), who managed to build a remarkable whole repertoire of primitivist choreography. Choreographies that she presented, on European stages, as “ African ” dance.
But Josephine Baker was not only a choreographer, she was also a black American who found refuge in Europe after having experienced the misery and brutality of American racism at the beginning of the 20th century. However, when we examine the nature of the reception that Europeans gave her, we see the same racist rejection, but expressed in different way ; a subtle and biased racism that made her the representative of a both unbridled and diabolical primitivist sexuality, a black sexuality capable of satisfying all the erotic fantasies of the white male, christian and tamer of the wild world. In short, she was the ideal woman for Indiana Jones or for Michel Leiris, a young surrealist poet lost among ethnologists and promoter of ethno-aesthetics." - Hassan Musa