The tribe out in the courtyard at play (Reporters Associés/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images)

In what is unfortunately a very uneven book, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies at Brown University, sets himself the ambitious agenda of refashioning the way in which Baker is remembered by situating her trajectory in the broader historical context of her era, and by focusing attention on the Rainbow Tribe as a way of better understanding ‘our mixed-up, hybrid, globe-trotting world’. In respect to his first goal, Guterl concentrates on the period after World War II, when the United States emerged as a cultural giant and a global superpower. Its engagement in the ideological conflicts of the Cold War saw the growth of a ruthless domestic anti-communist movement at the very time that African Americans were beginning to make serious advances against the institutionalised discrimination and segregation practices that continued to oppress so many of them. Guterl’s use of this tension-fraught situation as a crucible for testing the quality of Baker’s political mettle is highly original: he offers probing analysis, for example, of Baker’s participation – as the only woman on the podium, and dressed in her Free French uniform – in the famed August 1963 rally in Washington, when Martin Luther King delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech; and his coverage of her activities in Perón’s Argentina and Castro’s Cuba is richly informative and enlightening. There is also persuasive commentary on how Baker, a French citizen by marriage, tried to make the French live up to their own universalist ideals when, caught up in bitter decolonising struggles, they often revealed less noble qualities. But does the adoption of two orphans from Algeria in 1956 constitute more than a symbolic riposte to torture and massacre? Guterl cannot quite make up his mind: he does not doubt Baker’s commitment or courage, but he remains suspicious of the show-woman: was she really a radical, or just an ‘innocuous hanger-on’?

There is little such hesitation in respect to the Rainbow Tribe. Guterl accepts as sincere Baker’s desire to transcend her own inability to have children and to create, through the adoption – from 1954 to 1964 – of a dozen children of different ethnic and national backgrounds, a model of family-hood that could stand as a microcosm of world democracy. But he gives the outcome short shrift, condemning the public parading of this ‘vast assemblage of children’ at the Les Milandes château as exploitation, consciously practised by Baker to enhance her own celebrity. He makes extended comparisons with Disneyland, and even evokes Michael Jackson’s Neverland.

With Jo Bouillon gone, Josephine was left with eleven (later twelve) children at Les Milandes (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images)

More sympathy is shown when Baker, completely broke, is evicted from Les Milandes and obliged to take the Tribe to the house provided by the Rainiers on the Riviera. The children had grown, and several of them had become rebellious beyond Josephine’s ability to control them. Disconcertingly, as the narrative shows them being scattered across the globe, it becomes very patchy, and the reader is left with little idea of what happened to many of them. The author laments the ‘fragmented historical record’, but whether or not he is justified in doing so, his objective of using the Tribe as a way to offer insight into our present world is certainly not met.

Guterl has drawn on an impressive range of sources, including correspondence, his own interviews with witnesses and protagonists, newspapers and magazines, and several different archival repositories. There are, however, bothersome gaps and inconsistencies. There is very little reference to French materials, even though Baker centred so much of her life there; there is no explanation of her break-up with Jo Bouillon, the ‘father’ of the Tribe. Baker’s ‘autobiography’ (cobbled together by Bouillon after her death) is frequently described as unreliable, but equally frequently cited uncritically as testimony. The writing, while often deft and engaging, is also tramelled with the jargon of an approach that couches all human experience in terms of markets and commodities: the Josephine Baker who, in Guterl’s terms, was driven essentially by the need ‘to increase the cutting edge feel of her brand’ is probably not the one most readers will continue to remember.