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Performing Race and Gender The Exoticization of Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong

This document discusses an article that analyzes how Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong performed race and gender through their exoticized roles in early 20th century entertainment. It explores how their performances both reinforced and challenged stereotypes of the time through racialization and eroticization on stage and screen. The document considers their agency within the political economies and imaginative geographies that shaped expectations for non-white women in entertainment in both the US and Europe during their careers.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
79 views19 pages

Performing Race and Gender The Exoticization of Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong

This document discusses an article that analyzes how Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong performed race and gender through their exoticized roles in early 20th century entertainment. It explores how their performances both reinforced and challenged stereotypes of the time through racialization and eroticization on stage and screen. The document considers their agency within the political economies and imaginative geographies that shaped expectations for non-white women in entertainment in both the US and Europe during their careers.

Uploaded by

Marcelo
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Gender, Place & Culture

A Journal of Feminist Geography

ISSN: 0966-369X (Print) 1360-0524 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgpc20

Performing race and gender: the exoticization of


Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong

Jean-François Staszak

To cite this article: Jean-François Staszak (2015) Performing race and gender: the exoticization
of Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong, Gender, Place & Culture, 22:5, 626-643, DOI:
10.1080/0966369X.2014.885885

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2014.885885

Published online: 21 Feb 2014.

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https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cgpc20
Gender, Place and Culture, 2015
Vol. 22, No. 5, 626–643, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2014.885885

Performing race and gender: the exoticization of Josephine Baker and


Anna May Wong
Jean-Franc ois Staszak*

Department of Geography and Environment, University of Geneva, 40 Bd du Pont-d’Arve, Geneva,


1211-4, Switzerland
(Received 12 December 2011; accepted 25 November 2013)

Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong are two exceptions to white hegemony in early
show business. They became the first Afro-American and Chinese-American stars in
the 1920s and reached international stardom in spite of their ethnicity but also because
of it. Their careers and success were based on their exoticization. Baker and Wong’s
exoticism has much to do with ethnicity, but also with sex and gender. Their exotic
dances on stage or on screen can be considered to be forms of erotic shows. This article
shows how sex, gender, and race are entangled in their movies and burlesque shows.
It also discusses the ways in which the agency and the audience of the performer should
be taken into account, and analyzes how these performances were both rooted in
Western imaginative geographies and connected to symbolic and material spaces.
Keywords: dance; exoticism; intersectionality; movie; performance; agency

Performance, agency, and political economy


Theorists of intersectionality have shown how gender domination is enmeshed with other
forms of domination (Collins 2000; Crenshaw 1991), calling geographers to explore the
‘entwined spaces of “race,” sex and gender’ (Saad and Carter 2005, 49) – an exploration
pursued during recent years, but not without certain anxieties (Brown 2012). In queer
theory, sexuality and gender are socially constructed but they are also naturalized norms
that people are ‘coerced’ to fit into. Butler (1990) suggests a reading of these experiences
in terms of performance and performativity, but the agency and the historical and
geographical embeddedness of the performer, conceived of as a rather ‘abstracted subject’
by Butler, remain a question for geographers (Nelson 1999).
What exactly is the agency of a person performing a gender and racial role when both
are strictly coded and stigmatized? And how do performers deal with the ‘imaginative
geographies’ (Gregory 1995) codifying the roles they perform and the actual geographies
of the (social) stage where they perform? One of the issues addressed in this article is the
articulation of the different symbolic and material spaces where the performance takes
place. I try here to respond to the ‘lack of empirical work looking at intersection in
practice’ and the urge to ‘understand intersectionality as a situated accomplishment’
(Valentine 2007, 14). More specifically, I intend to answer the call to analyze ‘the
historical and geographical embeddedness of human subjects who “perform” a wide
variety of identities in relation to various spaces’ (Nelson 1999, 351), and to follow social
geographers in their attempts to show ‘how intersectionalities are bound up in spatialities’
(Peake 2010, 65).

*Email: [email protected]

q 2014 Taylor & Francis


Gender, Place and Culture 627

In order to answer these questions, I analyze the performances of two actresses and
exotic1 dancers: Josephine Baker (1906 –1975) and Anna May Wong (1905 – 1961). They
performed race and gender both on the stage/screen and in the spaces in which they live,
according to the sometimes contradictory identities of their person, of their persona, and of
the characters they had to embody. Their career and success were based on their ability to
incarnate and sometimes to transgress race and gender stereotypes. The differences and the
similarities between Wong and Baker’s lives and careers exemplify how performance,
performativity, and agency are situated. They vary according to specific contexts and
audiences, and change from one time and one place to another. I suggest that Baker and
Wong’s agencies resulted from their ability to master and play with both the imaginative
geographies encoding their identities and performances and the actual economic and
political geographies of the show business in Europe and the USA.
The classical opposition between the analysis of the political economy of show
business and the cultural study of its products (Hesmondhalgh 2007) does not help to
understand how a performance is embedded in a specific space and socioeconomic
context, nor how ‘the actor is [to be] seen simultaneously as an activity and object of
production and as practice of consumption’ (Polan 2002, 186). I suggest considering Baker
and Wong’s performances both as texts to be questioned from a cultural point of view and
as commodities to be analyzed from a socioeconomic point of view. Acknowledging
Baker and Wong’s agencies leads to question the rhetoric of their shows, and to draw on
the hypothesis that they could be – to a certain extent – the authors of their own texts.
Butler’s (1990) theory of performativity helps to see how Baker and Wong may have been,
at the same time, the subject and the object of their performances, and how they played on
(and with) identities and ideologies. Political economies of race and cultural production
are nevertheless essential to explain how their shows and identities were performed and
were responded to differently, according to the specific intersections of gender and
ethnicity in Europe and in the USA.
Yet, performing on the stage of a real theater and performing in everyday life are not the
same things. In her foundational paper, Butler may have thought metaphorically of gender
performance as an ‘act,’ ‘rehearsed’ and following a ‘script’ on a ‘scene,’ but she also made it
clear that on the social scene, ‘the act is not contrasted with the real, but constitutes a reality’
(1988, 526–527, emphasis in original). She later elaborates on this difference, theorizing the
distinction between performance, accomplished by a preexisting subject (for instance on the
stage), and performativity, which establishes the subject in social life (Butler 1990).
Baker and Wong’s performances were undoubtedly exceptions, but it is argued that
these exceptions confirm and help to explain the ‘rules.’ First, while gender and racial
performances by ‘ordinary’ women usually remain hidden in the obscurity of everyday
life, those of Wong and Baker – fully exposed and sometimes discussed by the stars
themselves – are easy to access.2 Second, the image of the ‘colored woman’ they both
reflect and diffuse is coherent with the society of their time because their movies and
shows were mainstream cultural products. Third, considering the case of two ‘colored’
women who nevertheless had exceptional success gives us a way to listen to the usually
silenced voices of the victims of white patriarchal hegemony, and without reducing them
to the status of victims. Valentine (2007, 14) notes that ‘work on intersectionality collapses
back to a focus on the experiences of nonprivileged groups rather than on how privileged
or powerful identities are “done” and “undone”.’ Baker and Wong offer the opportunity
not only to consider the intersectionality of two somewhat privileged women, but also
(or rather) to show how intersectionality may help to understand the blurring of the line
between privileged and nonprivileged people.
628 J.-F. Staszak

This article first presents Baker and Wong’s career in America and Europe in relation
to the local political economies of race and show business. I then analyze the two
processes of their exoticization: racialization and eroticization. The queerness of their
sometime transgressive performances leads me to question their agency along with the
audiences’ response to both their ironic moves and political commitments.

Wong and Baker’s early transatlantic careers


Wong and Baker were the first, main, or even only African-American and Chinese-
American stars in the early twentieth century. A French women’s magazine which dedicated
two papers to the ‘colored stars’ began by asserting that ‘movies seem to belong to one
single race: the white race’ and quoted immediately Baker and Wong as the two female
exceptions (Les Dimanches de la femme, 25 December 1932 and 29 January 1933).
Baker was born in Saint Louis in 1906, and Wong in Los Angeles in 1905. Wong’s
parents were both Chinese-Americans, born in California. Baker’s mother was African-
American, but her father’s identity remains unknown. Wong and Baker started their
careers in the USA, but came to stardom in Europe. Baker became a star by dancing in the
(in)famous Parisian Revue Nègre (1925), and Wong by accepting the leading role in the
Anglo-German movie Song (1928, Eichberg). Both performers were in Berlin in 1928 and
in Paris in 1932 – 1933, where Wong attended Baker’s show.3
In 1924, Baker was on the verge of becoming a successful burlesque dancer,
performing in New York vaudeville shows, but mostly for black patrons. At this time, anti-
miscegenation laws forbade interracial marriage in the USA and the depiction of
interracial couples on screen. Nor, of course, was there interest in showing a black couple
to white audiences. As most movies were about a romance, there were no leading roles for
black actors or actresses in Hollywood until the end of the 1950s (Cripps 1993). Baker did
not become a star in the USA. Though she appeared as a leading lady in four French films
(Staszak 2014), she was never cast in an American movie. Baker often complained about
Hollywood’s reluctance to cast black performers: ‘In France I have been a star [ . . . ] I
don’t see why I should do less here [in the USA]’ (Los Angeles Daily, 20 June 1952).
Wong was more advanced in her career when she decided to go to Europe. She was
facing a different situation to Baker. Indeed, many movies in the late 1910s and 1920s
were about a romance between a white man and an Asian woman. Such ‘miscegenation,’
although disallowed (Koshy 2004), was not as taboo as the mixing of whites and blacks, as
it was not perceived as such a social and political threat. However, to make such movies
acceptable in Hollywood, the Chinese woman often had to be played in yellowface by a
European actress (Courtney 2004; Moon 2005). This practice was an American theatrical
tradition whereby ‘colored’ characters were stereotypically played by white actors with
heavy make-up. Furthermore, the romance had to fail, and the Chinese woman had to die
at the end – ‘so that the white girl with the yellow hair may get the man,’ said Wong (Los
Angeles Examiner, 23 November 1929).
Even if Wong met success in The Toll of the Sea (Franklin, 1922) or The Thief of Bagdad
(Walsh, 1924), she was very disappointed with the roles Hollywood had to offer a Chinese-
American actress. Wong was often offered supporting roles to confer a more ‘authentic’
Chinese touch to the movie. Or, when the role was more important, it was a stereotyped
character: a childish doll, like Madame Butterfly, or a Dragon Lady, like the daughter of Fu
Man Chu (Figure 1). Frustrated with her career, Wong decided to move to Europe in 1927. In
Berlin and London, she became the main star of several movies in which she played leading
ladies (always involved in an interracial romance) and less stereotyped (but nevertheless
Gender, Place and Culture 629

Figure 1. Advertising material for Anna May Wong (and Warner Oland, in yellowface) in the
Daughter of the Dragon (L. Corrigan, 1931).
Note: Wong is drawn in a pose and an ‘Oriental’ outfit from a previous movie (Piccadilly, E.A.
Dupont, 1927).

exoticized) characters. She later explained quite lucidly the problem: ‘I love working in
American films, but I realize more and more that because of the psychology of many
American persons, particularly those in small towns, a Chinese actress has not a chance to
play leading parts. People don’t like to see a love story in which a white man and a Chinese
woman are the principals’ (Sunday Morning Star, 17 September 1939).
Furthermore, Baker and Wong’s star status did not protect them from racial
discrimination in their everyday life in North America. Wong was unable to marry a white
man (like one of her fellow actors), was arrested by immigration officers in a Canadian
railway station,4 and had trouble finding a place to live in Los Angeles in 1946 due to
racial restrictions.5 When Baker came back to the USA in the 1930s and 1950s, she was
repeatedly refused access to hotels and restaurants, which only accepted white patrons.
If Wong and Baker had to flee from the USA to eventually meet success in Berlin,
London, or Paris, it was not because they escaped racism but rather because the political
economies of ethnic minorities and show business were quite different in Europe. They
came to an ethnically homogeneous society where there was at that time no African or
Asian community, and where racial issues were much more abstract. ‘Negrophilia’ in Paris
made ‘black’ music and ‘black’ dances very fashionable (Archer-Straw 2000), but this did
not mean that there was less racial prejudice in Europe. In Europe, Baker and Wong
simply did not threaten any social or political order. On the contrary, their ‘status as
entertainers and visitors helped to contain anxieties’ (Leong 2006, 15). Being much more
630 J.-F. Staszak

successful in Paris and London than in their home country, Baker and Wong
unintentionally allowed the French and British audiences to focus on racism in the USA,
while drawing attention away from European colonial societies. Besides, Wong and
Baker’s performances made sense in the USA according to the constraining contexts and
traditions of yellowface and blackface burlesque. In Europe, the audience recoded their
shows ‘at the intersection of ethnographic, music hall and modernist cultures’ (Henderson
2003, 119), and respected them as authentic or avant-garde artistic performances. Wong
and Baker were given a new (but nevertheless racialized) political status and cultural
meaning which eventually boosted their career.
Wong may have said that she ‘found absolutely no race prejudice in Europe’ (Motion
Pictures, October 1931), and Baker may have thought in 1924 that ‘it is normal to be black
in Paris’ (Baker and Bouillon 1976, 56). It is unlikely, however, that non-white people
living in France or French Empire shared their privileged experiences and agreed with
their optimistic statements. The Chicago Defender (5 January 1952) suggested that Baker
‘is thinking only about herself. She should stop and consider what France is doing to some
45,000,000 Negroes in its colonies.’ Wong more realistically specified: ‘once you are a
success, color means nothing’ (The New Movie Magazine, July 1932).
Did Wong and Baker have any idea that their European stardom and repeated
statements celebrating the absence of prejudice in France or England could be
instrumentalized to dissimulating or legitimizing colonial and racial oppression? Baker
never criticized French colonization, but she fought for Civil Rights in the USA and
against Apartheid in South Africa. Her persistent silence, repeatedly criticized by the
Afro-American press, perhaps suggests that she knew there was a political line she could
not cross without putting her European career at risk.

Staging race
Wong and Baker reached stardom in spite of their ethnicity but also because of it. Wong
never played a white character. Her ethnicity (real or staged) was systematically the main
feature of her characters, and of the plot. Baker, on the stage or on the screen, was not just
any dancer or actress. She was, especially before the 1930s, a black dancer, performing the
so-called African, black, ‘savage,’ or indeed any kind of exotic dances.
The exoticization of Wong and Baker relies on the denial of their American identity. ‘Go
back to Africa!’ protestors shouted at Baker’s show in Finland,6 even if they were well aware of
her American citizenship. Wong was called a Chinese and journalists were surprised to meet a
woman dressed like any American woman and who was fluent in English. The same denial is
illustrated by the doors of the Grand Sveavägen movie theater in Stockholm, opened in 1933.
They figure a female star for each continent: Swedish actress Greta Garbo stands for Europe,
Hollywood star Joan Crawford for America, Wong for Asia, and Baker for Africa. Associating
Baker with Africa and Wong with Asia suggested that a non-white person could not be
American, and offered a means of finding representatives of the African and Asian continents
when there were no African or Asian stars. Geography serves here as a (false) proof of the
universal dimension of cinema, present on and addressing each continent, and as a (true)
instrument of racialization. The Hollywood and La Brea Gateway gazebo, erected in Los
Angeles in 1994 and presented as a tribute to Hollywood’s multiethnicity, plays on the same
trick, with its eroticized and racialized caryatid statues of Dorothy Dandridge, Dolores Del Rio,
Mae West, and, again, Anna May Wong. Celebrating these four stars exonerates Hollywood
from its (past?) racism while their statues nevertheless perpetuate sexist and racist stereotypes
(Staszak 2011).
Gender, Place and Culture 631

Yet Wong’s and Baker’s ethnicity was staged very differently, according to two
othering figures specific to Western colonial ideology: the savage and the barbarian
(Staszak 2009). On the Grand Sveavägen’s doors, Baker wears no shoes and dances half-
naked among tropical plants. She smiles and her body language seems spontaneous and
almost childish. Wong stands in front of a Chinese pagoda; her body is a little more
covered with an extravagant oriental outfit; she seems more serious, her gestures more
contrived and her dance more codified.
Supposedly African, Baker was staged as a ‘savage,’ especially before the 1930s. She
wore almost no clothes. Journalists reviewing her shows often compared Baker to a plant or an
animal, with which she would have a special connection (Figure 2). She was considered part of
nature and not displaying any culture or learning. Her dance was not seen as sophisticated or
codified but as free and childish. Baker was well aware of the prejudice she had to face:
‘People think I come from the jungle. The primitive instinct, isn’t it? The madness of the flesh,
the tumult of the senses, the delirious animality . . . What people didn’t write! White
imagination is quite something when it comes to Black people’ (Baker and Sauvage 1949, 71).
Wong being Asian and, more specifically, Chinese was not considered a ‘savage’ but a
‘barbarian.’ Orientals were seen as falsely civilized. Wong often posed in Chinese scenes

Figure 2. Josephine Baker and Chiquita.


Source: Studio Piaz (Paris, c.1930 – 1932).
Note: Offered to Baker by the director of the Casino de Paris, the pet cheetah appeared with her in the
revue Paris qui remue (1930). Chiquita was a male animal but wore a typically female exotic name
and a diamond necklace. In the picture, Baker is ‘dressed’ just like Chiquita; both sit on the same
level and seem to communicate through eye contact; both are said to come from the same tropical
savage place.
632 J.-F. Staszak

with luxurious Asian costumes and long red nails, surrounded by Chinese artifacts
(Figure 3). Her behavior was presented as following strange rules. As a Madame Butterfly
or a Chinese doll, she was too passive and obedient. As a Dragon Lady, she was too
dominant and sadistic. In both cases, she was too sophisticated – whereas Baker was not
sophisticated enough.
Baker’s performances changed at the end of the 1920s, Wong’s at the end of the 1930s.
For both of them, it had to do with aging: the danse sauvage or the Madame Butterfly
characters were less appropriate for a woman in her thirties. For a while, Wong played
Dragon ladies and then turned to more positive (if no less stereotyped) characters
(Daughter of Shanghai, 1937; King of Chinatown, 1939). The invasion of Manchuria
(1931) and the attack of Pearl Harbour (1941) changed or rather polarized the image of
Asian people in the USA. Japan became the supervillain and China a victim and potential
ally. Hollywood produced war propaganda movies that gave Wong the opportunity to play
heroic figures of Chinese women fighting the Japanese invader (Bombs over Burma, 1942;
The Lady from Chungking, 1942).
The change in Baker’s performances was due to her own choices rather than the
political context. After 1928, Baker understood that she had to bring something new to the

Figure 3. Studio photograph of Anna May Wong.


Source: E.R. Richee (Paramount Pictures, c. 1924).
Note: This exoticizing portrait was shot for the promotion of Peter Pan (H. Brenan, 1924), a movie
in which Wong plays the part of Tiger Lily, an ‘Indian Princess.’ Tellingly, the legend on the back of
the photograph explains that Wong is presented ‘as she appears in the delicate costume of her own
people.’
Gender, Place and Culture 633

audience, which was getting tired of her danse sauvage. But Baker’s decision was also
based on her reluctance to capitalize on the Black Venus myth. She wanted – and
succeeded – to be acknowledged as an artist, and not only a black artist. From the time of
the Casino de Paris’ revue (1930 –1931), she recorded her first songs in French and began
to wear sophisticated gowns on stage. Her shows did not refer to her race anymore: ‘she is
whitening before our very eyes,’ wrote a journalist reviewing her performance (Le
Journal, 9 October 1930). This may explain the audience’s negative response to her
performance in New York (1936). According to Maude Russel (1897 – 2001), who
performed with Baker in Shuffle Along (1921): ‘at that time, nobody wanted to see a
colored girl being twirled around with four white boys and dressed up like a queen. All
those people were saying: “She’s black, trying to be white, why don’t she go on and be her
original self like she was in Shuffle Along, when she was stickin’ her fanny out and looking
ugly?”’7 Baker received French citizenship in 1937. In her last movie Fausse alerte (The
French Way, Baroncelli, 1940), she plays the role of a Parisian Cabaret director and
performer, ‘a role from which any and all racial lines and identifications were completely
erased’ (New York Amsterdam News, 13 August 1952) – an inconceivable casting in
Hollywood until the 1980s (Staszak, 2014).
How did Wong and Baker define their racial identity? Wong never pretended to escape
from her community, and confessed to be ‘growing more Chinese each passing year’ (Los
Angeles Time, 9 September 1934). She was very proud of her ancestry and embraced her
Chinese origins. She spoke for the Chinese-American community and in defense of China
when it was invaded by Japan.
Baker was less consistent, especially before the 1940s. In her biographies and
interviews, she claimed in several instances to have a Spanish father, yet there is no
evidence or testimony to ground this assertion. She liked to wear white make-up and to be
lit in a way that made her look paler, and was ‘obsessed with [ . . . ] skin-lightening
products’ (Jules-Rosette 2007, 145). After 1928, she had no more special connection with
‘her’ community in France or in the USA. Baker, through ‘her effort to become white,’
seemed to be on the verge of ‘crossing the line’ of racial passing8 (Afro-American,
20 August 1927).
Nevertheless, Baker did not avoid racial issues in her early interviews. Racism and the
taboo of miscegenation are the central themes of the novel she coauthored in 1931 (Mon
Sang dans tes veines [My Blood in your veins]), whose plot takes place in the USA. Before
the 1940s, Baker’s antiracism went no further than her abstract, sentimental, and rather
depoliticized statements. But during the Second World War, she worked undercover for
the French Resistance and supported the cause of General de Gaulle against the Germans.
Nazi (and Vichy government’s) racism and anti-Semitism (she was married until 1942 to a
Jewish Frenchman whose religion she had embraced) made her more aware of racial issues
and more conscious of her own belonging and responsibilities. In the 1950s, she refused to
play for a segregated audience in the USA and became a Civil Rights activist. She spoke at
the March on Washington in 1963, next to Martin Luther King (Dubziak 1994; Regester
2000). She adopted 12 multiethnic orphans whom she used to call her ‘rainbow tribe,’
which apparently ‘was not a family at all but a social and quasi-religious utopian
movement’ (Jules-Rosette 2007, 185).
If these two women were subalterns because of their race, they could undoubtedly
speak. And Wong understood how crucial it was: ‘I was 17 when a truck-driver yelled
“Hey, Chink, out-of-the-way!” I blazed back at him. It was then that my life began’ (Los
Angeles Time, 9 September 1934).
634 J.-F. Staszak

Eroticizing the exotic


The exoticization of Wong and Baker operates not only through their racialization but also
through their eroticization. The two processes are indeed entangled, as shown by a cover
of a German magazine (Figure 4) figuring both stars. Wong’s skin and even her dress are
painted in a vivid yellow. Baker’s body is dark black, contrasting with her white torn shirt.
Both of them are half-naked. They contrast with the supposedly German man standing in
the background. White, male, and dressed in a very formal suit, he is the spectator of their
exotic and erotic show. The Grand Sveavägen’s doors provide the same evidence of the
intersection of race and gender. Whereas the two white stars are fully dressed, Wong’s legs
and belly and Baker’s breast are exposed.
Baker’s nudity, since her first appearance on stage and till the end of the 1930s, was
part of her persona and of her success. Baker’s films were generally more prudish than her
shows. La Sirène des tropiques [Siren of the tropics] (Etievant and Nalpas, 1927) though is
an exception. Baker plays the role of a native of the French West Indies. In a memorable
scene, she is a stowaway on board a ship sailing to France. She finds a bathtub in a cabin,
takes all her clothes off, and enjoys a bath. If the film was not censored, it was because the
actress was black, but probably also because the scene does not have an explicit erotic

Figure 4. Simplicissimus, German magazine, 28 May 1928.


The text comments, in Broken Berlin German: ‘A part of the black continent and a handful of light
from the East. Kids, it gives a daring cultural twilight’.
Gender, Place and Culture 635

dimension. It has more to do with the burlesque tradition of the vaudeville show, and she
acts so naturally and playfully in the bath scene that it makes it almost childish and
exuberant, exonerating (purposely?) the audience for its voyeuristic gaze.
Wong’s nudity is not rare but more partial. Quite often, she wears a fancy dress or an
exotic costume, which does not cover all of her body, leaving her legs, belly, arms, and
shoulders exposed. Her body was shown for the first time on screen in The Thief of Bagdad
(Walsh, 1924), featuring the first male star of the time: Douglas Fairbanks (1883 –1939).
Her role lasted a few minutes, but she made a great impression because of the eroticism of
the scene. Both Wong and Fairbanks are half-naked, and he sadistically points a knife into
the back of the very helpless Mongol slave she played.
Wong performed her first erotic and exotic dance in an Anglo-German movie Piccadilly
(Dupont, 1927). Most of the story of the film takes place in a London cabaret. Valentine Wilmot,
the manager of the club, needs to hire a new female performer for his show. In the scullery of the
cabaret, he notices Shosho (played by Wong), dancing on a table to entertain her fellow
dishwashers. Gilmot hires her to be his new star and eventually falls in love with her.
In the scene of the kitchen dance, the erotic intersection of race, gender, and class is very
obvious. Gilmot stands at the door, unnoticed. His gaze is intrusive and penetrating. When
Shosho’s eyes finally turn to the door, she panics, stops dancing, and jumps from the table on
which she was performing her show. Gilmot (and Shosho) knows he will have her whenever
he wants, because Shosho is a woman, because she is Chinese, and because she is poor. As
such, she is erotic prey. Her performance on the stage of the cabaret is quite different.
Shosho is dancing for wealthy European clients. The musicians are Chinese. Wong’s dance
owes much more to Asian traditions, even if its authenticity is questionable. Her costume
looks Oriental, Chinese, or Thai, and she is half-naked (Figure 3). The eroticism of the show
is justified by and relies on Shosho’s, deliberately staged exoticization.
In many of their movies, Baker and Wong played the role of a showgirl who at some
point in the story had to perform an exotic dance. In these scenes, the film is edited by way
of shots and reverse shots, showing alternatively the near-naked body of the performer and
the mesmerized faces of the (mainly white male) audience. The relevance of these
mandatory scenes, which form the climax of the movie, relies on the eroticization of the
female exotic body, first by providing an intradiegetic justification for its exhibition,
second by enhancing the mimetic desire of the extradiegetic spectator.

Queering race and gender


Both Wong and Baker were flappers. They bobbed their hair, wore short skirts, smoked
cigarettes, and drove cars. Just like Louise Brooks (1906 – 1985), they were independent
women challenging Western patriarchy. But unlike Brooks, Baker and Wong were not
seen as ‘normal’ women because this norm was constructed as white. Black feminists have
shown how normative white feminity resulted in the defeminization of ‘colored’ women,
stereotyped as bad mothers or having an insatiable sexuality. Accordingly, Baker and
Wong never played the role of a mother 9, and their sexuality was often portrayed as out of
control.
In Princesse Tam Tam (Gréville, 1935), Baker plays the role of Aouı̈na, a Tunisian
girl, who comes to Paris. In a most revealing scene, she is having dinner in a cabaret. Her
jealous rival, a European woman, is planning to make a fool of her. This white woman
assumes that an exotic girl’s sensuality is so powerful that she cannot master her own
desires. So she makes Aouı̈na drink while watching the conga dance. She hopes that
Aouı̈na’s real uncontrolled nature will break out. She will not be disappointed, except that
636 J.-F. Staszak

the audience will love Aouı̈na’s show: she takes her shoes and her dress off and jumps on
the stage to perform an erotic and exotic dance.
Baker’s oversexualization and erotic power over her male partners challenge her
gender identity. In a review of the Revue Nègre (1925), journalist Pierre de Reigner
confesses to be much confused. He asks: ‘Is it a man? Is it a woman?’ ‘Is she black, is she
white?’ (Baker and Sauvage 1927, 20 –23). It is not even entirely clear whether she is a
human being: he compares Baker to a baby giraffe, a snake, a kangaroo, a banana. In his
own words, she could just as well be a saxophone or an ectoplasm. In the journalist and the
audience’s minds, Baker blurs the lines between blacks and whites, men and women,
human beings and animals, living creatures and inanimate objects.
Nevertheless, she remains very exciting. Baker’s dance not only confuses her identity;
it challenges the audience. Who, finally, are these white males, supposedly heterosexuals,
who are overcome with lust for a person whose gender they cannot even identify? Baker
being not recognizable as a woman or even as a human being because she is not white, the
scandal of the Revue Nègre is not only in her performance but as well in the audience’s
enthusiastic response to her ambiguous sex appeal; her success challenges and threatens
gender and sexual norms.
The same ambiguity characterizes a scene of Piccadilly, when Shosho brings Wilmot
to Limehouse, the former London Chinatown, to show him the oriental costume (Figure 1)
she has chosen for her exotic and erotic performance. Shosho refuses to try it on and asks
Jim, her Chinese partners and one of her musicians, to put it on – so Wilmot can test the
appealing effect of the outfit. Jim looks rather bored with the situation, but Wilmot looks
more embarrassed. Pretending the exotic costume can fit a male Chinese as well as a
female one, Shosho is assuming that Wilmot’s (and the audience’s?) desire for her has
more to do with her ethnicity than with her gender.
The exoticization of Wong and Baker challenges the heterosexuality of white male
spectators. Accordingly, Baker and Wong’s heterosexuality was questioned. There is a
persistent rumor that Wong had an affair with Marlene Dietrich (Hodges 2004, 86 sq.).
According to Jean-Claude Baker (Baker and Chase 2001), Josephine had several ‘lady
lovers’ and several of her male lovers and even her two last husbands were homosexual.
He has been the first (and the only person so far) to write about Baker’s bisexuality or
lesbianism, but her popularity among gays, especially at the end of her career, is
unquestioned (e.g., Rose 1989), even by Baker herself, who said of the gay community:
‘they are my children’ (Baker and Chase 2001, 410).
My interest is less in Baker or Wong’s actual sex lives than in their queer image in the
LGBTQ community (Baker and Chase 2001; Hodges 2004; Rose 1989), for which their
queerness mainly relies on their ability and willingness to transgress gender, social, and
racial norms. But what transgressions are we talking about? On screen or on stage, they did
not break Western stereotypes about black or Asian women. On the contrary, their roles
and interpretations were perfect illustrations or even caricatures of these stigmatizing
stereotypes. I suggest that this caricatured dimension is the answer to my question.
Baker’s banana dance did not try to be realistic. Her ‘dress’ and her moves referred
less to her Afro-American identity or sexuality than to a European fantasy about it.
Baker was a black dancer in blackface. She went so far in incarnating racial and gender
stereotypes that, according to Jean-Claude Baker, ‘onstage she looked like a drag queen.
A badly made-up drag queen – glitter over her makeup, too much mascara, extravagant
gowns that exaggerated the feminine, extravagant gesture [ . . . ] Later, here in the U.S., it
would be called “vogueing”.’10 French poet Jean Cocteau once said to Baker: ‘you are
the opposite of Barbette [an American female impersonator who met tremendous
Gender, Place and Culture 637

success in Europe in the late 1920s]. He hides everything, you show everything’ (Baker
and Bouillon 1976, 92). Barbette’s performance was all about concealing the secrets of
his female impersonation while Baker’s was about showing them off. She admiringly
acknowledged Barbette as her ‘rival.’ Baker was ‘a female impersonator who happened
to be a woman’ (Rose 1989, 253).
Baker mastered the entire repertoire, beginning her career playing the role of a man in
blackface in the Broadway revue Chocolate Dandies (1924) and in La Folie du Jour
(Folies Bergère, 1926). In La Joie de Vivre (Casino de Paris, 1932), she was a bandleader,
wearing a tuxedo and a top hat. In her final show (Bobino, 1975), she drove a Harley-
Davidson in a male motorcycle outfit. And to begin with, did not the erected bananas of her
famous skirt (Folies Bergère, 1926) play on some phallic ambiguity (Rose 1989)?
Baker loved cross-dressing and drag shows. She went several times to Madame Arthur
and Chez Michou, famous Parisian cabarets where male artists were impersonating female
stars – including Baker herself (Baker and Chase 2001). Baker was pleading to be imitated
(Baker and Bouillon 1976, 74), and called the famous French transsexual Coccinelle
(1931 – 2006) ‘my daughter’ (Baker and Chase 2001, 432). ‘I like transvestites very much!
This is real theater! And they are the ones giving the best imitation of me!’ (Baker and
Bouillon 1976, 310), Baker said, acknowledging the special connection between her
performance and cross-dressing. According to Lynne Carter (1924 –1985), a famous
American female impersonator, Baker gave him three taxicabs full of Balenciaga and Dior
gowns, tutored him in phonetic French and ‘coached him in polishing his versions of her
routines’ (Gay News, 15 December 1978).
Why was Baker such an obvious and consenting target? Maybe Baker was more aware
of the masquerade of her own performance because she had to deal not only with gender
but also with race, leading her to a reflexive and critical understanding of the parodist
nature of her shows. It is also that racial and gender cross-dressings were essential to the
cultural and scenic rhetorics of minstrelsy, a tradition still very relevant to black
performers in the 1920s, mastered and appropriated by Baker (Garber 1992).
As for Wong, she did not simply try to be or to look like an authentic Chinese woman
on screen. Mastering and playing on Western stereotypes, she was overacting Chinese
otherness. Her performance was based on a self-exoticization which could be called
‘yellow yellowface’ and ‘could potentially demystify the stereotype’ (Wang 2007, 325).
Wong’s expertise on Oriental stereotypes and performances was used by Hollywood
producers, who hired her to coach white actresses playing ‘Chinese’ roles in yellowface
(Leibfried and Lane 2003, 90). And she played on gender stereotypes as well. Just as
Baker, she loved wearing a tuxedo. According to Margaret Cho, a contemporary American
comedian and stand-up performer who herself challenges gender, sex, and race norms and
stereotypes, Wong ‘is a tremendous gay icon, worshipped by drag Queens.’11

Baker and Wong’s audiences and agencies


Parodist performances may have a subversive dimension, but not when Dustin Hoffman,
playing Tootsie (S. Pollack, 1982), reinforces gender and sexual dichotomies (Butler 1993,
126). Do Wong and Baker’s performances ‘displace the very gender norms that enable the
repetition itself’ (Butler 1990, 148)? Or are they ‘functional in providing a ritualistic
release for a heterosexual economy that must constantly police its own boundaries against
the invasion of queerness and [ . . . ] actually fortifies the heterosexual regime in its self-
perpetuating task’ (Butler 1993, 126)?
638 J.-F. Staszak

Ambivalent answers can be found in Baker and Wong’s statements about their own
performances: Wong was rather embarrassed and unhappy with the roles she had to play,
complaining that she ‘had not been true to [her] people’ (Citizen News, 2 May 1958), while
Baker never made such statements. But their shows and movies being open texts, their
interpretation relies on the audience’s involvement. Theoretical discussions on
performance/performativity and agency may be biased by focusing on the performer
and neglecting the audience.
The Chinese-American community and the Chinese government protested repeatedly
against Wong’s movies. Wong regarded the critics as legitimate, and apologized, saying
she ‘had to take what is offered’ (Hollywood, January 1938). Indeed, her successful
incarnation of the Dragon Lady may have helped to deepen and spread this stigmatizing
and long-lasting stereotype (Staszak 2011), as suggested by the famous Terry and the
Pirates American comic strip (Caniff, 1934 –1946), whose notable Dragon Lady character
was much inspired by Wong’s performances. ‘Forgetting Anna May Wong’ (Nguyen Tu
2004) remains a contemporary issue.
Not being a major star, Wong had little say in the movies she was featuring in, other
than to refuse a role if she thought it was too denigrating to the Chinese community – as
she did for The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Capra, 1933) – or by using her costumes as
‘a pattern of resistance to the hegemonic system that so often abused her’ (Metzger 2006,
11). Her agency was more obvious in her theater performances, unfortunately less
documented. The press can still give us an idea of her more personal performances there
and of the audiences’ response. On 20 July 1939, she was performing in Sydney. Her show
included a sketch entitled At the Barricade, which ‘dealt with the situation in Tientsin’
(a port in North China where the Japanese army blockaded the foreign concessions on
14 June 1939, causing a major international incident) (Sydney Morning Herald, 21 July
1939). The sketch, clearly Wong’s decision, shows how quick she was to pick up an
opportunity to plead for England and China: the Japanese blockade was an answer to the
British refusal to hand over four Chinese nationalists accused of having murdered a
Japanese official. The Australian journalist did not like it: ‘it was unexceptionable
propaganda,’ and he even entitled his review of her show: A Propagandist Sketch.
Wong’s sketch proves her political awareness and commitment, but the journalist’s
response reflects the reluctance of the (white) audience to consider her as more than an
exotic entertainer, and to let a ‘Chinese’ actress cross the line between show business and
politics. Leong (2006, 22) is right in celebrating ‘Wong’s ability to develop a role for herself
by negotiating the international politics of the global film industry and to construct a public
identity out of the entangled web of national, racial, political, and cultural identities,’ but the
audience’s response to her accomplishments in this regard may actually have been limited.
Baker’s performances did not at first have much specific echo within the African-
American community, and the problem was less in her danse sauvage during the 1920s
than with her performances after the 1930s. She was suspected of mimicking white stars,
mingling with white people and hence betraying her racial identity (Regester 2000; Rose
1989, 172). In Europe, her performances between 1925 and 1929 may have been seen as
reinforcing the exoticization and eroticization of black women. But from the 1930s
onward, she proved that an Afro-American artist could successfully (except in the USA)
perform nonracialized roles, blurring racial lines on the stage. Her much respected status
after the 1940s rather exemplified the empowerment of black women.
Baker was indeed more successful in displacing social norms and escaping racialized
roles. First, because Baker chose to lead her career in and from Europe, when Wong
decided to go back to the USA at the beginning of the 1930s. European audiences –
Gender, Place and Culture 639

especially in Berlin, London, and Paris – were more attracted by and receptive to the
(ironic dimension of) (self-)exoticizing and eroticizing performances of an American
‘colored’ woman in the 1920s, and more appreciative of Baker’s attempt to de-exoticize
her persona in the 1930s.
Second, Baker more than Wong used the transgressive power of irony. Wong’s
performances were much more serious than Baker’s. Dying at the end of the movie and
embodying the figure of the hieratic impassible Asian, Wong was never cast in a comedy
and had very few opportunities to use her wit and dry humor. Asians were rarely comic
characters in American or European performing arts. Since the minstrel shows, it was
much more common to make fun of black characters, and Baker perpetuated this tradition.
When she was dancing in New York in 1924, she was the last girl of the chorus line,
traditionally expected to make the audience laugh. Her exuberant body language, her
hilarious smile and sparking eyes, and the jokes she made in her shows and movies
suggested not to take her at face value. Baker was less mocking of African dance or culture
than deriding her audience’s stereotypes. French-German poet Yvan Goll, reviewing
La Revue Nègre in 1926, understood the show as a ‘parody,’ noticing that the performers
‘are genuine actors,’ ‘laugh continuously,’ and ‘make fun of themselves.’12 A journalist of
the New York Amsterdam News (28 May 1936), defending Baker against ‘bitter criticisms
from Harlem,’ explained that ‘she is attempting to break down the stereotype of the Negro,
in and out of the theatre.’
Indeed, the primitive, savage woman Baker incarnated on stage could not be taken
seriously because she was conspicuously contradicted by Baker’s much celebrated
persona. As an American flapper, Baker was considered a hypermodern by European
audiences (Henderson 2003). Baker not only knew how to drive a car but could also fly a
plane. She was purposely playing on that contradiction: ‘Since on stage I have to be
savage, I do my best to become civilized in real life’ (Baker and Bouillon 1976, 73).
The comic and transgressive dimensions of Baker’s early performances allowed her to
play on and go behind stereotypes. She made the audience laugh with and (hence) at racial
stereotypes. Wong’s statements were unacceptable because they were assumed and taken
as political, Baker’s could more easily reach their target because they were an intricate but
discrete part of her hilarious performance. Who would suspect Baker of propaganda?
Third, Baker’s authorship is stronger than Wong’s. As an actress, Wong was following
a script written by someone else. Her performance had little flexibility and lacked agency.
Baker was more of a dancer than an actress, and was expected to add her own bodily touch
to the lines written by a choreographer. Furthermore, as a comic and Black dancer, she was
encouraged not to keep the step, and to apparently improvise a ‘free’ dance of her own,
uncontrolled and uncodified. ‘Baker’s rhetorical disavowal of control over her body
allowed her to seize a share of the author-function with her body’ (Kraut 2008). Baker’s
performance was very much in her persistent and recognizable personal signatures
(crossed-eyes, funky chicken, etc.), which precisely added the comic touch that forbade
taking her ‘primitive’ dance at face value. Baker’s agency and transgressions
paradoxically rely on the Western stereotype of the irresponsibility and irrepressibility
of the Black dancer. Whereas Wong was not expected to speak her own words, Baker
could dance her own steps.

Conclusion
The extent to which the audience appreciated the parodist dimension Baker and Wong gave
to their performances remains difficult to evaluate, especially when the audience’s response
640 J.-F. Staszak

may have varied according to gender and racial identities (Regester 2000), and in time
and place (Bergfelder 2004; Habel 2005). But there is no doubt that Wong and Baker’s
performances had a huge impact on racial imaginaries, especially in Europe. Most
Europeans had no direct experience of race before the 1950s. Many of them did not actually
see a real ‘colored’ person before attending ethnographic/exotic shows or viewing colonial
movies. There were very few Asian or black performers, and Wong and Baker’s images
were massively duplicated. They were the best-known Chinese-American and African-
American women in popular culture worldwide during the 1930s. European imagination
about ‘colored’ women was mostly made out of their performances. If Baker and Wong
may have had an important role in (re)producing racial and sexist stereotypes, they also had
the possibility of challenging them, depending on their agency and on the audience’s
(sometimes reluctant) response to their transgressions. The issue of the performer’s irony
and of the audience’s willingness to laugh with her and not at her turns out to be key.
My question about Baker and Wong’s agency in performing race and gender cannot be
easily answered. First, the answer varies according to the audience. Hence, the performer’s
agency relies in her ability to move from one place to another in order to find an audience
fitting her expectations. Second, Baker and Wong’s gender roles differed because of their
ethnicity. Both were exoticized and eroticized, but in different ways. Baker’s intersection
of race and gender left her a space for freedom and transgression, through dance and irony.
Wong’s performances were more serious and constrained. Third, going back to Butler’s
opposition between performance and performativity, we should wonder which Baker and
Wong we are talking about: the person as she appears in her private life or the persona
which she exhibits in her public life, the star in the so-called real life or the fictional
characters she played on stage and on screen?
The idea that there is a ‘real’ or more authentic Baker or Wong, who preexists and
informs her social or stage performances is naive, because, even far from the cameras and
in their private lives, they nevertheless had to perform their race and gender. In a sense,
Baker and Wong were hyperreal simulacra (Baudrillard 1994): copies for which there was
no original. There is no Baker or Wong who is not a ‘colored woman,’ no place where she
is not socialized as such. The intersection of race and gender is where the person, the
persona, and the character all take place. Wong and Baker’s agencies were about
performing these three roles differently, sometimes contradictorily. It gave them the
freedom to move between three intersections (or maybe six considering two locations:
Europe and the USA), instead of being locked in one. And, confronting their audience with
the evidence of their numerous identities, it also gave Baker and Wong the possibility of
denying their audiences taking any one of them for granted, and of challenging
stereotyping. Queering their racial and gender identities happened for Baker and Wong
through their ironic moves between the different intersections where they (were)
performed.

Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Juliet Fall, Claire Hancock, and Dan Hoffman for their most precious comments on
previous versions of this text, and with the anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions.

Notes
1. Baker and Wong were repeatedly labeled as ‘exotic’ by USA and French press since the 1920s.
2. Most of the information about Wong is found in Chan (2007), Hodges (2004), Leibfried and
Lane (2003), Leong (2005), and numerous interviews. Baker coauthored four autobiographies
Gender, Place and Culture 641

(Baker and Bouillon 1976; Baker and Rivollet 1935; Baker and Sauvage 1927, 1949). Two
interesting books have been cowritten by her last husband and her self-proclaimed adopted son
(Baker and Bouillon 1976; Baker and Chase 2001). This information is complemented and
corrected by recent academic studies on Baker (Jules-Rosette 2007; Lahs-Gonzales 2006; Rose
1989). I found most of the additional sources I quote in Bibliothèque Nationale de France
(Paris), Cinémathèque franc aise (Paris), New York Public Library for Performing Arts,
Margaret Herrick Library (Los Angeles), and UCLA libraries.
3. The Casino de Paris’ program for La Joie de Vivre (1932 – 1933), starring Baker, is among
Wong’s theater ephemera collection (New York Public Library for Performing Arts).
4. Unidentified clipping, 29 March 1932, Margaret Herrick Library.
5. Telegram sent by Wong to Hedda Hopper in 1946 (Margaret Herrick Library).
6. ‘Josephine Baker attacked by the Fascists on stage,’ Chicago Defender, 27 January 1934,
8 (quoted in Regester [2000, 53]).
7. Quoted in Baker and Chase (2001, 205).
8. Racial passing is the process through which a (black) person tries to be regarded as a member of
an ethnic group which is not her/his, causing (white) racial panic.
9. Except Wong in The Toll of the Sea, but just like Madame Butterfly, she abandons her child to
the white wife of her American ‘husband,’ before committing suicide.
10. In an interview in The Gay and Lesbian Review (September – October 2006). The cover of the
issue is dedicated to Baker.
11. In her blog (http://www.margaretcho.com/content/2004/12/). Interestingly, she compares Wong
to Baker. Nguyen Tu (2004, 18) identifies Wong as a ‘lesbian icon.’
12. Quoted in Henderson 2003, 124.

Notes on contributor
Jean-Franc ois Staszak received his PhD in Geography at the Sorbonne University. After serving as
an Associate Professor in the Universities of Amiens (Northern France) and Panthéon-Sorbonne
(Paris), he became a full Professor at the Geography Department of the University of Geneva
(Switzerland), where he has lived and taught since 2004. His early research focused on the history
and epistemology of Geography, and then with economic and cultural Geography. His most recent
work addresses geographical imaginaries in the fields of art and tourism, analyzing the geographical
othering process and especially the eroticization of the Exotic. His understanding of the articulation
of geographical representations, practices, and realities owes much to deconstructionist theories and
to postcolonial and gender studies.

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Positions 15 (2): 319– 343.

ABSTRACT TRANSLATIONS
Performar la raza y el género: la exotización de Josephine Baker y Anna May Wong
Josephine Baker y Anna May Wong son dos excepciones a la hegemonı́a blanca en los
principios del negocio del espectáculo. Se convirtieron en las primeras estrellas
afroamericana y chino-americana respectivamente en los años 20, y alcanzaron el
estrellato internacional a pesar de su etnicidad pero también debido a ellas. Sus carreras y
su éxito estuvieron basados en su exotización. El exotismo de Baker y Wong tuvo mucho
que ver con su etnicidad, pero también con su sexo y género. Sus danzas exóticas sobre el
escenario y en la pantalla pueden considerarse formas de espectáculos eróticos. Este
artı́culo muestra cómo el sexo, el género y la raza están enredados en sus pelı́culas y shows
burlescos. También discute las formas en que la agencia y la audiencia de quien performa
deben ser tenidas en cuenta y analiza cómo estas performances estuvieron apoyadas en
geografı́as imaginarias occidentales ası́ como conectadas a espacios simbólicos y
materiales.
Palabras claves: danza; exotismo; interseccionalidad; pelı́cula; performance; agencia

展演种族与性别:约瑟芬.贝克与黄柳霜的异国情调化
约瑟芬.贝克与黄柳霜是早期表演工业的白人霸权中的两个特例。她们自1920年
代开始成为第 一 位非裔和华裔的美国明星,尽管她们具有特殊的种族背景,却仍
成为国际名演员,并正是因为种族的因素使其成名。她们的事业与成就源自于异
国情调化。约瑟芬.贝克与黄柳霜的异国情调与种族大幅相关,并且关乎性和性
别。她们在舞台上表演的异国舞蹈,可被视为异国情调的表演形式。本文展示
性、性别与种族如何在她们的电影和百老汇表演中相互纠结。本文亦探讨表演者
的能动性及其阅听众必须纳入考量的方式,并分析这些展演如何同时植基于西方
的想象地理,及其与象征和物质空间相互连结的方式。
关键词:舞蹈; 异国情调; 相互交织性; 电影; 表演; 行动者

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