Hanna Diamond has written the first account that successfully reveals Josephine Baker’s full contribution to the French Resistance movement during World War Two. At this very busy talk, she animated the main points of her fascinating life, especially focusing on what she did to help De Gaulle from North Africa.
Diamond started her talk by giving us a brief summary of Josephine Baker’s life before the war. She told us how she was spotted dancing in New York and invited to travel to France to work as a dancer there. She was an overnight success in France and went on to become a musical hall performer as well as a film star. What marked her as different from the other African American performers who travelled to France before the Second World War to find work was that she chose to remain there when war broke out in 1939, in spite of being warned that she could be directly targeted. What I liked about this section of the talk was that Diamond gave us enough information about Baker’s early life for us to be able to envision her as a person, whilst also leaving herself enough time to really get into the details of her wartime contribution.
During the war, Baker played an important role in facilitating the Gaullist resistance movement in North Africa whilst managing to never fall under suspicion. During the talk, Diamond didn’t really explain how Baker managed to remain under the radar, however in the Q and A section at the end, she said that she was generally underestimated due to being a musical hall star, African American and a woman! Josephine Baker’s “stardom helped to open doors” for her so she was able to get access to lots of different sources of information and could feed this back to those people actually making decisions. She also physically carried information across borders, as it was much easier for her, as a performer, to get visas than it was for other people to get them.
I thought that Diamond’s talk was very well-structured and well-organised. It seemed to me like she probably covered all of the key points of her book, and I really enjoyed hearing about Baker’s possible motivations for playing such a significant role in the French resistance movement. However, this amount of structure and organisation did make the talk quite lecture-like and I felt like Diamond didn’t engage with the audience as well as she could have done. Whilst she did use a slideshow, I would have appreciated some more visuals at times, for, as she said at the end, no one knew what De Gaulle looked like as they only heard him on the website, however everyone in wartime France would have immediately recognised Josephine Baker’s face.
Overall, I found this talk very interesting and it has made me want to learn even more about Josephine Baker, both her contribution to the French Resistance movement and the part she played in the American Civil Rights movement later on. If you want to learn more about her too, you can read Hanna Diamond’s book Josephine Baker’s Secret War and discover more about “the African American star who fought for France and freedom.”
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
