The ‘Chocolate Arabesques’ of Josephine Baker: Fitzgerald and Jazz Dance

This chapter shows how Fitzgerald often associates modern dance with the primitive. Fitzgerald’s engagement with African American culture is complex, and though the appropriation of African American culture for profit is punished in certain stories, Fitzgerald’s engagement with black culture is elsewhere more challenging. This chapter explores how performative identity (that is to say, the deliberate, theatrical presentation of inner traits) functions at the level of both form and content in the story ‘Babylon Revisited’, using the appearance of the dancer Josephine Baker’s ‘chocolate arabesques’ as a platform from which to explore how people perform identity. Fitzgerald prizes authenticity as the key attribute of any artist, dancer, or writer. In the story, Baker is berated for an inauthentic performance, merely delivering her routine without improvisation. This chapter argues that this sense of inauthentic artistry informed Fitzgerald’s self-conception as a popular short storyist. In Baker, Fitzgerald presents an artist who has bridged the ‘high’ and popular arts: ballet and cabaret. Fitzgerald sets up jazz dance as formulaic by satirising blind adherence to rules and fashions, and this chapter offers a reading of these rules as a metaphor for the short story conventions within which Fitzgerald toiled as a commercial short storyist.