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This excerpt is from her newly-published biography of Josephine Baker, "A Fighting Diva." It tells the intriguing story of Baker's travels to Japan, her close friendship with the Japanese humanitarian Miki Sawada, and her adoption of a pair of Japanese orphans. Even after she achieved celebrity in France, Baker's experience as a Black American led her to develop an antiracist philosophy at a worldwide level, and she combined political militancy in the public sphere with a personal commitment through the formation of an international multiracial household of children, the "Rainbow Tribe."

Can we think of racialized skin as dress, as a form of fashion-consciousness? Instead of seeing this question as trivializing the history of denigrating corporeality attached to the raced subject, through a reading of Josephine Baker this paper argues for the importance of separating "skin" from a biological schema in order to consider its ability to reflect and activate different states of racialized consciousness and corporeality. Through a study of Baker's intricate and performative relations to various fashionable surfaces—from modern buildings to modern dress to her own shimmering skin—this paper traces Baker's spectacular invention of "skin-fashion" and its importance for how we think about style and racial visibility today.

African American dancer, Josephine Baker, and Spanish Gitana dancer Carmen Amaya, synthesized various identity categories in what I call modern synthesis, an idea expanded on from Monica Miller's article, "The Black Dandy as Bad Modernist." Expanding on various scholars including Brenda Dixon Gottschild, I argue Baker emerged from a tragic/comic context of African American performance which developed from slavery to vaudeville while Amaya came from flamenco, which, according to William Washabaugh in his Flamenco: Passion, Politics, and Popular Culture, exhibits simultaneous opposition as it simultaneously exists within various identity categories and qualities in flamenco culture. Emerging from these dissonant traditions, Amaya and Baker merge male and female stylization into hybrid-gendered performances in successful transatlantic careers that suggested possibilities beyond what was acceptable for women of color in their era.