40

This paper deals with the different roles played by J. Baker in her four French movies, shot between 1927 and 1940, and aims to analyze the imaginative geographies that she was performing, and her place in the film industry. Her first three movies tell the same story of a tropical Cinderella, who succeeds on stage but fails to integrate in French society. Baker’s characters were staged as erotic uncivilized women. The issue of race was important but remained carefully implicit. Baker’s exoticization took place within French colonial culture, reproducing its stereotypes and contradictions. Nevertheless, these movies were not uncritical of colonization. Her last movie eventually shows the successful integration of Baker in French society. J. Baker turns out to be a polysemic signifier, which may refer to different places and ideologies.