Second Skin

A playful, insanely ambitious text that seeks to rethink standard assumptions about Modernism, race and Josephine Baker in less than 200 pages . . . The book performs the admirable service of making Josephine Baker, the world she inhabited, and the skin that inhabited her seem stranger and more complex than they did before. * cinespect.com *
Opening up an entirely original line of inquiry that connects the architectural surfaces of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier to the shimmering allure of Josephine Baker's skin, this far-reaching study gives us a unique model of cross-cultural modernity in which psychoanalysis has a major role to play. With wit, verve, and precision, Anne Cheng's insights ensure that our understanding of early Modernism will never be the same and that our notions of phantasy and identification in art, film, and performance will be radically transformed. * Kobena Mercer, author of Welcome to the Jungle *
Anne Cheng's Second Skin offers an innovative, surprising, deeply transdisciplinary archaeology of aesthetic Modernism's relationship to race and its performances. Le Corbusier, Adolf Loos, Picasso, Paul Val rie, and Freud's psychoanalysis become partners in the is dizzying theoretical and historical analysis, where Cheng reveals how buildings, fashion, photographs, paintings, and dances express as well as construct our shared legacy of racial formations. * André Lepecki, author of Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement *
In a bravura meditation on the surfaces at the core of Modernism * skin, costume, canvas screen, ornament, patternAnne Anlin Cheng tracks the vicissitudes of visual pleasure in the encounter between Europe and its others. La Baker was not simply a lightning rod for exotic stereotypes, Cheng suggests, but instead a 'dynamic fulcrum' whose performances captivated because they staged the crosscurrents that define Modernist style, its dangerous intimacies between primitive and civilized, animal and machine, organic and plastic.Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora *
This brilliant, provocative, eye-opening work provides a powerful account of racial fetishism and its centrality to the development of Modernist style, thus forwarding a stunning new theory of Modernism in its entirety. * Sianne Ngai, author of Ugly Feelings *
Anne Cheng's brilliant new book, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, asks to be undressed. . . . [I]f one can't get inside Baker, one can move all around her, and critical movement * the electric motion of the critic's mindwill be a hallmark of Second Skin: we're presented with a generative and moving array of texts, from fashion to film to art to architecture to performance. The surfaces emerge in a vast and associative web, connecting the bars and stripes of prison uniforms, bathing suits, architectural exteriors, and bar-room floors, for example, and reach across disciplinary boundaries, as Cheng works to complicate an aesthetics built atop the black female body.Modern Drama *