In November 2021, dancer, singer and war spy Josephine Baker was interred at the Pantheon mausoleum in Paris. The lack of those of African descent within the Pantheon has been notable; moreover, the honour was clearly a male preserve, with just five women having been previously included. Josephine is the first black woman to receive this accolade, and it is particularly significant given that she is non-French. Ongoing arguments concerning her role as the ‘good migrant’ who can mediate difference within republican assimilationism must not take away from her achievements and stature as a European feminist icon. Black women artistes in the West have always been integral to the formation of worldviews that we would broadly define as modern and progressive in terms of how we understand female identity. However, many have not received due recognition, or they have fallen into anonymity with the passing of time and their histories are yet to be examined and explored. For example, the emergence of the feminist movement in 1920s France cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration the impact and influence of black women performers in the West during the early twentieth century. By the 1920s, women had dropped their corsets and had begun to discuss what we can term as their sexual revolution, which included debates concerning the place of women in the rapidly changing world. Many early-twentieth-century black women artistes can be thought of as sexual modernists and radicals who defiantly reconceived what it meant to be a woman. They share the key trait that they generally occupied an outsider space. Perhaps for this reason, they were freer to be creative and daring, ushering in exciting societal and cultural changes. They defiantly redefined notions of modern womanhood through sexual expression, sociability, and creative and intellectual experimentation.

From the 1920s through to the 1940s, transnational black and mixed-race women performers staged modernist representations of black female subjectivity. These bordercrossing cosmopolitans embodied the various contours of an avant-garde zeitgeist that connected Europe and the Americas, bringing together art, intellectualism and politics in order to propose ways of being that were distinctly modern. Josephine Baker is perhaps the most well-known black woman modernist of that era. The African American performer lived in Paris from 1925.