The scholarship that has accumulated around Baker’s Paris career has grappled extensively with the question of what it meant for a Black American woman to build a career on performances that were framed in primitivist terms by the audiences and critics who received them. The honest answer is complex: the primitivist framing was real, it was dehumanizing in its implications (reducing Black people to natural, pre-rational creatures in contrast to civilized Europeans), and it was also a vehicle through which Baker achieved things she could not have achieved in America. She used what was available to her; what was available to her was partly constructed from racist ideology; she navigated this with more intelligence and self-awareness than the audiences who brought that ideology to the theater.
The specific performance of the Danse Sauvage, which Baker did in La Revue Nègre with her partner Joe Alex, was a carefully choreographed number that the audience experienced as primitivism but that Baker and Alex executed as professional performers with trained bodies and precise timing. The apparent abandon was controlled. The apparent wildness was constructed. The audiences who saw something primitive and natural were watching something rehearsed and refined.
This was always the specific nature of Baker’s achievement: her precision was invisible precisely because the audiences expected to see wildness. The celebrity that grew from these performances was real, however it was generated, and Baker spent the following decades using that celebrity for purposes that the primitivist audiences who had created it could not have anticipated.