NEGROPHILIA

Art historian and curator Archer-Shaw investigates the degree to which black culture influenced Parisian artists in the 1920s.

The author is not primarily concerned with this subject’s more sensational or glamorized aspects, such as the sojourns in Paris during the 1920s of famous African-Americans like boxer Jack Johnson, entertainer Josephine Baker, or musician Sidney Bechet. Rather, her objective is to scrutinize the motives of some of the artists who exploited the new trend to promote their own ideas of modernity. She examines, for example, the move toward primitivism in the fine arts, making some not-unfamiliar observations about the degree to which African art and African-American culture in general worked its magic on figures as diverse as Brancusi, Man Ray, and Picasso. The vogue for primitivism, of course, reflected in large degree the weakening of the traditional philosophical bases of Western culture (particularly Christianity) in the wake of WWI, but Archer-Shaw is sensitive to the contradictions inherent in this movement. During the course of her explorations, for example, Archer-Shaw looks at the many ways in which Christianity’s metaphorical juxtaposition of black and white as visual representations of good and evil helped indirectly to shape European thinking on questions of race and ethnicity. In addition, she traces the development of stereotypical 19th-century images of blacks in the popular arts as they were passed down to 20th-century Europeans (largely as comic archetypes in the mode of Stepinfetchit). These are not necessarily new or startling observations at this stage in the history of African-American cultural studies, but Archer-Shaw does have her moments (particularly when she sticks with her specialty, which is art). Her forays into sociology are less impressive.

An imperfect but noble effort.