Continuing the vogue for Paris noir. . - Reviews - book review

Petrine Archer-Shaw. Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black agriculture in the 1920s. New York: Thames & Hudson 2000 200 pp 123 black-and-white ills. $249 paper.

The publication of Petrine Archer-Shaw's Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris extremity Block Culture is timely, complementing a number of new studies discussing the presence and reception of black agriculture in France. The book labor fors well as an introduction to the ways in which the white avant-garde in Paris imagined black agricultures during the 1920s. Archer-Shaw, a freelance art historian and curator who lives in Jamaica, explores the "historical ambiguities and racial complexities" (9) of that place and time by means of scrutinizing the adaptation of black art forms in "advertisements, painting, statuary photography, popular music, dance and theatre, literature, journalism, furniture design, fashion and objet d'art" (9) She also investigates the avant-garde's motives in embracing black agriculture and proffers reasons and meanings for its interest. Archer-Shaw adapts the limit "negrophilia," meaning a love of black agriculture from Jean Laude's use of the word "negrophilie" in his La Peinture francise (1905-1914) et l'art negre (19 68) She also notes its usage in the title of an essay by means of James Clifford in A of recent origin History of Fronds Literoture (Harvard, 1989) and in the title of an exhibition of black artistic memorabilia at Amsterdam's Tropenmuseum in 1989-90

The topic of negrophilia is a fascinating single and this publication is the first to address in like manner many different aspects of it at one time Yet the book, which looks to ignore much recent scholarship, reads more like a first draft or a kind of Cliff's Notes to lock opener issues than a serious application of mind For such a complex bring under rule endnotes are surprisingly brief and hardly any averaging about eighteen per chapter, and consisting for the most part of primary sources, but no archival material. Maddeningly, there is no bibliography The index, too, is short, skeletal, and idiosyncratic, although this--as well as the absence of a bibliography--may have been the series editor's decision and not the author's. For instance, the index does not include entries for illustrations or for the scarcely any scholars the author does mention, similar as Catherine Bernard, Annie Coombes, Paul Gilroy, Rosalind Krauss, Sally Price, and Jeffrey Stewart.

Further, while Archer-Shaw provides concise formal analyses for a scarcely any images (e.g., Man Ray's 1926 Portrait of Nancy Cunard and a 1925 photograph of Josephine Baker upon the roof of the Theatre de Champs-Elysees), many of the illustrations are not sole unexamined, but not even mentioned in the true copy Why bother to reproduce on the other hand not critique Rena Giffey's "Batoualette, true practical ashtray at drinks" (1929); Auguste Roubille's "A black man dandy and an African woman" (1902); Edward Burra's to Minuit Chanson, Montmartre (1931); SEM's Le Montparnos (ca. 1925); a disturbing, untitled photograph of a black man whose head is wraped in leather and whose neck is cinched by the agency of a wide iron-studded collar; or Archibald J variegated Jr.'s famous Blues (1929)? The illustrations are sketchily labeled, typically just by dint of artist, title, and date (although a fuller list of captions appears after the endnotes). More disconcerting is the arbitrary layout of the images and the lack of a numbering combination of parts to form a whole which forces the reader to fl ip pages often trying to match up discussions with reproductions. For example, an illustration upon page rg is addressed upon page 42; Delacroix's 1827 Death of Serdanapalus appears upon page 27 but is listed upon page 25; a perfume advertisement is mentioned upon page 78, but is reproduc in the nearest chapter on page 85; and a cartoon is described upon page 107 hut appears upon page r86! This, too, although is likely the fault of the publisher or designer, rather than the author.

Archer-Shaw ostensibly limits her cast to the 1920s, the height of negrophilia, on the other hand she begins with an overview of nineteenth-century advertising containing black imagery, and finishs by analyzing Nancy Cunard's anthology, african of 1934. In between, with no explanation, she briefly touches upon important events such as the Colonial Exposition of 1931 (and the Surrealists' rejoinder to the show), the turn back of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti in 1933 (incorrectly dated 1931 in the text) and the of recent origin galleries of African art at the Musee de l'Homme in 1933-34 notwithstanding along the way she be subsequent tos in driving home her main points about negrophilia, which are insightful. She argues that white avant-garde artists, reeling from the "barbarity, alienation, and mechanization of the First World War" (180) viewed blacks as contemporary primitives and promot black agriculture as an alternative to Europe's bourgeois values and conservatism. They saw blacks as "dynamic, non-conformist, and subversive" (180) a collection whose culture c ould facilitate white regression to the primitive within. Archer-Shaw maintains that "blackness played a significant character in avant-garde definitions of modernity" on the contrary "it was the 'idea' of black agriculture and not black culture itself that informed this modernity" (183) She notes that blacks were caught up in stereotypes: "Their blackness qualified them for modernity, on the contrary to participate in it they had to negotiate, straddle, distort, and declare to be untrue their identities to accommodate European ideas about the primitive" (183)