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A review by aegagrus
Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s by Petrine Archer-Shaw
3.5
Negrophilia explores the relationships between Black people, Black art, and the white Avant Garde movements which flourished in 1920s Paris. Those who claimed to reject Western modernity (Dadaists, Surrealists, and others) saw Blackness and Black culture as a potent aesthetic language, a reservoir of "primitive" vitality, or an instrument for subverting the established ethical and cultural order. Such Primitivism was always founded upon racist stereotypes, but Archer-Straw is attentive to the nuanced and contradictory ways in which both white 'negrohiles' and Black Parisians (many of them American expatriates) navigated these cultural currents. Her assessments of individual personalities are critical but fair. Moreover, her narrow geographical and temporal focus allows her to address both direct encounters/relationships and diffuse cultural trends, providing important context to her individual examples.
Negrophilia's greatest strength is its images, which are fascinating, often quite affecting, and very effectively integrated into the text's natural flow. Academic writing often groans under a rigid argumentative structure; the writing here feels more narrative-driven, progressing through different case studies and examples and examining each on its own terms. While this approach allows for the images' smooth integration and is very readable, I do believe the project would have benefitted from a clearer argumentative structure in which the author spent more time explicitly addressing the ways in which each chapter contributes to or develops her overall theses.
Negrophilia's greatest strength is its images, which are fascinating, often quite affecting, and very effectively integrated into the text's natural flow. Academic writing often groans under a rigid argumentative structure; the writing here feels more narrative-driven, progressing through different case studies and examples and examining each on its own terms. While this approach allows for the images' smooth integration and is very readable, I do believe the project would have benefitted from a clearer argumentative structure in which the author spent more time explicitly addressing the ways in which each chapter contributes to or develops her overall theses.