From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, 1919-1935

(Hardback)

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Was modern primitivism complicit with the ideologies of colonialism, or was it a multivalent encounter with difference Examining race and modernism through a wider and more historically contextualized study, Sweeney brings together a variety of published and new scholarship to expand the discussion on the links between modernism and primitivism. Tracing the path from Dada and Surrealism to Josephine Baker and Nancy Cunard's Negro: An Anthology, she shows the development of ngrophilie from the interest in black cultural forms in the early 1920s to a more serious engagement with difference and representations in the 1930s. Considering modernism, race, and colonialism simultaneously, this work breaks from traditional boundaries of disciplines or geographic areas. Why was the primitive so popular in this era Sweeney shows how high, popular, and mass cultural contexts constructed primitivism and how black diasporic groups in Paris challenged this construction. Included is research from original archival material from black diasporic publications in Paris, examining their challenges to primitivism in French literature and state-sponsored exoticism. The transatlantic movement of modernism and primitivism also is part of this broad comparative study.

Reviews

"In this study, Sweeney analyzes well-known sources using a surfeit of postcolonial discourse theory to find black agency in interwar French thought about race, identity, and colonialism."-Journal of Modern History
In this study, Sweeney analyzes well-known sources using a surfeit of postcolonial discourse theory to find black agency in interwar French thought about race, identity, and colonialism.-Journal of Modern History
Questioning the primitivist discourses of the interwar period, Sweeney looks at the mistrust in civilization generated by WW I, a mistrust that allowed a remythologizing of humanity. The black body became the trope of this regeneration, a palliative balm to the exhausted modern West, and the site of "a mixture of erotic savagery and infantile parody." Contrary to common practice, Sweeney situates the emergence of the negritude movement within this trajectory but as a counterprimitivist reasoning by the transatlantic diasporic black presence (Paris noir) rather than as a sui generis phenomenon....Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.-Choice
"Questioning the primitivist discourses of the interwar period, Sweeney looks at the mistrust in civilization generated by WW I, a mistrust that allowed a remythologizing of humanity. The black body became the trope of this regeneration, a palliative balm to the exhausted modern West, and the site of "a mixture of erotic savagery and infantile parody." Contrary to common practice, Sweeney situates the emergence of the negritude movement within this trajectory but as a counterprimitivist reasoning by the transatlantic diasporic black presence (Paris noir) rather than as a sui generis phenomenon....Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."-Choice

Author Bio

CAROLE SWEENEY is a Lecturer in French and Transnational Studies at the University of Southampton. She has written on race, colonialism, and interwar European modernism. She is currently working on a comparative literary project looking at the Francophone Americas and international avant-gardism.