This book examines the vibrant fusion of black and white cultures that took place in jazz-age Paris, and explores the historical ambiguities and racial complexities that arose out of the ferment.
Negrophilia, from the French négrophilie, was the term used by the Parisian avant-garde in the 1920s to proclaim their love of the negro in a defiant challenge to bourgeois values.
Painting, photography and popular music, dance and theatre, literature and journalism, fashion and advertising are all explored to show how black culture and black forms of expression were appropriated, adapted and popularized by white society and artists. The photographs, letters and articles of the poet Apollinaire, art collectors Paul Guillaume and Albert Barnes, shipping heiress Nancy Cunard, and dissident surrealists Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille are amongst the documents that vividly conjure up the atmosphere of the times. Archer-Straw also raises questions about the avant-garde’s motives in this lively exploration of a city in the grip of a ‘virus noir’.
Format:
234 x 156 mm, 200 pp., 123 illus., paperback
fond special / librărie / colecţie particulară / anticariat /
