Negrophilia [the blog]

Negrophilia [the book] describes the craze for black culture that was popular among avant-garde artists and bohemian types in 20s Paris. The parisian avant garde adopted negrophilia and its taboos to enhance their outsider status. Their flirtation with aspects of African-American popular forms such as jazz, Josephine Baker etc, was a way to rekindle their own primitive states. Black culture facilitated their regression to the primitive within. Negrophilia [the blog] considers how this love of black culture has persisted into the present day. Although, the passion for black culture and a "primitivised" existence flourished in the 1920s, when artists yearned for a simpler, idyllic lifestyle to counter the first world war’s mechanised violence, this kind of primitivism is not confined to art history. As it manifests itself in popular culture it is far more present and personal. So much so, that in whatever era one chooses to explore, whether it be the ‘crazy years’ of 20s Paris, the beebop culture of 50s Europe, America’s 70s ‘soul scene’ or todays global ‘rap’ and dancehall culture, the parallels between past and present are disturbingly similar and repetitious.

In the same way that in the 20s, the craze was for dances such as the charleston, the lindy hop and the black bottom, for Bakerfix hair paste, and for wearing African-inspired clothes and accessories, today, aspects of black culture such as hip hop, reggae, gangsta rap, locks and Afro hairstyles feed popular culture’s need for otherness and difference. The Caribbean, with its own history of minstrelsy, mento amd limbo dancing has also been a fixation of the West, and a site of the primitive. Since its plantation days, our islands have been alternative space within which colonists, itinerants, tourists, visual and musical artists can act out their fantasies.

The study of the West’s relationships with its others is a study about supremacy, and competition, but ultimately about fear, self-avoidance and self-loathing. The west’s attempt to primitivise others is a projection, an attempt to dispel and displace its own anxieties. The ‘primitive’ is fictional, created to be oppositional to or to complement the western rational ‘I’. Through this act of self-definition, the west makes its own monsters and it is these monsters that inevitably return to haunt it. The mistake of black people has been our complicity in these constructions, and our 'anansi' like ability to play into these fantasies whether as minstrels or mimic men. Within popular culture black people are constantly acting out the white people's fantasies in a parasitic relationship that we recognise but rarely challenge.