UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France

Book Jacket: "Ambivalent Desire" by B. A. Berliner

Brett A. Berliner

An innovative study of the representation of blacks in post-World War I France

The 1920s have long been known as an era of "negrophilism" in France, a time when everything associated with blacks and black culture became fashionable. The exotic appeal of the nègre manifested itself in a variety of ways—from the popularity of jazz and celebrity of Josephine Baker to a flourishing of love across the color line—and contributed to the reputation of France as a racially tolerant society. Yet upon closer scrutiny, Brett A. Berliner argues, it becomes clear that French attitudes toward blacks were at best ambivalent, and the ideal of racial tolerance more myth than reality.

Through a careful analysis of popular imagery, exotic fiction, travel writing, and other cultural texts, Berliner shows how the representation and reception of blacks in post-World War I France embodied competing, at times contradictory, perceptions. On the one hand, African and Caribbean blacks were depicted as a source of cultural renewal and a means for celebrating life and sexuality. On the other hand, interracial relationships were seen as a threat to French civilization, a notion reinforced by grotesque advertisements, ethnographic exhibitions, and other aesthetically repulsive images of "primitive" blacks.

On balance, Berliner concludes, negative representations of the exotic black "other" overshadowed more positive constructions in the French social imagination of the 1920s. Although negrophilism may have infused jazz-age France with new cultural energy, the focus on racial difference served another purpose as well: to define the boundaries and meaning of French identity after the horrific experience of World War I.

"Imaginative, well argued, and well written. Berliner is particularly adept at close analyses of literary and iconographic texts, providing a wealth of information and astute insights. His book will add significantly to our knowledge of French colonialism, race and postcolonialism in France, and the interwar avant-garde."

Tyler Stovall, author of Paris Noir:
African Americans in the City of Light

Brett A. Berliner is assistant professor of history at Morgan State University.

Black Studies / Cultural Studies / European History
288 pp., 21 illus.
$40.00s cloth ISBN 1-55849-356-5
June 2002

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