At the beginning of the semester, coming to this class felt like the informational equivalent of standing in front of a firehose. The readings were a largely indistinguishable soup of names and -isms. But after spending over three months untwisting the serpent (Daniel Albright pun intended) of Parisian musical life in the 1920s, I’m pleasantly […]
Tag: Negrophilia
Reception towards the influx of black cultural products in 1920s France consisted of equal parts attraction and enjoyment but also revulsion and fear. Reading through French author’s impressions of La Revue Nègre, which they describe as “soft, splenetic, brutal, lustful, or sad,” “something animal,” and “frenetic and devilish,” it is clear that what 1920s Parisians […]
The concept of Negrophilia becomes quite convoluted when attempting to dissect it and separate it into its true parts. The question of if Parisian’s really did love African and African American artists at the time cannot truly be answered by a modern scholar, as I’m sure there were Parisians who really did appreciate the music […]
In discussing the Negrophilia in Paris in the 1920s, we need to take a step back and first define what was going on. Negrophilia is a pretty vague concept and many of the audiences and critics in Paris in the 1920s had very different views from one another on the emerging influence of jazz on […]