{"id":1180,"date":"2022-03-12T17:09:05","date_gmt":"2022-03-12T23:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/?p=1180"},"modified":"2022-03-12T17:09:05","modified_gmt":"2022-03-12T23:09:05","slug":"blog-post-iii-the-negrophilia-craze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/2022\/03\/12\/blog-post-iii-the-negrophilia-craze\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Post III, The Negrophilia Craze"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Negrophilia was a craze in the 1920s Paris which saw the White population obsessed with African and African American based art and music, especially in a way that represented the culture as primitive.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is difficult for me, a White person who grew up in a liberal area of the United States in the early 2000’s, to see the Negrophilia craze of 1920s Paris as an act of love for the Black population. While I do think Parisians at this time had a love for Black art, especially Jazz, there are barriers that prevent Paris from truly loving the community, such as ignorance and the general timeline of WW1.<\/span><\/p>\n

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“What Is Love” by Haddaway was stuck in my head as I wrote this entire paragraph.1<\/sup><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What was the craze, then, if it wasn’t love? Love is defined by Oxford Languages in 2 ways: 1. an intense feeling of deep affection. 2. a great interest and pleasure in something. When we say that we love eating cupcakes or that we love playing Pok\u00e9mon GO on our iPhones, we refer to the second definition, a great interest in something. This is how I believe Parisians in the 1920s\u00a0 felt about the Negro art that was fillings their lives; they were greatly interested in it. For this blog post, love will officially refer to the first definition, in which case Parisians do not love the Black community or the art that comes from it.<\/span><\/p>\n

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World War 1 brought an influx of Africans and African Americans into France, and many of them decided to stay in their new country at the conclusion of the war.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first reason I say this is the fact that the Black population had not been prominent in France until WW1 (1914-1918), when France brought in Africans and African Americans to fight for their side. Consequently, Parisians had only been exposed to Black art and music for a very short amount of time come the 1920s. This time frame simply does not allow for Parisians to know that much about African or African American culture, which leads to an impossibility and\/or unlikeliness that Paris really did love its Black population, not just the art that they created.<\/span><\/p>\n

A quote from one of our readings correlates with this exact phenomena. Bernard Gendron says in the “Negrophilia” chapter of <\/span>Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant Garde<\/span><\/i>:<\/span><\/p>\n

“Clifford’s statement alludes to a second characteristic of negrophilia, which is the rapid and conspicuous circulation of things <\/span>n\u00e9gre<\/span><\/i> in the system of cultural production and consumption\u2013in effect, the pronounced commodification of “negroness” by the culture industry.” (Gendron 107)2<\/sup><\/a>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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You probably didn’t expect to read comparisons between Pok\u00e9mon and Poulenc today, but here you are.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The fact that Parisians treated Negro art as a commodity in the 1920s points to the fact that they were obsessed with it, in the same way that we would be obsessed with cupcakes or Pok\u00e9mon GO. If you really “loved” playing Pok\u00e9mon GO, you may buy yourself a small plushie of Pikachu to place on your desk at work or home. In 1920s Paris, the same thing was happening, but with Black art, especially art that was not true to the culture or poorly researched, such as Francis Poulenc’s <\/span>Rapsodie N\u00e8gre3<\/sup><\/a>
\n<\/span><\/i>or Darius Milhaud’s <\/span>La cr\u00e9ation du monde4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

When we look towards the current time period, 2022 in the United States, most of the music created by marginalized communities is easier for us to access, and has been around for longer periods of time in our area. For this reason, we do not face the same barrier that the 1920s Parisians faced. If we don’t know about the culture of a marginalized community whose are we love, that is on us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Contrary to popular belief, the internet wasn’t around in the 1920s.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For this reason, it is a little unfair for us to judge Parisians for being ignorant to the culture of Africans and Africans Americans while we sit upon a plethora of resources at our fingertips that they simply didn’t have. Our judgment of them, while still argumentatively valid, can’t be applied in the same way to our situation in America.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Duke Ellington and his Orchestra (1943)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Furthermore, the most important direction that we can learn from the problematic side of Negrophilia in 1920s Paris is to beware of ignorance. For example, I am certainly into Big Band Jazz, a genre that was created and popularized by Black musicians during the Swing Era of Jazz in the 1930s and 1940s. For a long time, I had listened to and created this music with my trumpet without knowing and understanding the roots of the music and why it was made. I had songs of the genre in my Spotify playlists and hummed them around the house all the time.<\/span><\/p>\n

But, like the Parisians, I did not love this music, because I didn’t know the backstory, I didn’t know anything about who wrote the music other than their name, and I didn’t know the reason for any of it. In my third semester here at St Olaf, I took a class titled “History of Jazz”, and ever since then, I found a new appreciation for the music. While I only took one semester-long class that tried to address a whole century of culture and art, I find myself much closer to being able to say that I love this music than I had been.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

-Will Fecko<\/p>\n

\n

1 Haddaway. 1993. “What Is Love”.<\/a><\/p>\n

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2 Bernard Gendron. 2002. “Negrophilia” in “Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club:Popular Music and the Avante Garde”<\/a><\/p>\n

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3 Francis Poulenc. 1917. “Rapsodie N\u00e8gre”.<\/span><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n

\n

4 Darius Milhaud. 1923. “La cr\u00e9ation du monde”.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is difficult for me, a White person who grew up in a liberal area of the United States in the early 2000’s, to see the Negrophilia craze of 1920s Paris as an act of love for the Black population. While I do think Parisians at this time had a love for Black art, especially […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4315,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4315"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1180"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1195,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions\/1195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}