{"id":471,"date":"2020-03-09T19:46:14","date_gmt":"2020-03-10T00:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/?p=471"},"modified":"2020-03-09T19:47:49","modified_gmt":"2020-03-10T00:47:49","slug":"france-jazz-and-negrophilia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/2020\/03\/09\/france-jazz-and-negrophilia\/","title":{"rendered":"France, Jazz, and Negrophilia"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Josephine Baker and La Revue N\u00e8gre <\/em>arrived in Paris in the fall of 1925, the public was captivated by her and the other performers\u2019 visceral dancing. It put the soul into black jazz for the white Parisian audiences. Jazz was an enormously controversial music in France at the time. There was both an obsession and repulsion by it. Matthew Jordan in Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity <\/em>described this as \u201cdiscursive dissonance.1<\/sup><\/a>\u201d Composers like Ravel, Milhaud, Gershwin, Stravinsky, and others were implementing elements of jazz into their music, and some compositions were even explicitly cited as jazz.<\/p>\n

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La Revue N\u00e8gre Poster, 1925<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

However, many critics of the time were concerned about American influence in France. After World War I, there was an influx of African American immigrants who were stationed in France during the war. In France there was no legal segregation, so it was a somewhat better place to live. Additionally, the French economy was in peril, which allowed American tourists to take advantage of the weakened currency. This dissonance, the love of jazz and the \u201cexotic\u201d and the French nationalist love of tradition and self, was at the heart of French negrophilia.<\/p>\n

Was the 1920s French obsession with blackness true love of black culture? No.<\/p>\n

An authentic love would require a mutual relationship between the French people and black performers, in which the white audiences learned and listened and collaborated with artists of color. However, they were not interested in this. They weren\u2019t even \u201cin love\u201d with black culture. They were infatuated by a racist idea of blackness as an \u201cexotic\u201d and \u201cprimitive\u201d other. Andr\u00e9 Levinson says that black dancing is \u201can innate gift, not a conscious art\u201d and that it is nothing more than their \u201cirrepressible animality.2<\/sup><\/a>\u201d Furthermore, many critics like Bizet, Brach, and Levinson viewed the liking of jazz and black performance as a vice, even going so far as to say that it was eroding French culture.<\/p>\n

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