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NEGROPHILIA

Name: NEGROPHILIA
Author: Petrine Archer-Shaw
ISBN: 0-500-28135-1

AVANT-GARDE PARIS AND BLACK CULTURE IN THE 1920S

by Petrine Archer-Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 27, 2000

An imperfect but noble effort.

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Art historian and curator Archer-Shaw investigates the degree to which black culture influenced Parisian artists in the 1920s.

The author is not primarily concerned with this subject’s more sensational or glamorized aspects, such as the sojourns in Paris during the 1920s of famous African-Americans like boxer Jack Johnson, entertainer Josephine Baker, or musician Sidney Bechet. Rather, her objective is to scrutinize the motives of some of the artists who exploited the new trend to promote their own ideas of modernity. She examines, for example, the move toward primitivism in the fine arts, making some not-unfamiliar observations about the degree to which African art and African-American culture in general worked its magic on figures as diverse as Brancusi, Man Ray, and Picasso. The vogue for primitivism, of course, reflected in large degree the weakening of the traditional philosophical bases of Western culture (particularly Christianity) in the wake of WWI, but Archer-Shaw is sensitive to the contradictions inherent in this movement. During the course of her explorations, for example, Archer-Shaw looks at the many ways in which Christianity’s metaphorical juxtaposition of black and white as visual representations of good and evil helped indirectly to shape European thinking on questions of race and ethnicity. In addition, she traces the development of stereotypical 19th-century images of blacks in the popular arts as they were passed down to 20th-century Europeans (largely as comic archetypes in the mode of Stepinfetchit). These are not necessarily new or startling observations at this stage in the history of African-American cultural studies, but Archer-Shaw does have her moments (particularly when she sticks with her specialty, which is art). Her forays into sociology are less impressive.

An imperfect but noble effort.

Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2000

ISBN: 0-500-28135-1

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | ETHNICITY & RACE

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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ORIENTALISM

by Edward W. Said ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 30, 1978

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One may quibble with the title: this is a study of Islamic Orientalism solely, of Western representations of the Near East, with little or no direct reference to Persia, India, China, Japan.

Professor Said (Comparative Literature, Columbia) explains the limited focus as both methodological (coherence over exhaustiveness) and personal: he is an Arab Palestinian. But among Eastern civilizations, as he recognizes, Islam is a special case, particularly in relation to Christian Europe: a "fraudulent," competing religion (doggedly miscalled Mohammedanism), a longstanding military threat, and all the more, therefore, as affront. Singularity, however, is no handicap to what is essentially a case study of Western ethno-centrism and its consequences, while the very persistence of the generalizing and dehumanizing attitudes that Said condemns, unparalleled in regard to either Africa or the Far East, argues the urgency of the enterprise. Drawing, most prominently, upon Foucault's history of pernicious ideas, Said traces the development of Orientalism from Silvestre de Sacy's fragmentation of Oriental culture into "a canon of textual objects" and Ernest Renan's incorporation of the fragments into the new comparative philology: "the Orient's contemporary relevance [was] to be simply as material for European investigation." Ascribed traits—passivity, eroticism, etc.—became fixed; travelers, ostensibly sympathetic, added exotic tales; and the presumed inferiority of Islam served as the pretext for its political domination, its supposed backwardness the excuse for economic intervention (with even Karl Marx writing of England's "regenerating" mission in India). Not until after World War II does Islam enter the American consciousness, and then—with Arab specialists in attendance—as "the disrupter of Israel's and the West's existence." Said's recent citations are devastating, and add force to his final challenge: how to avoid all categorization of one people by another?

The book is redundant and not always reasonable, but bound to cut a wide swath and leave its mark.