From Fetish to Subject Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, 1919-1935

Subjects:

• Multicultural Studies » European Studies
• History » European History -- Modern/20th Century
• Literature » Critical Theory

Reviews:

• Questioning the primitivist discourses of the interwar period, Sweeney looks at the mistrust in civilization generated by WW I, a mistrust that allowed a remythologizing of humanity. The black body became the trope of this regeneration, a palliative balm to the exhausted modern West, and the site of "a mixture of erotic savagery and infantile parody." Contrary to common practice, Sweeney situates the emergence of the negritude movement within this trajectory but as a counterprimitivist reasoning by the transatlantic diasporic black presence (Paris noir) rather than as a sui generis phenomenon....Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
  —Choice September 2005
• In this study, Sweeney analyzes well-known sources using a surfeit of postcolonial discourse theory to find black agency in interwar French thought about race, identity, and colonialism.
  —Journal of Modern History June 2007

Table of Contents:

• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Constructing the Primitive
• "I'll say it's getting darker and darker in Paris": Joseph Baker and La Revue Negre
• Black Woman/Colonial Body
• "Go to Harlem, it's sharper there": Negro: An Anthology (1934)
• "A Conceptual Swindle": Surrealism, Race and Anti-Colonialism
• Diaspora and Resistance: A 'French' Black Atlantic and Counter Primitivism
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations
• Fig 1
• Fig 2