![]() The white Parisians’ enchantment with blackness conflates all African and other black cultures into one exotic stranger, ignoring both the diversity of heritage and experience between, for example, African-Americans, Ethiopians, Martiniquans, and the myriad of other black peoples, and, of course, the human conditions that transcend all cultures, black, white, or otherwise, and that we all share with one another 5.īy this conflation, the whites of Paris succeed in seeming to honor blackness while actually disrespecting it by essentializing many distinct cultures. ![]() ![]() ![]() But, in fact, this fascination with all things “African” is an insult to blacks of all cultural and national backgrounds because it naively asserts the sameness of all blacks everywhere. The bourgeois French woman exudes the exotic appeal of Africa by draping herself in leopard skins 3, the well-to-do white man imagines himself accessing the “primitive” depths of his nature as he boogies to the late-night croonings of a jazz band, the up-and-coming artist is considered behind the times if she fails to reference the masks of Gabon on display at the latest ethnographic exhibition in her newest painting 4.Īn unsuspecting observer of this phenomenon might claim that white Parisians are celebrating black culture. Josephine Baker, the Bal Negre, and the State of Black Musical Expression in Parisįor years now, all of Paris has crazed itself over black culture 2. ![]()
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