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

Was modern primitivism complicit with the ideologies of colonialism, or was it a multivalent encounter with difference? Examining race and modernism through a wider and more historically contextualized study, Sweeney brings together a variety of published and new scholarship to expand the discussion on the links between modernism and primitivism. Tracing the path from Dada and Surrealism to Josephine Baker and Nancy Cunard's Negro: An Anthology, she shows the development of negrophilie from the interest in black cultural forms in the early 1920s to a more serious engagement with difference and representations in the 1930s. Considering modernism, race, and colonialism simultaneously, this work breaks from traditional boundaries of disciplines or geographic areas.

CAROLE SWEENEY is a Lecturer in French and Transnational Studies at the University of Southampton. She has written on race, colonialism, and interwar European modernism. She is currently working on a comparative literary project looking at the Francophone Americas and international avant-gardism.