Suptionpremises

Abstract

If the appearance of the word negrophilia makes your flesh creep (and I positively break into bumps at the sight of it), perhaps it is only doing the job its author wants it to do, calling out racism where it finds it. In the title of Petrine Archer-Straw's book, and throughout her study, its job is to expose the racism of those few white intellectuals in the 1920s who brought African art and African American jazz to the attention of other Europeans and Americans. Black people's anger at white people's exploitation of their cultures is certainly justifiable. But such a serious subject deserves serious research and well-considered arguments. This book, however, simply rekindles the flames of early twentieth-century racial sensationalism without providing a compelling or consistent analysis.