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Atlantic Studies: Global Currents
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Jazz women, gender politics, and the
francophone Atlantic
Rachel Anne Gillett
Published online: 18 Mar 2013.
To cite this article: Rachel Anne Gillett (2013) Jazz women, gender politics, and the francophone
Atlantic, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, 10:1, 109-130, DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2013.766494
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Atlantic Studies, 2013
Vol. 10, No. 1, 109130, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2013.766494
Jazz women, gender politics, and the francophone Atlantic
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Rachel Anne Gillett*
This article explores the francophone bourgeoisie’s class-based connection with
advocates of race uplift in the United States, revealing the transnational similarities
between middle-class French and American hopes and fears about racial
representation through black ‘‘culture,’’ whether literary, artistic, or musical. It
shows that, given this transnational context, jazz not only presented a real promise
to black communities in representing their culture as innovative and civilized, but
also posed a threat because of associations between jazz, primitivism, and sexually
suggestive performances. Finally, it engages with the commentaries produced by
black francophone women about black American performers in Paris and about
black popular music. It argues that, in these commentaries, black French
intellectual women began to explore how to move beyond the stereotypical images
of black women generated by the jazz craze. This was a position marked by race
uplift, but not necessarily a compromise position for black agency or a purely
assimilationist stance. The article concludes that in the process of formulating a
response to jazz, a set of literate French men and women of color began to define
their own music notably the Caribbean biguine style against jazz and to promote
it as a source of pride and racial identification. In doing so, they demonstrated an
early instance of Negritude values intermingled with race-uplift concerns.
Keywords: Nardal sisters; francophone Atlantic; gender politics; jazz; Josephine
Baker; Negritude
The black man entering France changes because for him the metropole is
the holy of holies; he changes not only because that’s where his knowledge
of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire comes from, but also because
that’s where his doctors, his departmental superiors, and innumerable
little potentates come from.1
Going to social affairs, talking the topics of the day, and other forms of
socializing are fine, but going around places of ill-repute, hanging around
pool halls, drinking excessively should not be indulged in by the leader . . .
Don’t forget, leaders and players, be gentlemen and ladies, practice for
perfection, and, above all, save your money.2
Introduction
Paris of the 1920s has been celebrated as a dazzling city enlivened by jazz and the
tumulte noir, the craze for black art and music, during a period of gaiety and artistic
ferment. It was a destination city for black Americans who longed to experience the
city of light and also for colonial subjects of color who hoped to find in the
metropole some mythic fulfillment and civilized ‘‘polish.’’ Frantz Fanon captured
this understanding of the city and deconstructed it at length in Black Skins, White
*Email: [email protected]
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
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110 R.A. Gillett
Masks (1952). His ironic depiction of the colonial subject’s fascination with Paris,
quoted above, seems at first to have little to do with the accompanying comment,
made by a conservative music columnist for the black American newspaper the
Chicago Defender. And yet together they reveal how ‘‘race uplift’’ ideals held by
African Americans were profoundly connected with a similar set of ideals circulating
in the francophone Atlantic, and how these discourses intersected in jazz-age Paris.
The columnist David Peyton frequently cautioned black entertainers to act like
‘‘gentlemen and ladies.’’ He explained that this was not just for the performers’ own
well-being (although that was important), but also because as highly visible
entertainers they represented ‘‘the race’’ to white and black audiences alike. Peyton,
like many other African Americans, wanted ‘‘the race’’ to be respected and to act,
and be treated, as ‘‘gentlemen and ladies’’ within broader American culture, where
racial identity determined access to citizenship and social inclusion. This shared
concern that black Americans act and perform respectably intensified when they
appeared in Paris, a globally recognized locus of good taste and cultivation.
Fanon was keenly aware that most French colonial subjects located a sense of
legitimacy and cultural superiority in the French metropole, and he scorned this
attitude. Indeed, his critique acknowledges a widespread and long-standing process
whereby French colonial subjects himself among them voyaged to Paris to finish
their education and saw that process as a critical stage in their own development and
for the potential development of their people.3 The movement of educated colonial
subjects of both sexes to Paris coincided with the popularity of jazz in the 1920s. At that
time, Paris, firmly in the grip of the tumulte noir, was inundated with representations of
black female nudity, exotic primitivism, and clownish (or alarmingly seductive) black
jazz musicians. The influx of black jazz entertainers in Paris had intensified the
production of stereotypical representations of racial difference and created a perceived
need for corrective commentary and action from the black francophone community.
Some white observers argued that the jazz migration had paved the way for greater
racial equality in the job market and in society generally. Yet black francophone
subjects experienced the phenomenon differently. They worried about the damage
done to the project of racial advancement by the jazz-fuelled representations of
blackness. Their concerns hinged on the notion of respectability, a notion that infused
the way black women on both sides of the Atlantic commented on popular black
performers, although the historical parallels in how this process played out in the
United States and Paris have not been fully explored.4
The first section of this article describes how the francophone bourgeoisie
manifested a deep, class-based connection with advocates of race uplift in the United
States. It reveals the transnational similarities between middle-class French and
American hopes and fears about racial representation through black ‘‘culture,’’
whether literary, artistic, or musical. The second section not only explains why, given
this transnational context, jazz presented a real promise to black communities in
terms of representing their culture as innovative and civilized, but also how it posed a
threat because of associations between jazz, primitivism, and sexually suggestive
performances. The third section engages with the commentaries produced by black
francophone women about black American performers in Paris and about black
popular music. It argues that, in these commentaries, black French intellectuals began
to explore how to move beyond the stereotypical images generated by the jazz craze.
This was a position marked by race uplift, but not necessarily a compromise position
Atlantic Studies
111
for black agency or a purely assimilationist stance. The article concludes that in the
process of formulating a response to jazz, a set of literate French men and women of
color began to define their own music notably the Caribbean biguine style against
jazz and to promote it as a worthier source of pride and racial identification.
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How race uplift functioned as a transatlantic discourse
The ideology of ‘‘race uplift’’ held sway on both sides of the Atlantic and was part of
a discourse that included social practices, print media, and political campaigning.5
Yet men and women on both sides of the Atlantic who aspired to full citizenship and
socio-economic stability within the ‘‘middle class’’ or ‘‘bourgeoisie’’ linked certain
social, musical, and behavioral practices with respectability and an upward social
trajectory. They believed that through the acquisition of ‘‘cultural capital,’’ to invoke
Pierre Bourdieu’s term, they would merit, and could win, social and political
acceptance by the dominant racial group, whether that was metropolitan white
French or middle-class white Americans.6
The 1920s heralded a black cultural renaissance, located primarily in Harlem and
Chicago, which ‘‘accelerated a process of social differentiation’’ among African
Americans in that it emphasized economic, social, and artistic success.7 It also
privileged forms of creativity that were acceptable to white bourgeois social values.
Langston Hughes critiqued this aspect of the Harlem Renaissance when he parodied
black individuals like the ‘‘Philadelphia clubwoman,’’ who begged him to ‘‘be
respectable, write about nice people [and] show how good we are.’’8 Yet the United
States was just one location for what several scholars of black intellectual activity
and cultural production have identified as, to quote one of them:
a worldwide movement . . . [which] embraced cities that served as bases for the
dissemination of the art and ideas of Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston
Hughes, Duke Ellington, William Grant Still, Roland Hayes . . . and Alain Locke.9
These figures were stars in the race-uplift pantheon. Most of the men and (lesserknown) women who participated in this movement traveled extensively, and their
work was well known in black francophone intellectual circles. Paris was an early
hub of this transnational black cultural movement, home to Countee Cullen and
host to Alain Locke, Paul Robeson, and numerous others. It was, at the same time, a
place where black men and women could come to enjoy high culture or, in Fanon’s
scathing depiction, ‘‘talk of the Opera house’’ on their return home.10
The attempt to demonstrate cultural sophistication through good taste constituted one way in which black men and women across the Atlantic attempted to
demonstrate their civilization or progress according to a western European model. In
other words, demonstrating good taste and appropriate behavior might help ‘‘level
up’’ the races, as jazz star Florence Mills described it in a reflection on her
experiences in London and Paris.11 The global campaign against the ‘‘color line’’
therefore sought to deconstruct the myth of the primitive black man or woman
unable to regulate his or her physical desires and stuck at an early stage of
intellectual and cultural development.12 As early as 1904, W.E.B. Du Bois contended
that: ‘‘the Negro races are from every physical standpoint full and normally
developed men [who] show absolutely no variation from the European type sufficient
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112 R.A. Gillett
to base any theory of essential human difference upon.’’13 In the August 1911 issue of
the Crisis, he clearly spelled out the implications of this stance, arguing that the
world’s leading scientists had proven that it was ‘‘not legitimate to argue from
differences in physical characteristics to differences in mental characteristics.’’ He
further proposed that the ‘‘civilization of a . . . race at any particular moment of time
offers no index to its innate or inherited capacities.’’14 In other words, there was
nothing inherent or biological about the global existence of racial inequality, and,
furthermore, given education and equal opportunities, individuals from black
communities would equal the achievements of those from white middle-class
communities. The ideal behind race-uplift ideology was for black men and women
to demonstrate that contention through achieving home and business ownership,
church membership and attendance, fiscal responsibility, and propriety in dress and
personal behavior.
The resonance of these ideas in black francophone networks is evident in an
article printed in the Revue du Monde Noir, an influential bilingual arts and politics
journal founded by black French Caribbeans and Africans living in Paris, but
strongly transatlantic in orientation. In it, Louis-Thomas Achille, a French artist and
intellectual who was active in interwar black francophone networks and who later
taught at universities in France and the United States, argued that ‘‘European
civilization is no longer national or racial’’ and ‘‘is likely to be adapted by different
human races, who will consider it their own modern civilization.’’15 Achille thus saw
‘‘modern European civilization’’ as a potentially egalitarian model that leveled the
colonial and racial playing field for men and women who were prepared to ‘‘adapt’’
and ‘‘advance.’’ An article on the same theme by the controversial and charismatic
amateur Dutch anthropologist Herman Bernelot-Moens (who was well known in
American pan-African circles) had been featured on the front page of the Dépêche
Africaine two years earlier. In it, Bernelot-Moens waxed lyrical on the role of
evolution in creating the homme civilisé, a category that transcended racial difference
and was the necessary precursor to ‘‘the perfect man.’’16 His contribution highlights
the transnational circulation of the set of ideas about civilization throughout the
interwar black Atlantic. This assimilationist and uncomplicated view of European
modernity was a limiting one, and one with which white surrealists, black Negritude
writers, and African American authors contended. It nonetheless formed a shared
starting point for middle-class American and francophone intellectuals as they
plunged into the discussions of culture and representation that animated ‘‘black
internationalists’’ of the interwar era.17
A major aspect of this transatlantic discourse of respectability that affected black
responses to the jazz craze was its gender politics. W.E.B. Du Bois made this explicit
when he described women of the ‘‘Talented Tenth’’ (the black elite he sought to bring
into being) as women ‘‘against the honor of whose womanhood no breath was ever
raised, whose men occupy positions of trust and usefulness, and who, judged by any
standard, have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European
culture.’’18 The apparent conservatism of the gendered assumptions in Du Bois’s
claim is often striking to readers: he assumed a male breadwinner and female chastity
to be inherent components of modernity and modern culture.19 Yet, at the time, a
wide swath of the black bourgeoisie subscribed to this linkage between black female
respectability and the struggle against racial prejudice.20
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Atlantic Studies
113
The work of Du Bois resonated with a strand of thinking, social practice, and
intellectual production in Paris that shaped black cultural production in the 1920s,
and helps to explain the ambivalence toward jazz and jazz performers discussed
below. The three eldest Nardal sisters, now recognized as architects of the Negritude
movement, embodied francophone female respectability. The Nardal sisters were
educated, intelligent women from a middle-class Martinican family and, in
the interwar years, lived together in the Parisian suburb of Clamart, while the three
eldest of the seven sisters (Paulette, Andrée, and Jane) pursued their studies at the
Sorbonne.21 The sisters hosted a salon that constituted a social and intellectual
center for black cultural life in Paris, and where many of the ideas that fueled the
Negritude movement first took shape.22 The practice of black culture in that salon,
however, reflected the values of a ‘‘revisionist group of moderates,’’ most of whom
were following the established geographic and educational trajectory into Paris
mocked by Fanon.23
The characterization of this gathering as a ‘‘salon’’ emphasizes the role of
respectability in black cultural production. The salon hostess, the salonnière, was a
long-established female role in French society and one intimately associated with the
creation and appreciation of high art and the fostering of literary talent.24 It was a
semi-private space, and thus an appropriate venue for feminine involvement within a
conventional understanding of gendered spheres of action and engagement. Black
middle-class women on both sides of the Atlantic hosted salons, which were
deliberately constructed as spaces for elevating cultural practices.25 The Nardals very
carefully moderated what happened at the salon and which aspects of black culture
were embraced. They fostered lively conversation on political and intellectual topics
relating to black life at their gatherings, and served light refreshments but no alcohol
to their guests. They created an atmosphere which Louis-Thomas Achille, their
cousin and an intellectual who participated frequently in their salons, described as
genteel and feminine.26 The cercle d’amis that gathered in Clamart carefully selected
which elements of the Harlem Renaissance they incorporated into their salon and
into the middle-class black publications with which they were involved. They favored
literary, artistic, and musical works that both demonstrated black creativity and were
respectable.
These qualities are evident in the publications produced by members of the
cercle d’amis, which sought to emulate the literary and intellectual quality of Alain
Locke’s anthology The New Negro (1925). The Nardal sisters had attempted to
translate the anthology into French. Although they never finished that translation,
they used their salon as a platform from which to launch the bilingual arts and
culture journal the Revue du Monde Noir, with the avowed aims of ‘‘giving to the
black elite, and friends of the race, a medium for publishing their artistic, literary,
and scientific works’’ and, by doing so, enabling black men and women to
contribute to the ‘‘truth, beauty, and intellectual, moral, and material improvement
of humanity.’’27 The same values animated the editors of the leading black
francophone newspaper of the interwar era, the Dépêche Africaine. This newspaper
urged readers and contributors to produce more intellectual and cultural work, to
educate themselves and to reflect upon current political issues, to attend classical
concerts, and to read great literature. The editors seemed to believe that such
activities would help their readers win respect, and possibly full inclusion in French
society.28 Maurice Satineau and Marcelle Besson, the co-founders and editors of the
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114 R.A. Gillett
Dépêche Africaine, for example, inaugurated the ‘‘Victor Schoelcher prize,’’ which
offered 6000 francs for an outstanding literary or philosophical piece of work by a
black francophone author.29
Music, despite being as socio-politically charged as any of these other cultural
enterprises, has received comparatively little attention in scholarly treatments of
black francophone culture between the wars.30 Examinations of the literary aspects
of the Negritude movement have dominated the historical and scholarly portrayal of
black cultural activities in interwar Paris, although the rise of diasporic music in
Paris clearly influenced the work of Negritude authors.31 Music deserves more
attention because, at the time, it presented a unique opportunity to showcase black
cultural achievements to a public thirsty for performances of black culture (a very
broad and approximate category at the time).32 In 1928, the Dépêche Africaine, for
example, announced enthusiastically ‘‘To Our Readers’’ that the publication itself
had commissioned a committee to organize concerts at which both American and
French artists would perform. It had done this ‘‘with a view to making known, in
Europe, the evolution of the race noire in the artistic realm.’’33 Madame Marguerite
Vinci, a ‘‘beautiful singer from the opera,’’ presided over the committee, and the first
concert featured her prominently, along with a number of classical musicians of
color. The promotion of this concert reflected how the politics of cultural capital and
ideas about civilization affected musical performance in black francophone communities. As the use of the term ‘‘evolution’’ suggests, it operated on the assumption
that an appreciation of ‘‘high art’’ or classical music was one attribute of a civilized
people. The newspaper circulated throughout the francophone Atlantic and
disseminated this idea through its musical reportage. The American musical critic
Samuel Floyd, writing about the cultural politics of ‘‘black music,’’ has shown that,
in this era, race-uplift advocates in the United States acted similarly and ‘‘put the
race’s best foot forward by treating only the accomplishments of those who could
read music.’’34
In addition to showing their appreciation for, and mastery of, Western classical
music, black race-uplift advocates often turned to spirituals as a worthy demonstration of black musical potential and a source of racial pride. The Nardal sisters, for
example, played classical piano solos at their salon and they also formed an
impromptu choir from time to time to sing black American ‘‘blues’’ or ‘‘spirituals.’’35 The choice of the spirituals made sense, as they were universally recognized
as the creation of African Americans during slavery, and thus the ‘‘hopeful
lamentation of a soul in anguish.’’36 Paul Robeson won widespread approval for
incorporating them into his classical concert recitals, and W.E.B. Du Bois used
musical quotations from various spirituals as epigraphs for chapters of The Souls of
Black Folk (1903). Those gathered at the Nardals’ salon would have had no trouble
making the connection between the fight against racial prejudice and the spirituals.
The reference to the blues is more surprising. It is unlikely that those gathered
around the Nardal family piano in Clamart would have sung ‘‘I want a little sugar in
my bowl’’ or any of the other less-than-subtle lyrics that made Bessie Smith and Ma
Rainey so famous. It is far more likely that, by ‘‘blues,’’ Louis-Thomas Achille
meant light jazz classics, even though in print the Nardal sisters were quite critical of
jazz (there was a lot of slippage in the use of the terms ‘‘blues’’ and jazz’’ at the
time).
Atlantic Studies
115
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The problem of jazz
The Nardals were among many advocates of race uplift who had reservations about
jazz. Jazz, or the cluster of popular, syncopated, often improvised varieties of black
American music and dance (it was loosely defined in the era), presented both
potential and problems for black communities invested in notions of race uplift and
modernity. Paris was an internationally known and admired cultural venue within
which one could prove the worth of ‘‘the race,’’ and jazz had great potential to do just
that. It had originated in black American society and had gained recognition among
the artistic avant-garde and the social elite. It was creative, original, and innovative,
and, by the late 1920s, was wildly popular and had produced a canon of well-known
works and a body of criticism.37 These were all hallmarks of the art forms of civilized
societies as described and identified by Louis-Thomas Achille and W.E.B. Du Bois,
and thus jazz had the potential to disprove the image of African diasporic people as
timeless, primitive, and unable to ascend to the higher levels of ‘‘modern European
civilization.’’38
But jazz also presented a problem, for several reasons. It was a product of ‘‘low’’
or working-class popular culture, and was improvised by small bands. Many great
jazz numbers were neither recorded for posterity in written Western musical notation
nor designed to be played by a symphony orchestra or chamber group. Jazz artists
performed in nightclubs and insalubrious ‘‘jook joints’’ (dive bars) rather than
concert halls or the respectable space of the salon, and jazz performances,
particularly those taking place in interwar Harlem or Montmartre, often turned
into all-night jam sessions. The lyrics could allude to sex, drinking, and dancing, and
jazz was also closely associated with the blues, which featured more obvious
references to sex, drinking, drugs, infidelity, and bisexuality. These features of jazz
offered a sharp contrast to the emphasis on reflection and redemption found in the
less controversial musical form of the spirituals.
Perhaps this explains a curious article that appeared in the bourgeois publication
the Dépêche Africaine in 1928, defending and explaining the wild popularity of jazz
in Paris. The author, Noble Sissle, had served as drum major with the Harlem
Hellfighters, the black American army regiment renowned for its band and vaunted
as an example of black Americans fulfilling their civic duty by fighting for their
country. He was hailed as an ideal black musical leader.39 The editors of the Dépêche
Africaine devoted most of a page to Sissle’s commentary on jazz. Sissle argued
against the accusation made by many black American church congregations that jazz
was ‘‘Low Down Music’’ or even ‘‘the devil’s music,’’ and claimed instead that the
‘‘real article’’ (a term he left vague but which seems to refer to jazz performed by
black instrumentalists with strong rhythmic syncopation and an improvisatory feel)
had ‘‘universal appeal.’’40 He argued that jazz existed on ‘‘as high a plane as regards
to the spirit of human inspiration as any music that was ever born in the souls of a
race of people,’’ and that jazz music in its original form could stand its ground with
the best of Western art music as ‘‘music born in the souls of a race.’’ Sissle’s claim
about artistic work here conveyed a political message that was absolutely consistent
with race-uplift rhetoric. The inclusion of his article in this 1928 French publication
suggests that French colonial subjects were engaging with the promise of jazz as a
black art form by then. Jazz was, in fact, admired for its great musical appeal, and
became part of black francophone music-making.41 Sissle’s reputation helped to
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116 R.A. Gillett
legitimate ‘‘sweet’’ or ‘‘light’’ jazz, as opposed to the highly improvised, syncopated,
and harmonically adventurous jazz that was becoming known as ‘‘hot’’ in Paris at
the time jazz often played at its best in all-night jam sessions and saloons. As
mentioned above, ‘‘jazz’’ of some kind was played, along with the classical music and
spirituals, at the Nardals’ salon, and some jazz records were reviewed in the Dépêche
Africaine and the Revue du Monde Noir.42
The problems presented by jazz, however, meant that while they enjoyed it and
performed it in the private space of the salon, the Nardals and their colleague Gisèle
Dubouillé were ambivalent about its manifestations in the music hall and nightclub,
not to mention its popular print media representations. The promises and problems
of jazz for women like the Nardals were compounded by the content of jazz
performances and the notoriety of some jazz stars. The most public performances of
jazz in both Paris and the United States occurred in large musical productions, which
often featured exaggerated images of black working-class culture, scenes of jungle
life, and men and women dressed in primitive and sexually suggestive costumes.
Those performances, in turn, caused a plethora of images and prose to be published
in Paris, emphasizing the primitive and sexualized images of black men and women.
Such images presented a problem for those who sought racial equality through
respectability and ‘‘uplift,’’ exacerbating the sense that widespread white expectations
of black women in the French metropole were limited to exotic and forced
performances of sexuality.43 In this context, it is understandable that some educated
Martinican women critiqued jazz music and performers viciously in the ‘‘tellingly
entirely cerebral space’’ of the black francophone press.44 Several examples of their
own musical practices and criticism show how they responded to the race-uplift
conundrum presented by jazz.
Josephine Baker, the American jazz dancer and star of interwar Paris, clearly
illustrates how the publicity surrounding jazz posed a problem for bourgeois black
francophone women. But Baker’s iconic status sometimes obscures the fact that she
was, at the time, simply the most visible of a significant number of black American
musicians, both male and female, who performed in Paris and publicly represented
black manhood and womanhood there. The charming and cheeky red-headed
nightclub manager, compère, singer, and business owner Ada ‘‘Bricktop’’ Smith, for
example, built a career on the association between black women, jazz, and dancing in
Paris. She struggled to get her start, but success came when she impressed Cole
Porter with her ability to dance the Charleston. He publicized her dancing prowess
among his set of elite and wealthy friends and, as a result, Bricktop was asked to
teach le tout Paris how to do the new American dances.45 Like Bricktop, dozens of
African American women arrived in the wake of the wave of enthusiasm for jazz that
broke upon Europe’s shores in the 1920s. These women, whether on tour for a few
weeks or on long-term contracts, made Paris their home, sang and taught and
performed the popular dance the Charleston, while black men served as instrumentalists, bandleaders, and sometimes exotic or louche characters in music hall revues.
Black Americans enjoyed and embraced the performance opportunities in Paris,
which made many of them well known or successful.46 The problem for women like
the Nardal sisters lay in the fact that the Charleston was perceived as a very
flirtatious, suggestive, and still slightly titillating and scandalous dance in interwar
Paris.
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Atlantic Studies
117
Josephine Baker became the iconic representation of jazz women in Paris, and she
exemplifies the dangers of jazz in race-uplift gender politics. She debuted with a
breathtaking, agile, and, by all accounts, electrifying performance of a danse sauvage
in the Revue Nègre. Paul Colin’s celebrated set of lithographs of the tumulte noir was
inspired by Baker and created to publicize that show. His images rapidly caught the
popular imagination and indelibly inscribed a linkage between jazz and the nearly
nude dancing black body within Parisian popular culture. Fans of the music hall were
familiar with semi-nudity and risqué performances, but Baker was widely acknowledged to have taken the overt performance of sexuality to a new level. She also
offered white European audiences an image of black femininity which they embraced
as authentic, although it was actually a hybrid of African, African American, and
Caribbean stereotypes.47
Josephine Baker followed her debut in the Revue Nègre with another large-scale
production at the Folies Bergère, in which she wore the (in)famous banana skirt, and
the image of sexualized black femininity with an exotic and primitive twist became
firmly embedded in popular culture (see Figure 1). Josephine Baker was now defined
both by her ability to dance the Charleston and the provocative style in which she
danced it. European newspapers reported that Baker had ‘‘introduced the Charleston
to Paris,’’ and the dance had been renamed the Banana Dance ‘‘on account of the
banana garment worn by the Colored dancer at the Folies Bergère.’’48 The
‘‘celebrated banana garment’’ was sexually suggestive, as is evident in the
photographs and surviving footage of it.49
The powerful association between black women, primitivism, nudity, and the
exotic that gained strength through jazz and the music hall was also evident in
publicity for the revue The Blackbirds of 1928, several years after Baker’s debut.50 The
female chorines who toured Europe with the revue were portrayed in numerous
cartoons and caricatures in the contemporary French print media.51 In many of these
cartoons, the women chorus members were portrayed in primitive attire (see Figure 2).
One reviewer expressed surprise at the absence of nudity in the show given what he
had seen in the Revue Nègre.52 The expectations of nudity in the Parisian music hall
created problems for Adelaide Hall, the star of the show. She was rehearsing a dance
number and had entered ‘‘like a whirlwind,’’ when the music stopped. The director’s
voice rang out from the darkened theater, demanding that the star dance au seins nus
[‘‘bare-breasted’’]. Adelaide Hall protested, but the ‘‘voice insisted,’’ and the star,
close to tears, said she would be ashamed to dance ainsi dénudée [‘‘thus unclothed’’].
Eventually, the producer intervened and Adelaide Hall was allowed to perform
clothed.53 For the American star, it was topless dancing, rather than jungle
stereotypes, which threatened her dignity and reputation. French colonial subjects,
however, had some similar and some different concerns.
The association between black women and the risqué Charleston dance style, in
conjunction with music hall performances of exotic primitivism, clearly built on a
historical pattern in European literature, art and popular culture of portraying black
women as primitive and semi-nude, and/or hypersexual. The enormous success of
black American female entertainers in Paris thus carried a high risk in the view of the
respectable black community on both sides of the Atlantic. Ivan Browning, an
American musician and Paris-based music correspondent for the Chicago Defender,
felt compelled to leap to Baker’s defense after the opening night of her ‘‘banana
skirt’’ performance. He wrote:
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118 R.A. Gillett
Figure 1. ‘‘Josephine Baker,’’ reproduced with permission from the New York Public Library.
Madam Josephine Baker is the big star as usual and received a tremendous reception on
the opening night. The Paris papers are universal in their praise and wonderful comment
on the work of Miss Baker . . . and there is no doubt about the love and respect all classes
of people have for her in France. A recent paper called her a beautiful Brown Goddess,
another paper says that her work and appearance in the Follies is the very highest of
artistry, and by no means whatever of vulgarity which Joio of the New York Variety says
her work is. As I have stated before, the London reporters on the New York Variety are
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Atlantic Studies
119
Figure 2. Adelaide Hall and the Blackbirds of 1928 live in Paris.
always ready to speak in a derogatory manner where our people are concerned. I wish
Madam Baker continued success.54
Browning’s insistence that Baker’s performance was not at all ‘‘vulgar’’ and that
she won ‘‘respect’’ in France for her ‘‘artistry’’ exemplifies all of the hallmarks of
race-uplift anxiety. This concern about how black women were portrayed to white
audiences through the medium of jazz was felt deeply in Paris, as well as in the
United States. Onstage gender identities and parodic presentations of black
stereotypes were exaggerated for comic effect, but this was not always understood
by white audience members. Josephine Baker, and many of the avant-garde artists
who admired her, for example, saw her performance of an eroticized wild African
‘‘savage dance’’ as deliberately exaggerated and sensationalized, but the majority of
the white audience and mainstream reviewers uncritically extrapolated from her
performance to wider black culture.55
The image of jazz musicians, as performed in the public zones of nightclubs and
music halls and reported upon or caricatured in the press, threatened to affect the
image of all black women. It linked these women with the physical and the feminine
in a set of associations that did nothing to undo centuries of associating black with
body and the stylized repetitive gestures of dance with gender roles.56 Adelaide Hall
and her fellow chorines performed in stylized costumes portraying black women in
the jungle and on the plantation. For these Americans, nudity was a real threat to
their dignity and reputation, as the anecdote about Adelaide Hall shows. But for
French women, the performances presented additional problems. Black Americans
could parody or perform the primitive jungle dance onstage, confident in the
knowledge that most Americans, white or black, would recognize it as fictive in
relation to American society. These images perpetuated stereotypes of black men and
women as primitive, which undermined the way black francophone women tried to
represent themselves. Black men and women living in France were understandably
aggrieved by these persistent links between ‘‘blackness’’ and such characteristics as
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120 R.A. Gillett
‘‘animal joy,’’ primitivism, and naivety.57 Many of the black women living in Paris
were utterly urban in their upbringing and most of them were from the Antilles. They
were more familiar with colonial Catholic schools than the jungle or the tom-tom,
and they were defensive about images of grass skirts or feathered headdresses.58 The
advent of Americans performing ‘‘jungle dances’’ to an eager public posed a grave
threat to black francophone claims to modernity, civilization, and thus full
citizenship. A survey of what French black men and women should wear, printed
in the Revue du Monde Noir, for example, reacted angrily to a comment in the
mainstream French press that the sight of a black man in European dress induced
‘‘laughter,’’ and that, given the ‘‘recent fad for everything colonial,’’ a loincloth for
the men ‘‘undoubtedly would be very good.’’59 This survey responded both to the
Colonial Exposition of 1931 and to the populist images of jungle primitivism and
black identity that had been produced in association with the vogue nègre. Given this
context, it is not surprising that middle-class francophone women looked at the
influx of performances of black exoticism that proliferated in interwar Paris and tried
to combat them in their work and in their lives.
The Nardal sisters actively challenged jazz performances of black primitivism
and sexuality in print. Jane Nardal, for example, used the public forum of the
Dépêche Africaine to take up arms against these stereotypes in an article entitled
‘‘Pantins exotiques’’ [Exotic puppets]. In it, she also laid out a literary and cultural
agenda for the French ‘‘New Negro.’’60 She began by praising Josephine Baker, and
jazz music in general, for revealing to Paris that black men and women could be
‘‘modern.’’ She then, however, critiqued the popular French author Paul Morand for
his novel Black Magic (1928), which drew on many of the stereotypes discussed
above and contained a character named Congo (an African dancer imported into
Paris), who was clearly based on Josephine Baker. Morand described Congo as a
force of nature who had enlivened the ‘‘tired cynical’’ city with the ‘‘primitive
merriness of her lively limbs’’ and her ‘‘immense vitality,’’ which was transmitted
through a current ‘‘more violent than the electric chairs.’’61 In an article in Candide,
Morand had argued that the tumulte noir was responsible for a general decline in
European morality, saying: ‘‘Just think of the general slackness, the distaste of young
people for hard work, the nudity, equality, fraternity, clay houses that last three years,
public lovemaking, divorces, publicity.’’62 Jane Nardal lambasted the author for this
one-dimensional portrayal of black women, demanding what the stereotypical blacks
of Paul Morand (and Carl Van Vechten, for that matter) had to do with ‘‘the calm
grace, the slow dances’’ of her community.63 Her emphasis on dance, and particularly
on the slow tempo and the graceful demeanor of Antillean dances, contrasted
markedly with Morand’s description of jazz dances and dancers as frenetic, savage,
primitive, and uncontrolled, and reveals her determination to address the way French
rhetoric about jazz at the time represented black men and women.
The turn to the biguine
Jane Nardal’s political and rhetorical turn in this article to the biguine, an Antillean
dance and a musical style in its own right, signifies a broader trend in the critique of
jazz mounted by black francophone intellectual women. These women wrote
extensively about the Antillean dance style, and their enthusiasm had a moral
underpinning: they wanted to identify it as respectable in the face of the popular
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Atlantic Studies
121
images of jazz as a sensual dance practice. They did this by attacking the perceptions
about black women that were most damaging to their bourgeois sense of self: the
lack of propriety in dress (the semi-nudity present in so many stereotypical images of
black women in the interwar era); the lack of propriety in behavior, particularly with
regard to dominant perceptions of black promiscuity and hypersexuality; and the
lack of sophistication in art forms (the idea that black music was uncontrolled,
spontaneous, frenetic, and mostly rhythm-based).
These women argued that Afro-Caribbean music was intrinsically more graceful
and decorous than African American jazz dances, both in its musical style and in the
way it brought dance partners together. For example, Martinican writer and
contributor to the Revue du Monde Noir Gisèle Dubouillé praised the ‘‘Antillean
rhythms of the biguine’’ over ‘‘the virtuosic but less flexible rhythms of continental
America.’’64 Here we see an implicit contrast between Antillean folk/popular music
and American jazz which is very similar to that offered by Jane Nardal. Jane
Nardal’s sister Andrée added her voice to this consensus on the superiority of the
biguine in a later study that compared the physical elements of the Caribbean biguine
and American dance styles:
However, it is to be deplored that the biguine should be presented to Parisians only
under an obscene interpretation when it can express both a languorous grace and an
extreme liveliness according to the changes in its tempo. Two short gliding steps (barely
visible) resulting in a supple swaying of the hips form its essential principle. The biguine
differs from the ‘‘blues’’ characterized by a swaying of the whole body and from the
‘‘Charleston’’ which is nothing more than a rhythmic exercise.65
The rhetorical patterning here mimics her sister’s description in ‘‘Pantins
exotiques’’: Caribbean folk music, now made popular in the Parisian dance hall,
is, in its truest performance, ‘‘grace[ful],’’ ‘‘supple,’’ and ‘‘gliding,’’ as opposed to a
‘‘rhythmic exercise’’ or a dance that is jerky and frenetic, as though animated by the
electricity that fuels an electric chair.
These commentaries, and the perceptions they fought, underscore the influence
Josephine Baker exerted on representations of black women in the metropole. The
biguine had become very popular in Paris by 1931 due to the vogue for the
colonial that accompanied the Colonial Exposition. That exposition featured
an Antillean dance floor among its attractions, and it drew large crowds. The attention
garnered by the exposition and the wave of interest in all things colonial had inspired
Josephine Baker’s starring role in a new revue at the Casino de Paris, in which she
performed the biguine (among other colonial female stereotypes). In her article,
Andrée Nardal represented Baker’s performance, and various nightclub appropriations of the ‘‘true’’ biguine, as ‘‘obscene’’ interpretations. She tried to offset the
sexualized presentation of the dance in her insistence that, when properly danced, it
consisted of graceful sliding steps and a subtle but sensual swaying of the hips that
reflected the eternal push and pull of heterosexual attraction, but did not cheapen it.66
These commentaries on the ‘‘true’’ biguine emphasized its restrained sensuality and
the ‘‘honor’’ (to borrow Du Bois’s term) of the women who danced it.67
Paulette Nardal offered a further defense of both the biguine and black female
propriety when she reviewed a new ‘‘colonial dance hall,’’ the Bal de la Glacière,
where couples could dance the ‘‘true biguine.’’68 This new colonial dance space was
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122 R.A. Gillett
created partly because the original Bal Nègre, or the dance hall set up for and run by
French colonial subjects, had become very popular among the white avant-garde,
tourists, and thrill-seekers, who wanted a glimpse of ‘‘authentic’’ colonial exoticism.69 A white journalist reporting on his experiences at the original Bal Nègre,
for example, noted that on each step of the staircase ‘‘stood a spitting image of
Josephine Baker, barely more clothed, but without the ostrich feathers.’’70 In her
review of the new dance space, in contrast, Paulette Nardal takes care to show that
all of the women present were fully dressed. She describes women with every shade of
skin color from caramel to deepest Egyptian black and in dress varying from
contemporary European fashion to the brightly colored skirts and head kerchiefs of
Martinique. There is, notably, no mention of feathers. Nardal emphasizes the variety
of black women at the dance, as if to offset one-dimensional print representations of
exotic colonial women and performances of erotic black femininity in Parisian
theaters. Her efforts were echoed in the Revue du Monde Noir survey on ‘‘What black
men and women in Europe should wear.’’ Several female contributors to the
discussion pointed out that wearing regional headdresses, such as the Antillean head
kerchief, when done appropriately and with European dress on the body, conveyed a
sense of regional pride while not compromising one’s dignity.71 In both cases, the
reaction against prejudiced representations of black womanhood is admixed with
concerns about respectability, and yet the ultimate response is not toward
assimilation but toward a more nuanced representation of black identities than
that presented by jazz.
Nardal’s review of the new music hall (as yet ‘‘uncorrupted’’ by white tourists)
also tackled ideas of oversexualized physical contact in black music and dance. She
wrote that couples dancing the biguine at this new music hall ‘‘undulated
harmoniously,’’ although ‘‘barely moving their feet,’’ and conveyed a sense of the
‘‘eternal sensual struggle’’ between men and women. She allowed that the waltz and
the mazurka which were both imported into Martinique by Europeans were
‘‘appropriate’’ as danced at this particular dance hall, but qualified her approval with
a terse observation that the ‘‘Tango doesn’t suit the atmosphere although correctly
danced, in general.’’72 The inference was clear: this space was for the dance styles of
the black francophone diaspora in Paris and not for overly exotic and sensationalized
dances. Nardal’s pun on the word ‘‘correctly’’ in both English and French preserves
the idea of moral uprightness, as well as technical proficiency. Anyone who wanted to
dance the tango (which was originally Argentinian but was well entrenched in
Europe by 1928) or the Charleston (which emerged from African American dance
styles but was now Europeanized), both of which were associated with overt sexual
expressiveness, could go elsewhere.
While this analysis has focused on the presentation of black womanhood, the
issue of black male representation in jazz weighed almost as heavily on black
communities throughout the Atlantic. The editor of the black American newspaper
the Chicago Defender was so concerned by the behavior of black American musicians
in Paris when he visited that he suggested a collection should be taken up to send a
missionary to work with these musicians or, at the very least, a club should be
founded where they could gather in a sedate environment to listen to lectures and
correspond with relatives in the United States.73 Paulette Nardal was as alert to the
perils presented by stereotypical portrayals of black men as she was to those of black
women. In her positive write-up of the Bal de la Glacière, she took pains to describe
Atlantic Studies
123
the resident bandleader, Stellio, a well-known Antillean musician, as an exemplary
musician and gentleman. Her portrait is of a man distinguished by a classy
physicality who stood out from commercially oriented American jazz musicians, who
were happy to clown around in order to entertain paying Parisian audiences:
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It is Stellio, the celebrated clarinetist, who leads the main orchestra . . . Don’t think that
he thrashes about like a noir in a jazz band, acrobat, and juggler. Everyone else is a pale
imitation of Stellio. It isn’t only his mouth that serves to disseminate the unique cadence
[of the music], it is his entire body. His eyes, his head which he turns from right to left,
his neck, his shoulders, his right foot which marks the tempo, everything in him emits
such intensity, such powerful training, that he cannot help but let himself be carried
away by the spirited rhythm of the biguine. However, this devil of a man manages to
retain the air of a gentleman.74
The language she uses to describe Stellio draws both implicit and explicit
contrasts between the ‘‘wrong’’ representations of black culture that proliferated in
the jazz nightlife of interwar Paris and the ‘‘right,’’ or cultivated, forms of music that
accorded with their social and political aspirations. He is ‘‘trained’’ rather than
instinctive, and his intensity is modified by that training; although his whole body
disseminates the power of black music, he is not ‘‘carried away’’ by it, as an
unregulated, primitive, passionate performer might be. He is, above all, like the ideal
bandleader in the epigraph at the start of this discussion a ‘‘gentleman’’ but,
unlike that bandleader, Paulette proudly proclaims him as a countryman, an
Antillean, not some ‘‘noir in a jazz band.’’ In rhetoric like this, the Nardals began
to sketch out a cultural politics of identity in music, albeit imbued with ideals of
propriety and respectability.
Conclusion
The experience and writings of these Atlantic women of African descent show that
black francophone intellectuals were immersed in a transatlantic discourse of ‘‘race
uplift.’’ Their ambivalent responses to the jazz craze suggest that they understood
that while the commitment to European ideals of modernity, conventional gender
roles, and moral rectitude was limiting, it also contained a powerful potential for
agency and liberation. The Nardals, and ultimately the Negritude movement, acted
according to their conviction that the path to great black art led through Paris by
way of the francophone education system and through legitimation by European
intellectuals. For all their insight, the critiques of Fanon and Langston Hughes miss
the subtlety and agency of an important stage in black cultural production opened
up by the bourgeois, race-uplift-driven, transatlantic engagement with jazz.
Paulette Nardal, her sisters, and their black middle-class community in Paris
attended the Bal de la Glacière and went to concerts and dances, as well as playing
and performing music in their salon. Their musical choices and their written
commentaries on music challenged representations of black men and women in
popular music that threatened their aspirational ideals. Their published commentaries mounted a defense of black francophone womanhood which reached an
extensive francophone audience in and beyond France, and which also demonstrated
their own literary and intellectual achievements as black francophone females. The
Nardals ‘‘turn’’ to the biguine, in response to their deep reservations about jazz as a
124 R.A. Gillett
vehicle for race uplift, moved the conversation about black Antillean culture in France
forward. That move was an important part of what the Nardal sisters and their
network did to pave the way for the Negritude movement and for the development of
new francophone Caribbean musical styles such as Gwo Ka during the black cultural
nationalism of the 1960s. Their intervention in that musical genealogy deserves more
work, as does the complex of ideas about masculinity that circulated throughout the
francophone Atlantic. Scholars of the francophone Atlantic must begin listening to
the musical pathways through which modern African, American and French identity
formed and interacted in the twentieth century.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Jordan Kellman for his patience and encouragement in the preparation of this
article, and to the reviewers, whose insights were invaluable as I considered the issues discussed
here. Thanks also to Judith Tick and Laura Frader, whose thoughtful supervision has
informed my gender analysis, and to the staff at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France,
Richelieu, and the Manuscripts and Rare Books Library at Emory University, Atlanta, for
their assistance.
Notes on contributor
Rachel Anne Gillett is a Lecturer and Assistant Director of Studies in the History and
Literature concentration at Harvard University. She was educated at the University of Otago
in New Zealand and at Northeastern University in Boston, where she received her PhD. She is
revising a manuscript on popular music and the francophone Atlantic in the interwar years.
Her article ‘‘Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism in Interwar Paris’’
appeared in the Journal of World History in 2010, and her research interests include race,
gender, colonial relations, and popular culture in the twentieth-century francophone world.
She is also working on notions of cosmopolitanism in popular culture.
Notes
1. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 7.
2. Peyton, ‘‘The Musical Bunch: Orchestral Discipline.’’
3. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 38; Socé, Mirages de Paris. The latter novel, written in
the interwar period, portrays an idealistic Senegalese man traveling to Paris and being
disillusioned.
4. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent; Gaines, Uplifting the Race; Chapman, Prove It on Me;
Wolcott, Remaking Respectability; Curwood, Stormy Weather; Le Wita, French Bourgeois
Culture; Besson, ‘‘Reputation and Respectability Reconsidered.’’ Higginbotham’s study of
black American Baptist women is the origin of the phrase ‘‘the politics of respectability,’’
which the more recent works on black American women, cited here, explore in a nuanced
fashion. Beatrix Le Wita offers a useful gender analysis of bourgeois culture, although she
engages only with white women, while Jean Besson’s work on Caribbean women shows how
the discourse of respectability was circulating, and being negotiated, throughout the
francophone Atlantic in history here by peasant women.
5. In France, the terms ‘‘bourgeois’’ and ‘‘cultural capital’’ are more appropriate than ‘‘race
uplift’’ and ‘‘black middle class’’ because the latter terms are historically linked to the
African American experience.
6. Richardson, Handbook, chap. 2; Bourdieu and Johnson, Field of Cultural Production.
Here, I draw on Bourdieu’s understanding in a very basic sense, in that an individual
equipped with ‘‘cultural capital’’ which would enable them to function comfortably
(assuming the absence of race-based exclusion) in middle-class American or French
bourgeois society of the interwar era would possess a metaphorical ‘‘package’’ of
Atlantic Studies
7.
8.
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9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
125
secondary or tertiary education, and have benefitted from an investment of time (often
from the earliest stage of their upbringing), resulting in specialized knowledge, including,
but not limited to, literacy, an appreciation for ‘‘good art and literature,’’ a style of
speaking, and an ability to create and pursue thoughtful, reasoned conversations or texts
(whether letters or books). To borrow one further aspect from Bourdieu, many of these
attributes loosely contribute to a common understanding of ‘‘good taste,’’ comprising a
values system that sees some styles, schools and works of art, literature and music as
inherently more worthy than others. The intersection of class and taste has thus
historically combined to produce ‘‘high art’’ as opposed to ‘‘low art.’’
Floyd, Power of Black Music, 89.
Hughes, ‘‘Negro Artist’’; Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 59. Edwards discusses the
consternation caused amongst black American critics by Hughes’ work.
Floyd, Power of Black Music, 1323; Fabre, From Harlem to Paris; Gilroy, Black Atlantic;
Edwards, Practice of Diaspora; Miller, Nationalists and Nomads; Philipson, ‘‘Harlem
Renaissance.’’ Composer William Grant Still and classical singer Roland Hayes
were notable in their time, as Floyd shows. The quotation in this paragraph is from
Floyd, but Fabre, Gilroy, and Edwards, among others, identify the Harlem Renaissance
(a problematic label) as a transnational movement, and Philipson’s analysis reinforces this
understanding.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 7.
Mills, ‘‘Magic Moon.’’
Fanon offers an astute summary of this perception, describing the perception of black
men as having ‘‘no culture, no civilization, no long historical past’’ (Fanon, Black Skin,
White Masks, 17).
W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘‘Heredity and the Public Schools,’’ in Du Bois W. E. B., and Eugene F.
Provenzo. Du Bois on Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, 119120.
For a biographical discussion of Du Bois’s shifting philosophies over his lifetime, see also
Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois. This article does not attempt to address contemporary scholarship
on Du Bois, but rather to engage with how the francophone circles had a similar approach
and how it affected their response to jazz.
Du Bois, ‘‘Editorial’’; Appiah, In My Father’s House, 34. The quotations in this paragraph
are all from the editorial, which Appiah discusses extensively. The reference to leading
scientists was prompted by papers from the First Universal Racial Congress, held in
London in 1911.
Achille, Revue du Monde Noir, 185.
Bernelot-Moens, ‘‘L’Anthropologie nouvelle’’; Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women,
645; Wilder, French Imperial Nation-State, 156. For more on Moens’s odd career and
his involvement with race-uplift efforts in the United States, see Voogd, ‘‘Research Briefing
No. 1.’’ Sharpley-Whiting discusses the Revue du Monde Noir’s reprint of an essay by
anthropologist Grégoire-Micheli on the same theme, and Wilder discusses the way
Negritude authors responded to Frobenius’s arguments, which were similar to those of
Bernelot-Moens.
See Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 27, 17 (but also throughout); Sharpley-Whiting,
Negritude Women, 3844; Wilder, French Imperial Nation-State, 171. Each of these authors
discusses black internationalism in light of an article by Jane Nardal entitled ‘‘L’Internationalisme noir,’’ in translation in Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women, 105107.
W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘‘The Talented Tenth,’’ in Washington, Negro Problem, 3177.
Carby, Race Men. Hazel Carby offered one of the first gender critiques of Du Bois, but
that scholarship is now considerable.
Edwards, Keep the Waters Troubled. Edwards suggests, as did Wells in her autobiography,
that these gender conventions hindered Ida B. Wells in her anti-lynching campaign as a
woman speaking openly about sex, and the myth of the sexualized black body, not to
mention her openly public work as a married woman.
Musil, ‘‘La Marianne Noir’’ has the most extensive biographical discussion of the
Nardals, although they are also discussed in Boittin, Edwards, Sweeney, SharpleyWhiting, and Wilder (see note 22).
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126 R.A. Gillett
22. Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 151; Sweeney, ‘‘Resisting the Primitive,’’ 49; Edwards,
Practice of Diaspora, 1557; Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women, 536; Wilder, French
Imperial Nation-State, 1745. Each discusses the Nardals’ salon and the founding of the
Revue du Monde Noir.
23. Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 53, 1401.
24. Anderson, ‘‘Bourgeois Vacuity?’’; Goodman, Republic of Letters. Anderson discusses
black women and salons, and Goodman’s work offers a nuanced view of the actual social
and cultural role of women in Enlightenment salons.
25. Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 1568; Anderson, ‘‘Bourgeois Vacuity?’’; Krasner, ‘‘Dark
Tower.’’ Edwards has a good comparison of the American and French versions of a black
salon. Anderson argues that Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston described the
salons of Lillian ‘‘Sadie’’ Alexander and Jessie Fauset as bastions of the black middle
class, whereas Krasner sees them as vital spaces for creativity.
26. Achille, Revue du Monde Noir, xv; see also Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 1556.
27. Achille, Revue du Monde Noir, xv; Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 1620. The statement of
aims is from Achille’s edited reissue of the Revue du Monde Noir. Edwards discusses The
New Negro translation project, which never materialized.
28. The newspaper’s character, target market, and circulation are described in Boittin,
Colonial Metropolis, 1345, and Wilder, French Imperial Nation-State, 1668.
29. Satineau, ‘‘Nouveau prix Victor Schoelcher.’’
30. Excellent theoretical and historical introductions to this style of analysis are Erlmann,
Music, and Radano and Bohlman, Music.
31. For example, the references to rhythm and the drums in the work of Senghor and
Gontran-Damas. The literature on Negritude and its emphasis on literature is too
extensive to cite here, although many of the works I reference frequently use literature in
their analyses. Edwards and Boittin do examine music at various stages in their analysis,
although it is not their central focus.
32. Archer-Straw, Negrophilia; Jackson, Making Jazz French; Berliner, Ambivalent Desire;
Stovall, Paris Noir; and Blake, Tumulte Noir collectively provide a thorough assessment of
the appeal of black culture in jazz-age Paris.
33. Satineau, ‘‘A nos lecteurs.’’ Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the French are
the author’s.
34. Floyd, Power of Black Music, 103.
35. Achille, Revue du Monde Noir, xvi.
36. Sissle, ‘‘Why Jazz.’’
37. Cœuroy and Schaeffner, Le Jazz; Panassié, Hot Jazz. Several prominent French music
critics and enthusiasts were writing about jazz and promoting their favorite artists by
1924, among them musicologist duo Cœuroy and Schaeffner, and enthusiasts Hugues
Panassié and Charles Delaunay, who started the Hot Club of France, assembled
discographies, and launched a record label.
38. Achille, Revue du Monde Noir, 185.
39. See numerous mentions of him in the prominent black newspapers the Chicago Defender
and Pittsburgh Courier. He was very successful in interwar Paris. See ‘‘Across the Pond’’
and ‘‘The Musical Bunch.’’
40. Sissle, ‘‘Why Jazz.’’
41. The appeal of jazz and other popular black music was leveraged to attract attendance at
political meetings. See Boittin, Colonial Metropolis; Gillett, ‘‘Crossing the Pond.’’
42. Egan, Florence Mills, 113; Achille, Revue du Monde Noir. Egan notes that Noble Sissle was
admired as a ‘‘race leader’’ and applauded when, for example, he delivered a ‘‘telling piece
of racial lecturing.’’ The Revue details the repertoire at the Nardals’ salon, and included
reviews of jazz similar to the ‘‘Revues des disques’’ in the Dépêche Africaine.
43. Sweeney, ‘‘Resisting the Primitive,’’ 55; Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 1556.
44. Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 154.
45. Porter, ‘‘Telegram’’; Bricktop and Haskins, Bricktop, 1013; McBrien, Cole Porter, 1089;
Stovall, Paris Noir, 45. In July 1926, for example, Bricktop and Porter exchanged telegrams
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47.
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arranging for her to give private dance lessons to his wealthy friend at the Excelsior Hotel in
Venice. See also the accounts of the Cole Porter/Bricktop meeting in the other texts.
Gillett, ‘‘Crossing the Pond’’; Stovall, Paris Noir, 81. Gillett’s estimate of black performing
women in Paris was from a database of performers developed in the course of her doctoral
research, which relied on reports collected in black American newspapers and verified,
where possible, by archival records and discographies. It shows that women comprised
about a quarter of all African Americans (around 800) who traveled to Europe in
association with the jazz craze. About a third of those women were traveling with their
spouses, but the rest traveled as artists in their own right. Most of them list dance as their
primary entertainment skill and singing second, although, for some, it is the other way
around. Stovall notes that the permanent community of African Americans in interwar
Paris was ‘‘small but genuine.’’
Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, chap. 1; Rose, Jazz Cleopatra, 1467; Ezra, Colonial
Unconscious, chap. 4.
‘‘Josephine Baker.’’
dsmrtgrl, ‘‘Josephine Baker’s Banana Dance.’’
Baker was not involved in this production, but it illustrates her impact on the Parisian
imagination.
This generated huge publicity. Many newspapers reviewed, previewed, or remarked upon
the show. See ‘‘Jazz’’ Clippings.
Léon-Martin, ‘‘Au Moulin Rouge.’’
‘‘Le Barman.’’
Browning, ‘‘Across the Pond.’’
Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday; Ezra, Colonial Unconscious; Rose, Jazz Cleopatra.
In the discussion that follows, I use Judith Butler’s concept of gender as a performative
gesture, although I do not follow her to the conclusion that all gender identity is nothing
but performative. See Butler and Salih, Judith Butler Reader.
Blake, Tumulte Noir, 7882; Berliner, Ambivalent Desire, chap. 8; Ezra, Colonial
Unconscious.
Nardal, ‘‘Pantins exotiques.’’
Achille, Revue du Monde Noir, 183.
Nardal, ‘‘Pantins exotiques.’’ See also Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, and Sweeney, From
Fetish to Subject, who emphasize this point throughout their texts.
My translation. From ‘‘Pantins Exotiques,’’ Sharpley-Whiting’s translation differs, for her
version of these phrases see Negritude Women, 112. This analysis builds on her discussion
of Nardal’s article.
Morand, ‘‘Age of the Negro’’; Nardal, ‘‘Pantins exotiques.’’ Jane Nardal critiques him and
he is also mentioned with distaste elsewhere in the Dépêche Africaine. In the October 1928
edition, for example, a journalist-reviewer compares Morand’s book Black Magic
unfavorably to Louise Fauré-Favier’s novel Blanche et noir: roman (6). Morand was also
scorned in other black francophone publications for example, the Revue du Monde Noir
and the black unionist newspaper the Cri Nègre.
Nardal, ‘‘Pantins exotiques.’’
Dubouillé, ‘‘Nouveaux disques de musique nègre,’’ 189.
Nardal, ‘‘Etude sur la Biguine creole,’’ 1213.
The emphasis on heterosexuality is intriguing. The issue of heterosexuality was unspoken, but
it is another key component of the discourse of respectability and race uplift that runs through
the discourse on both sides of the Atlantic, and deserves its own extensive exploration.
Du Bois, ‘‘The Talented Tenth.’’
Nardal, ‘‘Le Nouveau Bal nègre.’’
Berliner, Ambivalent Desire, 209; Gillett, ‘‘Crossing the Pond,’’ 26971.
Pays, ‘‘Un bal negre.’’
Magd Raney, ‘‘Nos enquetes,’’ in Achille, Revue du Monde Noir, 183.
Nardal, ‘‘Le Nouveau Bal nègre.’’
Abbott, ‘‘My Trip Abroad.’’
Nardal, ‘‘Le Nouveau Bal nègre.’’
128 R.A. Gillett
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