‘One of them, but white’: The disappearance of Negro: An anthology (1934)

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Notes

Henry Crowder was Cunard's African-American lover who was the catalyst for her interest in the African diaspora. Through Crowder, Cunard read The Crisis and The Liberator, and was exposed to W. E. B. DuBois's seminal work on race and history, The Souls of Black Folk. Later, however, she would bitterly criticize the politics of DuBois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), despite his contribution to the anthology.

Even Crowder, Cunard's collaborator on the project, disliked the final version of Negro, calling it a ‘big drum that has little inside’, ‘hollow and empty’ (Crowder 1987:183)

Cunard's scathing indictment of W. E. B. DuBois and the NAACP as ‘black imperialist lackeys’ did nothing to smooth the way for Negro's reception in the United States.

See Clifford 1988:117–52, on the links between the social sciences and cultural movements in inter-war France.

Marcus argues that, for Cunard, ‘the sexualised black male body becomes the site of her political (and personal) rebellion …’ (Marcus 1995:41, my emphasis).

See, for example, the early Dadaist poetry of Tristan Tzara or Richard Huelsenbeck's ‘Chorus Sanctus’. Huelsenbeck's 1917 Dada manifesto, ‘The New Man’, described Dada as closely identified with those unassimilated spaces of the ‘outcasts and the dehumanized beings of Europe, the Africans, the Polynesians, all kinds …’ (Huelsenbeck 1974:xxi).

There are of course notable materialist exceptions to this poststructuralist reading of postcolonial theory; see, for example, Ahmad 1992, Dirlik 1994 and Quayson 2000.

The Surrealist Group mounted the only effective protest against the spectacle of the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Paris in their installation ‘La Verité sur la colonies’, a satirical pastiche of the racial exotica displayed in the exposition proper with the ethnographic gaze turned back on to European artistic and religious kitsch in a piece entitled ‘Fétiches européens’.