How to be Primitive
How to be Primitive
Tropiques, Surrealism and Ethnography
Tropiques, the review edited by Aimé Césaire and others in the 1940s, was heavily influenced by surrealism, Negritude and Marxism. Thus they saw surrealism as a force for political liberation. But their attitude to surrealism's enthusiasm for art nègre and primitive cultures was distinctly ambivalent: at times happy to go along with the European surrealists’ characterization of them as ‘primitive’, but also often regarding their own traditional folk culture – and the literature of the Harlem Renaissance – with patronizing distance. Their adherence to Negritude produced further contradictions, since it implied a deep personal identification with an African culture (seen as exemplarily primitive) of which they had no direct experience. This led to an interest in ethnography – also shared by surrealism – but ethnographic knowledge was produced by Europeans, and if they were dependent on it, how could they claim to be closer to Africa than the Europeans were? This chapter analyses the ambiguities and contradictions resulting from Tropiques's position as Caribbean intellectuals uneasily poised between Europe and Africa.
Keywords: Tropiques, surrealism, primitivism, ethnography, Harlem Renaissance, Negritude
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