Rezensionen 371 Iris Schmeisser, Transatlantic Crossings Between Paris and New York. Pan-Africanism, Cultural Difference and the Arts in the Interwar Years (American Studies Monograph Series 133). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006. Thomas Claviez In the wake of Paul Gilroy’s pathbreaking Black Atlantic, numerous studies have been published that scrutinize what has become a research paradigm of its own: the transatlantic connections between the US, Europe, and the African continent. Schmeisser’s monograph constitutes a contribution to this burgeoning field, as it analyses the intricate interconnections, mutual influences and creative (mis)appropriations that have characterized this triangular field of tension. She focuses especially on the sometimes problematic mutual artistic fertilizations to be observed between the two capitals of the Negro Renaissance and the “crise negre,” New York and Paris, although the main thrust of her argument is devoted to the latter. At the center of attention is the concept of pan-Africanism, where the author distinguishes between a general pan-Africanism - conceived as a conglomerate of political and philosophical ideas and concepts - and Pan-Africanism writ large, which designates the actual political movement(s) dedicated to this cause. Schmeisser, however, states that it is her objective to “depart from conventional readings of pan- Africanism as a primary political movement - a theory of black nationalism and internationalism” and instead to “focus on the significance and function of culture in these constructions and how they are attached to a particular view of race and racism in political, historical and aesthetic constructions of ‘pan-African’ denominators” (9/ 10). After the introductory chapter, which outlines her approach as well as the field of study, the author pursues this project through four chapters, which trace the development of pan-African ideas (and their volatile as well as highly charged implications) from the end of World War I to their post-World-War-II revival at the first “Congrès International des Ècrivains et Artistes Noir” in Paris in 1956. This occasion serves as focal point to which the interwar developments provide both the ideological and aesthetic tableau, as well as the programmatic prelude, and to which the last chapter returns in form of a résumé. The second chapter covers the emergence and the cultural, historical and political background of Pan-Africanism both in Europe and in the US along the different agendas of the four Pan-African Congresses in Paris (1919), London, Paris and Brussels (1921), London and Lisbon (1923), and New York (1927). This chapter addresses an issue that sets the tone for the entire book, as it unravels how the roots of pan-Africanism - borne out of the perceived need to thematize white oppression from different settings (colonial, diasporic) and accordingly with different aims in mind - grow out of the call for “the self-definition and self-determination of peoples of African descent who recognized the commonality of the experience of social, political, and cultural oppression by either white American society or European colonialism because of their race” (30, author’s emphasis). Almost by default, then, the common experience of white racist oppression (based, as it was, on skin color) predefines, if AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 2 Rezensionen 372 not predetermines, the discursive regime in which the concept of pan-Africanism is caught - at least at its outset. As the author shows, however, right from the start the different national contexts in which the respective “renaissances” take place - France and the US - elicit different strategies of action and perception. While the diasporic tradition of African-Americans gives birth to the internationalist and cosmopolitan politics of Alain Locke and W.E.B. DuBois (itself not free of “Eurocentric” taints), the French side is enmeshed in the colonial ideology of a “mission civilisatrice,” aimed at assimilation (on both the colonizers’ and the colonized side). The third chapter analyses the ideological problems, as well as the cross-fertilizations, of “art negre,” primitivism, and modernist white culture, as they unfold in the uneasy co-existence between a modernism intent to challenge the complacency of bourgeois culture by means of adopting the allegedly “primitivist” assets of black art, the project to forge an African American art aware of its “ancestral” roots (Locke), and a French colonialism bent to exploit the resources of its African colonies both materially and culturally, as well as to legitimize its “benevolent” colonialism. These different - sometimes mutually fertilizing, sometimes mutually exclusive - objectives are traced along the manifestations of the “vogue negre” that swept Paris, induced by the import of American Jazz on the one hand, the arrival of colonial art objects on the other. In the center of this chapter are the motivations and cultural politics of negrophile artists, curators, and art collectors such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Guillaume, Albert Barnes, and Carl van Vechten. Schmeisser uncovers - through articles and correspondences between the driving forces of the “vogue nègre” - that, their doubtlessly good intentions notwithstanding, their rhetoric “suggests the fetishizing of the (borrowed) originality and authenticity of the African cultural Other, thereby endowing modernist art with a pluralistic-synthetic quality of artistic uniqueness” (57). Thus they affirm, as Schmeisser puts it, the suspicion that “‘colonial desire’ and its racialized obsession with black otherness constituted the cultural filter through which ‘art nègre’ was conceptualized in the early twentieth century” (61), and, if inadvertently, popularized “primitivist stereotypes and racist assumptions to which black artists and intellectuals responded with a variety of strategies” (103). If the third chapter shows pan-Africanism between colonial ethnologization and modernist aestheticization, the fourth chapter is devoted to the strategies of African and African American artists to uphold the idea of pan-Africanism and their attempts to rid it of stereotypes and assumptions. That this is by no means an easy feat to achieve is exemplified by the oeuvre of Alain Locke, whose sometimes inconsistent, if not outright contradictory variety of cosmopolitanism and cultural radicalism dramatizes the conceptual traps set up by the discursive regimes of the day. Locke’s work, in a nutshell, encapsulates the underlying - if hardly ever explicit - question that informs Schmeisser’s analysis: Can an ‘Other’ be conceptualized in a way that avoids both essentialism and syntheticism - especially in a context of a pan-Africanism whose political purpose and success seems to depend on such “generalizations”? This question becomes even more pressing in the fourth chapter on “Black Modernism and the Primitivist Reception of Jazz,” which tackles, among other aspects, the commercial success of, and craze about, American Jazz and especially Josephine Baker and her “danse sauvage.” Baker’s strategy is a striking example of the phenomenon that Homi Bhabha - whom Schmeisser also quotes - has termed postcolonial “mimicry.” Simultaneously caricaturing both the US-American tradition of Rezensionen 373 minstrelsy and catering to the (predominantly white audience’s) desire for the “primitive,” Baker’s hyperbolic performance takes the question of authenticity one step further: “By mimicking and mocking the primitivist expectations of her audience, Baker, at the same time, subverted, i.e., destabilized, the pattern of colonial dominance” (176). If, as Schmeisser claims, colonial art objects, by being fetishized, were appreciated, read, and commercially exploited out of their historical (authentic? ) context, then Baker’s dance on the one hand takes playful (but equally commercially motivated) de-authentification one step further; on the other hand, considered in her own historical context, her art is in itself “authentic” in that it exemplifies the eternal flux of cultural change and amalgamation. If she belongs, as the author claims, to those African American modernists who “were able to exploit creatively the ambivalent concept of ‘art nègre’ […] for their own ends by mimicking and resisting racist fabrications” (119), then this “exploitation” itself deserves some scrutiny, as white “exploitations” are not accorded the same leniency by Schmeisser, be they as “creative” - though as commercially minded - as Baker’s or not. If, as the author claims, to “accuse black modernists like Josephine Baker and Aaron Douglas of affirming racist stereotypes means decontextualizing their work from the history of race and racism in diaspora to which they were responding” (191), then to neglect this aspect is ahistorical as well; moreover, the same would then also have to apply to white négrophiles. All of this notwithstanding, the author meticulously and intelligently unravels the inherent paradoxes and contradictions that haunt both critical white and black intellectuals and artists, admitting to the inescapable grip of the discursive regimes and the colonial or diasporic power structures that these phenomena are embedded in. In the case of Jazz, this is reflected both in the white projections of its “primitiveness,” as well as the similarly problematic assumption of its being “indicative of a racially motivated pan-African cultural unity” (125). As Schmeisser shows, the fault-lines between an African-American diasporic experience and the expediencies of the French colonial context also apply to the phenomenon of Jazz as part of the Parisian “vogue nègre”: As it is imported from Harlem, the author convincingly shows, it is “marked by a playing down of the diaspora factor (Jazz as an expressive cultural formation of the diaspora) and by a corresponding exaggeration of its ‘African roots’” (137). This fourth chapter, however, is not only devoted to Jazz as a musical form, but also to its reflections in painting. The author offers analyses of artists such as Gwendolyn Bennett, Palmer Hayden, Archibald J. Motley, as well as informed insights into the entire black art scene of Paris at that time. Chapter 5 deals with the influence of African images in both anthropology and colonial art, tracing the discussion of the concept of “primitivism” in the realm of ethnology, most notably the works of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Franz Boas. Even in the works of ethnologists dedicated to a cultural relativism and a critique of the predominant evolutionary school of anthropology, residues of racist assumptions can be detected. Thus Lévy-Bruhl simply abstains (though not always successfully) from any evaluative judgment between “civilized” and “primitive” while upholding the distinction itself; Boas’ cultural relativism, in turn, proved to be quite influential for both Locke and DuBois. Against this background, the rest of the chapter offers a detailed discussion of the various art exhibitions in Paris - and the visual impact of “art nègre” in general - covering the “Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels” Rezensionen 374 of 1925, the highly influential “Exposition de la Croisière Noire” (an exhibition featuring the artifacts assembled by an expedition sponsored by Citroën) of 1926, and the “Exposition Coloniale Internationale” of 1931. This chapter - as, indeed, the entire book - is an example of archival cultural historical research at its best. Private correspondence of relevant artists and organizers, reviews, essays, exhibition catalogues, and interpretations of paintings and artifacts are woven together to create a picture of a transatlantic project - or rather, projects - that, despite their different agendas and unavoidable misreadings and misprojections, combined in their search for both a usable past and a feasible future, and resulted in a tumultuous and highly productive art scene trying to liberate itself from, but nevertheless remaining deeply entangled in, the discursive and political frameworks of colonialism and diaspora. These transatlantic - and by necessity, translingual - crossings are adequately captured by the effortless bilingualism of Schmeisser’s book, which still constitutes a rare asset, despite repeated demands from “internationalist” Americanists. The “post-colonial” view which, according to the author, informs her approach and the discussion of her material accounts for a sometimes lopsided view of the merits, motivations, and goals of the white and black artists involved in the pan-African project. The question whether difference - let alone radical otherness - can be discussed with complete avoidance of any essentialist, stereotypical or synthesizing implications or vocabulary is certainly one of the pressing questions that postcolonialist theory still has to provide a satisfactory answer for. Concepts such as “strategic essentialism” - to which the author resorts at one point as well - only poorly cover up the conceptual abyss between a moral-theoretical claim and the necessities and demands of politics. It becomes even more problematic when it is enlarged to a construct such as a “strategic essentialization of black otherness” (142). To evoke such or similar concepts, such as “a truly liberating aesthetics of otherness” (324), which Schmeisser traces back to René Ménil, and which ideally would avoid or overcome the discursive traps and ideological residues the book so impressively traces, applies a rather high - in fact, inadequate - yardstick. Difference, as the author quotes Bhabha, is indeed “always disturbed by the question of its re-presentation or construction” (293); it is, however, also disturbed by ethical axiologies that inform, if mostly unreflected, unacknowledged, and mostly unresolved, postcolonial discourse. If Transatlantic Crossings does not tackle these theoretical conundrums, it certainly offers a treasure trove of material to open up and enrich further discussions in this direction. Thomas Claviez Institute for Cultural and Linguistic Studies University of Stavanger