Some of These Days

Abstract

This book shows how interwar European audiences, artists, and intellectuals particularly associated with modernism, used Black American culture-for which “jazz” was often a shorthand-to negotiate the disorientating experience of modernity and modernization. One manifestation of this process was the fashionable Negrophilia of the 1920s, the decade in which the two most successful Black American stars of their era first made their names: the dancer Josephine Baker and the singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson. The book is threaded around their careers, their travels, and their relationships. It looks at their performances across a number of art forms and contexts-film, dance, song, theater, architecture, politics-and it introduces a rich and diverse cast of characters. One argument is that the fantasy of a supposedly more elemental or authentic “reality” attributed to blackness functioned as a way of compensating for the increased “virtualization” of experience brought about many aspects of modernity, not least the disruptions to familiar forms of time and space associated with the telephone, the gramophone, radio, and cinema. Another theme that emerges is that of “home”. The idea of home (like that of “race” ) often embodied a fantasy of subjective authenticity. For the nomadic Baker and Robeson, “home” promised stillness and belonging. The book also examines the antiracist activism of both stars.

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