Politics of a « Race Culture »
The polemics caused in 1925 by the vaudeville show La Revue Nègre were based on the revelation of a black aesthetical génie, and of its positive or negative impact on French culture. The obviousness of this racial interpretation relied on aesthetical techniques : critics set the show in two histories that would have been mixed within La Revue Nègre – the history of the revue à grand spectacle, concerning the evolutions of music-hall, and the history of modern ballet, dealing with the innovations of avant-gardes. Thus, primitivism appears as a political language which is specifically literate, by defining « anthropological » cultures through aesthetical products – and as a step in the diffusion of the language of culture as a political language, which will dominates French public space in the 1930s’.