Short Essay 7

For Europeans, the African was perceived as being new and exotic as well as savage and inferior to the white race. The former was greatly used in advertising and entertainment while the latter was used as propaganda to discourage interracial relationships and to justify the European conquest of Africa. African culture was extremely popular, especially in the early twentieth century, giving Europeans a temporary escape from the familiar and the mundane.
The African “seemed to offer…a source for renewal and a means for celebrating life and sexuality” (Berliner 206) that the European wanted to explore and exploit without damaging their own reputations. This sexuality was admired by Europeans, but the fear of interracial sex was overwhelming. “Blackness” was viewed as symbolic of “sin, death, ignorance, sexual deviancy, virility, fecundity”, thus further promoting the supposed purity of the white race (Archer-Straw 24). In theater, Africans were often half-naked and running wild, while Europeans appeared to be more refined and sophisticated in order to justify Africa’s conquest (Archer-Straw 31) and to make Africans appear to be terrifying.
In the nineteenth century, the African continent was still only beginning to be explored so it was essentially unknown to the majority of Europeans, “fuelling fantiasies for the driven, disillusioned and disaffected of Europeans society who sought a place either to lost, to find or to expand oneself” (Archer-Straw 29). African culture was exciting for Europeans, especially music and dancing. In the early twentieth century, jazz became very popular and black entertainers were very common in Parisian clubs (Berliner 209).