Abstract
In this contribution, I would like to discuss the queer figure of the Le Mercure Noir as invented by avant-garde Paris and the historiography embodied, as an ideal, by the Senegalese dancer François Benga in Paris in the early 1930s. This figuration testifies to a paradigm shift in the European modelling and reception of so-called male African bodies in art and scholarship. Following on the artistic and intellectual negrophilia of the 1920s, based on the construction of the greatest possible difference between Europe and Africa, we see the emergence of a phantasmatic figure crafted from two to three different threads: these are (1) classical sculpture, (2) the African dancing body, and (3) the technological-proximate coupling of man and machine.
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Notes
- 1.
Recent works on Benga include Coutelet (2012), Décoret-Ahiha (2005), Lindstrom (2013), Rosenhaft and Aitken (2013), Smalls (2013 and 2017), Vendryes (2003 and 2008); the exhibition The Black Model at the Musée d’Orsay Paris, where he is presented as paradigmatic figure; and the performance The BEATification Of Feral Benga by Athi-Patra Ruga 2017 at the Nordwindfestival Berlin.
- 2.
As Andreas Kraß accurately states: “der Körper ist immer schon mit einer sozialen Geschlechterrolle imprägniert, die durch den Prozess der performativen Wiederholung stetig affirmiert wird” (Kraß 2003, p. 20). Translation: The body has always been associated with a social gender role that is continually affirmed through the process of performative repetition.
- 3.
For Féral Benga’s biography, see Décoret-Ahiha (2005).
- 4.
“[D]anseur noir comique, danseur noir exotique, danseur noir érotique” (Coutelet 2012, p. 205).
- 5.
Translation: “Always, in what concerns dance, such analogies of form surprise the aesthetician and trouble ethnologists.” The closeness to Warburgian thinking in particular is striking; a more in-depth comparison of these two intellectuals of modernity would be revelatory.
- 6.
“[D]es analogies et filiations ethniques, religieuses, historiques qui donnent à la variété indéfinie des formes une apparence d’unité. Ces courants et interférences, les affinités naturelles des races et des tribus, grandes familles humaines, les conquêtes, migrations, l’expansion des cultes, le rayonnement des idées, la circulation des symboles créent partout de séduisantes similitudes, effacent les limites, rapprochent les extrêmes” (Levinson 1933, p. 224). Translation: “Ethnic, religious, historical analogies and connections give an appearance of unity to the indefinite variety of forms. These trends and interferences, the natural affinities of races and tribes, large human families, the conquests, migrations, the expansion of cults, the spread of ideas, the circulation of symbols, create seductive similarities everywhere, erase limits, bring the extremes closer together.”
- 7.
Current research on Josephine Baker argues that she intentionally over-emphasized, super-imposed, and ultimately subverted a variety of racist stereotypes. See for instance: “Colonial pastiche, in this context, refers to several features of Baker’s performance, including her well-known propensity to appropriate or mimic the prevailing representations of colonial people. It extends, as well, to an over-the-top assemblage of a diversity of representations, parts, styles, and genres, a technique of performance that is implicitly parodic, if not deeply subversive in unsettling ways” (Guterl 2010, p. 26).
- 8.
This argument is supported by, among others, Brenda Gottschild: “Stars like Florence Mills, Josephine Baker, and many others unwittingly carried on the primitive legacy, their real contributions misinterpreted and their greatest potential untapped” (Gottschild 1996, p. 37). See also Henderson (2008, p. 10).
- 9.
“Les possédés sont devenus des ‘professionnels’, mais par son singulier et inquiétant génie, une Joséphine Baker rejoint, d’un bond, la sauvageonne et, d’un autre, notre commun ancêtre animal, quand, courant sur les pointes de pieds et les paumes des mains, elle s’enfuit à quatre pattes dans la coulisse, à l’instar d’un gorille” (Levinson 1929, p. 278).
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Haitzinger, N. (2020). François (Féral) Benga as Le Mercure Noire. In: Hausbacher, E., Herbst, L., Ostwald, J., Thiele, M. (eds) geschlecht_transkulturell. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30263-4_12
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