‘Negrophilia’, ‘Negrology’ or ‘Africanism’? Colonial Ethnography and Racism in France around 1900

Abstract

The 1900 Universal Exhibition can be considered, in view of the space allotted to the colonial pavilions, to be the first French colonial exhibition. The colonial section comprised numerous didactic items, with exhibits and erudite comments on people living under colonial domination, the burden of which was that the period of conquest was over and the time had come to move on to rational exploitation based on methodical inventory. Here we propose to look behind the scenes of this triumphant production, focusing on the particular case of Africa and Africans. The Universal Exhibition did not offer a comprehensive view but rather took a position firmly in the context of French metropolitan controversies and crystallised latent contradictions at the junction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fact is that colonial figures — administrators, officers and missionaries — had been drawing more and more precise pictures which differed greatly from the very general perspectives contributed by earlier explorers, and the period lends itself particularly well to examination of the changes in representations of Africa brought about by the colonial experience.