Imagining Africa: Négritude and Primitivism in Corps perdu
Date
2020
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Haverford College. Department of French and Francophone Studies
Bryn Mawr College. Department of History of Art
Bryn Mawr College. Department of History of Art
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Bi-College users only
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Abstract
My thesis explores the way Pablo Picasso and Aimé Césaire claim Africa as a source of inspiration in their jointly-published book Corps perdu , an illustrated volume of poetry released in Paris in 1950. I look at the way Négritude, Césaire's guiding philosophy, and primitivism, an art movement popularized by Picasso, rely on a vision of Africa as both the romanticized home of "primitive," pre-colonized culture and as the site of horrific violence and exploitation. Using both text and image as evidence, I argue that the book mobilizes this conception of Africa in order to amplify the black voice in twentieth-century European culture