Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (review)

Rae Beth Gordon’s book fully lives up to its goal of being what Clifford Geertz calls a “thick description,” focusing on Parisian life between 1875 and 1910 and using “journalistic firsthand accounts and the iconography of gesture and movement in drawings, posters, lithographs, and photographs in the music-hall and in film representations” (2). Gordon is a vigilant urban anthropologist, mining an impressive number of the era’s newspapers and journals to provide a ground-level account of la vie quotidienne as experienced in the music halls, cabarets and café-concerts, and reflected by prominent journalists and cultural critics of the fin de siècle. She concentrates on three fields: late nineteenth-century psychological pathology, Darwinian concepts of evolution and fears of animal regression, and colonial views of African and African-American dance hall performers, all to show the way these separate practices create “an amalgam in the popular imagination” (4). Gordon is at her best in teasing out the complex interrelations between these practices, so that her study increasingly feels like a “palimpsest” (130) of cultural influence.

One underlying argument, fully developed in Gordon’s previous book, is that the French are particularly drawn to convulsive movement and gesture, witnessed equally in the hysteric at the Salpêtrière as in the epileptic contortions of the café-club performer (19–34).¹ In this way, Dances with Darwin trades on spectacular displays of the body in movement, whether through hysteria (chapter 1), degeneration and evolutionary conceptions of “the ugly” (chapter 2), epileptic singers (chapters 1 and 5), or African and African-American dance (chapter 4). Such displays are brought to life through a remarkable collection of illustrations around which particular chapters are structured, including reproductions of period photographs, posters, cartoons, lithographs, and sketches. These images are fascinating by themselves, but also provide evidentiary support for many of the key points of the book. Chapter 4, “Natural Rhythm: Africans and Black Americans in Paris,” is especially provocative as the figures provide their own narrative progression to show the imbrication of black/white hybridity, minstrelsy, and fears of evolutionary regression.

Although the book’s ostensible focus is the influence of Darwin’s thought on the Parisian café-concert and music hall, I found Gordon’s comments on Darwin and evolution less revealing than the emphasis on race and medical pathology in understanding the mechanisms of the café-concert. Perhaps this is partly because Darwin himself was reluctant to separate human kind into distinct races or classifications (65); perhaps it is due to the ambiguity of Darwin’s beliefs in contrast to some views that grew out of his work, including theories of degeneration, social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism (the latter of which Gordon strongly distinguishes from Darwin). Dances with Darwin might therefore be better titled Dances with Darwinism, since Gordon’s multivalent approach to culture seems weakened by focusing on one man, rather than on the constellation of institutions, movements, and thinkers that contributed to the cultural tapestry called “Darwinism,” including ideas cited in the study by Spencer, Haeckel, Nordau, and Lombroso.

Dances with Darwin is a rich contribution to studies of the “primitive,” and Gordon’s archival work serves as a useful extension of Sieglinde Lemke’s Primitivist Modernism by showing that the “angularity and fragmentation” (272) that Lemke claims for twentieth century cubism in fact has a much less auspicious start in music hall performance of the nineteenth century.² In “Natural Rhythm” (chapter 4), Gordon traces the meteoric popularity of the Cake-Walk in Parisian café-concerts, frequently performed by whites who increasingly exaggerated the Afro- American form. What Gordon shows is the extent to which the Cake-Walk’s popularity was tied to the belief that it was initially performed by “primitives”; Parisians were ignorant of the fact that the Cake-Walk “originated on antebellum southern plantations as a parody of the master’s dances” (173). In other words, the Cake-Walk was a satire...