Exoticism in Black and White

Ernst Ludw ig Kirchner, Sam and Mitti in the Circus Schumann in the Artist's studio, 1 9 1 0 . F or almost twenty years, I have considered myself a student of "negrophilia." This means that I spend much of my time looking at how white and black people relate to each other, trying especially to understand their attraction to each other. My scrutiny can be quite personal , focusing on how I, as a black woman, interact with others around me, particularly when I am working in England or here in America; but my exploration is also often stimulated by my time in Jamaica, where the legacy of colonialism has ensured that race relations are a constant touchstone of Caribbean existence. Sometimes, my interests are voyeuristic, and I find myself spying on mixed-race couples and wondering how they perceive each other; at other times, I have a more critical attitude, trying to grasp why, and how, European history has often, implicitly or explicitly , tended to denigrate the image and psyche of black people. At the moment I am mulling over the success of the Hollywood movie Crash, which was awarded the Oscar for best film of 2006. Henri M at isse, Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra), 1 9 0 7 Fall 2 0 0 7 I M k a - 2 5 It stars, among others, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Terence Howard, and his on-screen partner Jennifer Esposito as well as the popular rap star Ludacris. The film's plot centers around several characters of different racial backgrounds that collide in one incident. The different stereotypes society has created for those backgrounds affect their judgment, beliefs, and actions. This in turn causes problems for each of them.1 The film's happy ending with the stylish brown-skinned wife's rescue from the burning flames of a car crash by the white police hero Matt Dillon, combined with its subsequent box office success and Oscar award, seems all too pat and coincidental, especially in the light of 9/11 and a year in which we all witnessed Hurricane Katrina and the rabid racism its windstorms unleashed. With this in mind, I want to use this article to explore our contemporary responses to racism and to question whether there is an exotic aesBillboar d of t h e m o v i e Crash, 2 0 0 5 thetic somewhere between black and white that is mediating it. This article looks at the exoticized image in photography from the past century, and it connects modern art practice, especially surrealist photography in Paris, in the early decades of the twentieth century to the even more contemporary world of Los Angeles and Hollywood. These communities may seem distinct from one another, but through photography, this article will try to show what links them. Although the threads that hold this historical narrative together are tenuous, sometimes speculative and even fictive, making connections from one time frame to another, one side of the Atlantic to the other, and from one set of aesthetic and cultural values to another, I hope these ideas resonate with those whose identities hinge on this kind of hopscotch, and that this discussion offers a visual sense of the layers beneath the exotic personality. By examining photogra2 6 • N k a Jo u r n a l o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A f r i c a n A r t phy's facilitation of exoticism, its rituals of fancy dress, its heightening of racial and gender differences , its ability to create and capture the subaltern and the transgressive, I want to suggest that the exotic "other" of photography has become an engaging concept for both blacks and whites, one that is producing a kind of global aesthetic and the modern media's panacea for racial intolerance. But what is exoticism? In the fine arts, the notion of exoticism carries with it a certain allure, it references the unfamiliar and exciting in a way that is decorative, edgy, but ultimately nonthreatening . It is a representation of otherness that suggests compromise. In portraiture, neither black nor white, it represents...