Negrophilia

The above recollections were published in 1935, when his views about Afro-America had already hardened into dogma, and his negrophilia had long been left behind.

If, as one historian has argued, "Minstrelsy is negrophobia staged as negrophilia, or vice versa, depending on the respective weight of the fear or attraction" (Ostendorf, 81), the hypermasculinized buck of Birth of a Nation and the undermasculinized boy of The Jazz Singer sustain minstrel conventions, setting both negrophobia and negrophilia in the context of the Oedipal dilemma with its attendant anxieties about successful maturation into white manhood.

‘But,’ says Gilroy, ‘negrophilia and negrophobia can be intertwined. [Colin] MacInnes seems to have imprisoned black people in his exotic conceptions of their blackness. […]’

However the particular entry of the plantation revues Dover Street to Dixie (1923) and The Rainbow (1923) and The Blackbirds series (1926) into the West End at this time signalled a different kind of crossover and a new contradictory investment in the black persona through primitivism and negrophilia. In 'Blackbirds' we find a British national ideology re-asserting a 'particular order' through a revisionist, romanticised fantasy of black culture expressed as primitivism.