Black and White
By HERBERT READ
A vorumE of 855 large quarto pages,* containing at a moderate estimate about 750,000 words, is no light matter to review ; and its very varied contents are beyond the scope of a single reviewer. I can only give the reader a general idea of these contents, and then concentrate in more detail on one or two subjects appropriate to the literary pages of The Spectator.
The book is essentially a manifesto and a protest. It is a record of the virtues and achievements of the Negro peoples, and an outcry against their exploitation, persecution and ostracism. No fewer than 150 writers of both the black and white races contribute to the volume, which is illustrated with many reproductions of photographs, and with maps. There are seven sections, each packed with material of the greatest interest. The first and longest deals in considerable detail with the social and political status of the Negro in America— his history, his mode of life, his education and his religion. Various aspects of colour prejudice are described, various cases of lynching, terrorization, and injustice. - The notorious Scottsboro case is dealt with in detail by the editor herself ; Theodore Dreiser's incisive speech on the case is reprinted. The political orientation of the Negro towards Communism as the only political programme offering him full social equality is the final note of this section.
The next section is devoted to Negro Stars. Robert Coffin, for example, writes on the best Negro jazz orchestras ; other articles: deal with Florence Mills, Josephine Baker, Negro boxers, Negro dancers, and Negro film stars. Negro music is given more serious consideration in a separate section, which, in addition to several articles on various types of Negro music, includes modern scores by Vance Lowry, W. C. Handy, and Henry Crowder. The fourth section is an anthology of Negro poetry. The three remaining sections are geographical—West Indies and South America, Europe, Africa—and mainly ethnographical in their interest. The African section includes many fine plates of Negro sculpture. Such is the bare outline of an encyclopaedic work, which needed both passion and intelligence to bring to a successful conclusion.
If we try to get the whole material into intelligent perspec- tive, I think we shall find that two main problems are involved : the cultural and the inter-racial ; and that they are not necessarily related to each other. A rather different arrangement of the book, beginning with the history of African empires and civilizations (to some people it will come as a surprise that black civilizations have ever existed, and have in fact a history as continuous as our own), then investigating the nature and value of the various forms of African culture, passing then to the history of slavery, and concluding with the American scene—such an arrangement would have brought out the fact that the American Negro is culturally a decadent representative of his race—naturally through no fault of his own. He is only integral against his native background, under his native sun, and in contact with his native traditions. If even the white American has not yet assimilated a transported culture to his background, how much more difficult the prob- lem must be for the coloured American. So long as the problem is looked at from the American angle, there will be a tendency to solve it- by a compromise—the compromise put forward by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for example, which is severely criticized in this volume as a reactionary organization ; and, more serious because more insidious, the social compromise which treats the Negro as a harmless and amusing variation on the human theme, like a white elephant or a black swan—the Black Sambo attitude,
*Negro. Anthologyeditedby Nancy Cunard. (Wishart. £2 2s.)
we might call it. Against this attitude Rene Crevel, in one of the most lively and intelligent contributions to the volume, makes a somewhat isolated protest : "Nowadays the white man regards the man of colour precisely as the wealthy Romans of the Late Empire regarded their slaves—as a means of enter- tainment." From this point of view it is regrettable that a whole section of the anthology should be given up to Negro Stars; they are not the only stars in the firmament, and even if we give knighthoods to our white stars, we do not exalt them as typical representatives of our culture and civilization.
Fourteen million American Negroes cannot be brought up on a diet of Frobenius (incidentally, let me add my plea to Ezra Pound's that this great German ethnologist should be made available to English readers ; he is an infinitely better social philosopher than Spengler, and has the merit of being a great explorer and a writer with a sense of style). But the Negroes must find their own culture, and Africa should be its focus. There they will find an indigenous culture, the study of which might lead to a Negro Renaissance, which is more than will come about by playing jazz to whites sated with their own culture. Actually the values inherent in African culture are being absorbed more directly and more effectively by Europeans, and show their influence above all in modern music and painting. The influence of Negro sculpture on modern art is not specifically dealt with in this volume (though there is a long talc to tell), but the influence of their music has more than one article devoted to it, the most interesting being by George Antheil. " Look where we may today," he writes, " beneath this classical music of Strawinsky, or beneath the cheap but infinitely touching Berlinese ' of Weill, or beneath the beery but inter- esting and strong (in a Breughel-like way) fabrications of lirenek, or for that matter the last creations of Schiinberg. Milhaud, Auric . . . we find the note . . . the technic . . . the aesthetic of the Congo . . . all the more important and insidious in its influence because now it is more deeply hidden but now everywhere present."
To state simply the qualities that make Negro art (including music and poetry) an influence of value in the post-classical culture of modern Europe may not be very easy. The Negroes have been able to create works of art because of " their innate purity and primitiveness " ; they have a plastic vision, but it is without volition. But nevertheless there is a tradition. The bronzes of Black Africa, for example, " with their per- fection of technique and maturity of style, establish beyond all question the antiquity of Negro art . . . Negro art has evolved from an extreme subtlety of analysis to the most abstract synthesis, controlled by those same laWs of growth that took effect in Greece, Chaldea and Mexico " (Charles Ratton). As another writer in this volume points out, the 'concept of " art " is foreign to the Negro himself ; it is only we Europeans and Americans who exalt the manifesto- ' tions of Negro culture into the category of -art. But pre- cisely in that fact lies their virtue ; art, we arc beginning to 'discover, is almost wholly 'vitalized by intuitive processes, and these: we have gradually suppressed in that process of humanization and intellectualization undergone by post- Renaissance civilizations. We now return to the child and to the savage for clear -vision, pure enjoyment, and natural sensibility. ' To those who cannot think outside the cate- gories of their decaying civilization, this must inevitably • Heem a retrograde step ; but those who see beyond degenera- tion to a conceivable regeneration, the only hope exists in this tendency In modern art. '
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