The Spectacle of Belonging: Henri Bergson’s Comic Negro and the (Im)possibility of Place in the Colonial Metropolis

• In Event: Race, Revolution, and Bergsonism in the Americas

Abstract

In its December 1931 issue, the Paris-based journal La Revue du monde noir invited its readers to weigh in on the question “How Should Negroes Living in Europe Dress?” Bergson’s Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique was the point of departure for this conversation among black intellectuals in France. Bergson devotes a brief section of his study to an investigation of why the sight of the black body provokes laughter from whites. He concludes that the source of comedy for the white viewer lies in the imagination, in the possibility that the black man is actually a white man in disguise. Bergson’s inquiry focuses specifically on the supposedly comedic effect created by black skin. Interestingly, the editors of the renowned Négritude movement journal La Revue du monde noir—Haitian doctor Leo Sajous and Martinican journalist Paulette Nardal—reframe his study by placing dual emphasis on skin and dress. What is at stake in this reframing and in readers’ responses, are issues of colonialism, nationalism and performance of racial identity. Joseph-Gabriel argues that Négritude writers rethink Bergson's comical Negro trope by highlighting the links between colonial ideology and comedy, and foregrounding the adverse effects of colonialism on the black psyche. From La Revue du monde noir to Nardal’s and Césaire’s works, the comic Negro functions as a symbol of the black intellectual’s interiorizing of white superiority and exteriorizing of black inferiority. As these writers investigate the inextricably intertwined feelings of comedy and horror provoked by the sight of their comical black characters, they are engaged in a systematic process that begins with their contemplation of the comic Negro as Other and culminates in an awareness of the intricate weaving of Self and Other in the psyche of the colonized black intellectual.

Author

• Annette Joseph-Gabriel