Dark Continent, Dark Stage

Abstract

This article examines inscriptions of the Black body in French colonial performances. It shows how stage representations of the Negro in exhibitions, theatre, and cinema have consistently portrayed Africans predominantly in bodily terms and thus invented an archetype of the colonial subject akin to an animal. In addition, the article points that although the imperial system purposely characterized the Other as merely physical—in opposition to the European defined as cognitive and intellectual—a number of African intellectuals and artists have involuntarily continued to promote the same stereotypes and archetypes in discourses portraying African identities in mostly corporeal terms.