Roger de VALERIO, Marc HELY
Partition piano et chant "Yes ! We have no bananas"
Editions Francis Salabert|Paris 1923|27 x 34.90 cm|une feuille rempliée
First edition of this vocal and piano score illustrated on the first cover with a color drawing by Roger de Valerio.
Although created by a French artist in an expressionist vein, the cover reproduces the stereotypical imagery of African Americans that had been conveyed since the Civil War through American racist caricature.
Yet in 1923, this violent, degrading and essentializing stigmatization based on the ideology of ethnic hierarchy was facetiously subverted by Black Americans, notably through Jazz and Blues culture and by several major artistic figures including Josephine Baker. Thus, in her Revue Nègre, she humorously and sensually reappropriated the degrading representation of which Black people were victims. It was then sometimes difficult in the representations of blackness during these roaring twenties to distinguish the boundary between racist caricature and its modern reinterpretation mocking racial myth.
However, this new fox trot by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn, which was then a huge hit in the United States and which Billboard magazine would place in 1948 on its list of Fifty Years of Song Hits, had no connection to blackness. It was inspired by a remark from a Greek grocer following the shortage due to banana blight.
Completely inadequate, Valerio's image was inspired by the simple evocation of the banana associated with Africa for the French public and thus with the fantasized "savagery" of the Black African. This colonialist reinterpretation of the racial cliché differs from American imagery, notably through the nakedness of the characters, the children's earrings and their disheveled hair. This same iconography would be found in Franco-Belgian comics, including Tintin in the Congo a few years later.
A very handsome copy of this original French score of one of the great Fox-Trot successes, of great graphic quality despite its racist theme.
Although created by a French artist in an expressionist vein, the cover reproduces the stereotypical imagery of African Americans that had been conveyed since the Civil War through American racist caricature.
Yet in 1923, this violent, degrading and essentializing stigmatization based on the ideology of ethnic hierarchy was facetiously subverted by Black Americans, notably through Jazz and Blues culture and by several major artistic figures including Josephine Baker. Thus, in her Revue Nègre, she humorously and sensually reappropriated the degrading representation of which Black people were victims. It was then sometimes difficult in the representations of blackness during these roaring twenties to distinguish the boundary between racist caricature and its modern reinterpretation mocking racial myth.
However, this new fox trot by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn, which was then a huge hit in the United States and which Billboard magazine would place in 1948 on its list of Fifty Years of Song Hits, had no connection to blackness. It was inspired by a remark from a Greek grocer following the shortage due to banana blight.
Completely inadequate, Valerio's image was inspired by the simple evocation of the banana associated with Africa for the French public and thus with the fantasized "savagery" of the Black African. This colonialist reinterpretation of the racial cliché differs from American imagery, notably through the nakedness of the characters, the children's earrings and their disheveled hair. This same iconography would be found in Franco-Belgian comics, including Tintin in the Congo a few years later.
A very handsome copy of this original French score of one of the great Fox-Trot successes, of great graphic quality despite its racist theme.
€120