Meanings
negrophilia1
alternative Negrophilia
- historicaloffensiveuncountableAn affection for, or interest in things related to, the black race.
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.
1990, Bernard Gendron, “Fetishes and motorcars: Negrophilia in French modernism”, in Cultural Studies, volume 4, number 2, Taylor & Francis, →ISSN, pages 141–1553 more examples
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.
2000 April 20, Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (Race and American Culture), Oxford University Press, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 77‘But,’ says Gilroy, ‘negrophilia and negrophobia can be intertwined. [Colin] MacInnes seems to have imprisoned black people in his exotic conceptions of their blackness. […]’
2007 April 14, Ed Vulliamy, quoting Paul Gilroy, “Absolute MacInnes”, in The GuardianHowever 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.
2021 July 31, David Linton, Nation and Race in West End Revue: 1910–1930 (Palgrave Studies in British Musical Theatre), Springer Nature, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 14Antonyms: Negrophobia
Negrophilia2
- uncountableAlternative letter-case form of negrophilia.
Synonyms & antonyms
nounAn affection for, or interest in things related to, the black race.
Origin
Cite this entry
negrophilia. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/negrophilia
“negrophilia.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/negrophilia. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “negrophilia,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/negrophilia.
Source: negrophilia on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.