No Glitter Blown: With a Weapon and a Grin: Postcard Images of France's Black African Colonial Troops in WWI by Stephan Likosky

4 Stars

Pictorializing race for political advantage.

Propaganda is a blunt weapon used in fear mongering and ego stroking. During World War I, the French utilized African colonial subjects in the ranks of soldiers fighting Germany. This books attempts to frame this through a review of postcards wherein the stereotypes of Africans are being used and recast for the glory of France.

The imagery display a mix of fearfulness and civility, balancing the need to reassure French citizens of African soldiers' naiveté so they don't pose a threat, especially to white women and their savagery in battle to embolden Allies' forces against the Germans. The spectrum from smiling childlike soldier or injured soldier amongst the general populace clearly incapable of posing a threat to the crazed soldier with mutilated body parts that he nonchalantly displays to the horror of white female audience or gleeful holds up for the postcard viewer.

There are interesting examples of propaganda aimed at humiliating the enemy. The insinuations of sodomy with German forces and bayonet imagery that are also discussed in reference to a political/military scandal highlighted the immorality of German soldiers' homosexuality. Feminizing the enemy was a popular tool to negate them as equals. Finally, the issue of cannibalism is sensationalized with a soldier refusing to eat bad-tasting meat of pig Germans playing off the Muslim dietary prohibitions which in the context of the Turkish-German alliance during WWI is a twist in the divisive issue of religion.

The postcards themselves are well preserved and the imagery runs from photographs to cartoons with a sliding scale of historical solemnity to crude humor. The material uses French, English, German and petit nègre, which highlights a condescension and corralling or limiting aspect of African inclusion with an inferior form of French taught that would be easily ridiculed.

Overall, both sides used their colonial forces during World War I for their advantage, framing the rhetoric to degrade the enemy or valorize themselves. The focus is France's use of African troops in Europe, but as you view the extensive selection of postcards it becomes apparent that other ethnicities and races were caught up. Ironically, here we are 100 years later and the same powers are in friction again: Germany, Britain, France, Russia, and Turkey. The ancillary religious differences between muslim and christian countries and how they were exploited are particularly interesting due to current events. Definitely, an interesting read.