The Aestheticization of Ethnicity: Imagining the Dogon at the Musée du quai Branly

By investigating one tiny event in the history of the Dogon Rabbit Mask, a gala performance that took place at the French West African pavilion at the Exposition coloniale on Jul 10, 1931, Levitz explains to explain how the aesthetics of difference in evidence at the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris France came to be constituted and other related issues. Levitz concludes that Branly's spectacle of aesthetic difference is unlikely to serve, as Jacques Chirac had hoped, as a means of bridging ethnic divide and resolving postcolonial tensions in contemporary France, because it denies the Dogon their history, agency, and capacity for fashioning their own identities, while while simultaneously blocking the French government, as represented by Branly, from taking moral responsibility for past colonial injustices.