"Senghor's Prefaces Between the Colonial and Postcolonial," By

Senghor’s Prefaces between the Colonial and the Postcolonial

Richard Watts

Voilà quelque cent cinquante ans que les blancs s’intéressent à la littérature des nègres d’Afrique, qu’ils dissertent sur elle, comme l’abbé Grégoire, ou qu’ils en donnent des traductions, comme Blaise Cendrars. Mais voilà que les Négro-africains de langue française veulent eux-mêmes manifester cette littérature, et ils se présentent en traducteurs le plus souvent. Over the last one hundred and fifty years or so, whites have expressed their interest in Black African literature, whether in critical essays such as Abbé Grégoire’s or in translations such as Blaise Cendrars’s. But now francophone Black Africans want to present this literature themselves, and they do so most often by serving as its translators. —Léopold Sédar Senghor, Preface, “D’Amadou Koumba à Birago Diop” 7

n the discursive field of francophone “colonized” and postcolonial literatures, the paratext—the book covers, illustrations, epigraphs, and, Iin particular, prefaces that surround the text—has a varied if somewhat checkered history. Used principally for indicating colonial approval of and control over a text in the early years of the literatures produced by so- called indigenous or colonized writers in the French empire,1 it later became in the hands of postcolonial writers such as Assia Djebar, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau , Werewere Liking, and Henri Lopes a space for signifying a break with colonial models of literary patronage. In the colonial and postcolonial contexts, the paratext is always about more than the promotion of literature. All paratexts inscribe the texts to which they are attached in particular discursive fields, but the paratexts to works produced in the colonial and postcolonial context do so in a way that renders the political use of the novel explicit. If the paratext in this literary field is always about more than the promotion of literature, it is not simply an instrument for expressing a politics (e.g., for or against French colonialism). The paratext has an underlying function, intralingual cultural translation, that is, in fact, closely related to its more explicitly political function. The paratext to colonized and postcolonial literatures translates—in a metaphorical sense—the text in abbre- viated textual form (prefaces, dedications, dust jacket copy, etc.) as well as in iconic form (cover art). This gives readers who might not otherwise be immediately able to “read” the text’s cultural difference access to it. This makes the text, lest we forget the commercial imperatives of the paratext, a more approachable and desirable commodity. Translation, a central trope of postcolonial studies, is the mechanism by which the unknown becomes known and the unknowable becomes knowable, and it is precisely this

Vol. 33, No. 4, Winter 2002 Richard Watts 77 operation that the paratext effects. Although Léopold Sédar Senghor is describing the work of Birago Diop in the epigraph above, he could very well have been talking about his own practice as preface writer. When colonized writers begin writing prefaces for the works of writers who share the same subject position, they become the translators of this literature for its largely metropolitan French readership. The politics expressed by the paratext and the form of translation of the text it performs are intimately linked. For instance, the “colonizing” paratext of the 1930s and 1940s presents political positions that are pro- colonial and evinces, not coincidentally, a highly adaptive form of translation. In the earliest production of francophone literature, the paratext translates the difference of the work in question by presenting it in terms easily assimilated by a metropolitan French readership. The paratext exists in this context (as does the colonizer, for that matter) to render, as Horace put it, the Ogre Roman. For translation theorist Antoine Berman, this dom- inant mode of translation is ethnocentric (it subordinates the text’s values to its own), hypertextual (it positions itself above the text), and Platonic (it privileges the ostensibly universal meaning of the text over its particular form of expression) (26). The subversive, disruptive paratexts of the postcolonial writers cited above describe a political space beyond the opposition between the colonial and the anti-colonial and conform more, as a form of translation, to Berman’s literal alternative to the adaptive mode of translation. Whereas the adaptive mode of translation that I associate with the paratext from the colonial period is ethnocentric, hypertextual, and Platonic, the postcolonial paratext is closer to Berman’s literal translation, which is ethical (it accepts the cultural difference of the source text), poetic (it does not attempt simply to rewrite the form of the source text), and “reflexive” (it signifies through form as well as through content) (27). Most of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s prefaces to works of francophone colonized and postcolonial literature occupy the uncomfortable middle ground between the colonial and the postcolonial, in political and translational terms. The period of decolonization—whose precise beginning and end points are as notoriously difficult to pin down as those of the colonial and postcolonial periods, but which constitutes nonetheless an episteme—is marked by the emergence of a culturally autonomous literature in French from the colonies and postcolonies. It also happens to be the period during which Senghor writes the bulk of his prefaces to literary texts by (mostly) francophone colonized and postcolonial sub-Saharan African writers. Through his work as literary patron of novels, short stories, and collections of poetry from the late 1940s to the 1960s, Senghor was instrumental in marking out the contours of this literary field whose shape has changed since the mid-century but that still bears his mark.2 Although Senghor contributed prefaces to all kinds of works, most of which had some connection to his project of identifying and renewing the cultural and political practices of Africa and the diaspora, the greater part of his patronage was to novels and collections of poetry from francophone sub- Saharan Africa, with a few prefaces to works from the Caribbean.3 Senghor, 78 Research in African Literatures whose generosity does not need to be established here, contributed over thirty prefaces over the course of nearly fifty years to works of African and Caribbean francophone literatures, far more than the other two most active preface-writing patrons of these literatures, Jean-Paul Sartre and Edouard Glissant. He begins writing prefaces to the works of francophone colonized writers at that crucial moment following the Second World War when it becomes clear that the hegemonic colonialism of the interwar years is no longer possible. Increasingly large spaces for opposition to colonialism emerge in the immediate postwar years, and Senghor’s prefaces both reflect and help create these new openings. They also—and this is not the least of their virtues—promote a literature that will play a deter- mining part in the redefinition of the subjectivities of the (former) colonizer and the (formerly) colonized. However, even in their generosity they are marked by the ambiguities of the period of decolonization, and it is these ambiguities that I want to explore here. If Senghor’s importance in shaping the field of francophone literature is undeniable, it is less clear how his prefaces fit into the history of the reception or, more precisely, the patronage of the works that constitute this literary field. In other words, how are Senghor’s prefaces different from those that precede and follow his in the field of francophone literature? Understood as instruments of cultural translation, what is their politics of translation? Where do they lie on Berman’s spectrum of translational practices? For all the work that has been done to derive a Senghorian (read: African) literary criticism, philosophy, or cultural politics from Senghor’s prefaces, little has been said on their status qua prefaces. Although Daniel Garrot and Pius Ngandu Nkashama—to name simply those whose critical works focus most intently on Senghor’s prefaces—present, respectively, convincing accounts of Senghor’s literary criticism and his rewriting of mid-century phenomenology using the prefaces, both choose to ignore the position these texts previously occupied and the rhetorical implications of that positioning. This is at least partly the result of the paratextual repackaging of Senghor’s prefaces. The majority of Senghor’s essays, prefaces, and speeches have been collected in the five volumes of the Liberté series, and it is in this disembodied form that most critics read the prefaces. What I want to do here, then, is resituate Senghor’s prefaces as works of literary patronage that belong to a history of this practice. Senghor’s prefaces anticipate the paratext of the postcolonial period, but they do so while relying on rhetoric that occasionally has the ring of the preface from the colonial period. I want to show where these prefaces lie, from a translational perspective, on the continuum between the ethnocentric and the ethical, the hypertextual and the poetic, and the Platonic and the reflexive. What Senghor’s prefaces show is that a discourse that promotes literary, cultural, and even political autonomy can share the page with a colonial rhetoric, granting the prefaced text what amounts to a conditional free- dom. Before getting to the heart of the matter, though, I will make one last detour through the history of the paratext in the francophone literary Richard Watts 79 context in order to describe in more detail the colonial model of paratextual patronage with which Senghor was certainly familiar and in relation to which he developed his own paratextual practice. The paratextual framing of francophone African writers of the interwar years is characterized, as suggested above, by a nearly unavoidable recuperation of the works of colonized writers into the colonial project. In many of the prefaces from this period, the works are presented as symbols of the success of the mission civilisatrice. The allographic preface writer4 usually states that the author has learned to mimic, albeit imperfectly, French literary models, and this mimicry is presented as a form of conquest. In fact, an expression that appears in a number of these prefaces is “conquêtes intellectuelles et morales” ‘intellectual and moral conquests.’5 The colonizing prefaces of this period, written mostly by colonial authors and adminis- trators, go far beyond what Gérard Genette calls the “function of recommendation” (268) of the allographic preface. The colonizing prefaces betray an obsession with signaling their absolute mastery over the text, its author, and his cultural context. Other paratextual elements perform a similar gesture: cover art that reproduces colonial clichés of the colonized, the mention of colonial literary prizes on the book cover, colonial co- authorship, and the dedication of the work to a colonial patron (which can be understood as an implicit precondition for publication) all suggest the colonizer’s desire for authority over the texts produced by the colonized. Senghor’s first preface constitutes a questioning of that structure of authority, and does so in its subject of enunciation and its discourse. Whereas the task of assembling and introducing anthologies of colonial and colonized literature fell during the interwar years to the French writers who could claim a familiarity with the colonies, the immediate postwar years witness an explosion of anthologies of colonized literature prefaced by colonized writers themselves. This is the case with the collectively edited Les plus beaux écrits de l’Union française et du Maghreb (The Most Beautiful Writings of the French Union and the Maghreb) (1947), only the second such anthology not to be edited by a French or colonial writer (the first being Léon Damas’s Latitudes françaises: Poètes d’expression française, 1900- 1945, published earlier in the same year). Part of a regular series of anthologies organized either by period or by region, Les plus beaux écrits de l’Union française et du Maghreb has a much broader mandate than the other anthologies in the collection. Divided into four sections (North Africa, Black Africa, Annam [the central province of Vietnam], and Madagascar) that correspond roughly to the four administrative regions of the Union française and preceded by prefaces by Mohamed El Kholti, Senghor, Pierre Do Dinh, and A. Rakoto Ratsimamanga and E. Ralajmihiatra, respectively, the anthology is animated by the desire to present a global view of the literary production of the colonies. Senghor’s role in this project is singular in that he is alone among the editors/preface-writers of the anthology in privileging the contemporary literary production of the area he is responsible for presenting. The three other sections of Les plus beaux écrits de l’Union française et du Maghreb present an historical canon of 80 Research in African Literatures written and oral texts translated into French dating back as far as one thousand years ago (as in the case of the section on Annam). Senghor’s interest clearly lies in establishing a new canon, one of francophone “Black African” literature. In an anthology that does the work of colonialism by collecting the textual traditions of peoples colonized by France under the banner of the Union française, Senghor’s contribution stands out for its insistence on the present and the future of African literature and, in particular, on a certain autonomy of the texts he is presenting. In so doing, he points towards the future dissolution of the Union française, itself a sign of the dissolution of strict colonial rule. In his preface, following a brief discussion of African religion and culture as they existed prior to colonialism, Senghor broaches the topic of contemporary African literature and art by evoking its French models. He writes of the passion he developed at the colonial school in Dakar for the works of Corneille, a playwright who represents for him “l’aboutisse- ment d’un idéal” ‘the accomplishment of an ideal’ (174). In spite of his admiration for Corneille, though, Senghor insists that francophone African literature is not derivative of these French models. It is, rather, just one expression of an Africanness that can be seen in a number of media and genres: Et nous voilà ramenés [. . .] à l’art nègre proprement dit. Car cet art est un, il a le même style dans ses différentes manifestations: architecture, sculpture, danse, musique, poésie et littérature en général. Le Négro-Africain lui-même ne les sépare pas dans sa vie. And here we return [. . .] to what can properly be called Black art. For this art is unified. It has the same style in all its different manifestations: architecture, sculpture, dance, music, poetry, and literature in general. The Black African himself does not separate them in his daily existence. (174) Senghor’s discussion in the same paragraph of Corneille and what Senghor calls Black art performs an early relativizing of artistic value in the history of this literature. He also assigns singularity, or at least distinction, to the francophone colonized writer, and is the only one to do so forcefully in the anthology. Senghor’s “translation” of the contents of the anthology is therefore ethical, in Berman’s sense, since it does not adapt in an ethnocentric manner the cultural difference embedded in the anthology’s text to the habitus of the largely metropolitan readership. Senghor’s preface, however, also has recourse to a form of translation that is closer to Berman’s ethnocentric type. When Senghor constructs the difference that allows him to distinguish francophone African literature from metropolitan literature, he does so in a way that paradoxically flattens that difference. In establishing the cultural substrate of the new francophone African literature, Senghor insists on the exclusion of Islamic elements: “[A]ntérieur à l’islamisation et plus profond qu’elle, est le dyom [sentiment de dignité personnelle] négro-africain” ‘[P]rior to Islamization and deeper than it lies the Black African dyom [sense of Richard Watts 81 personal dignity]’ (173). The anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle has deplored in another context what he sees as the all-too-common tendency in African literary criticism “de débrancher systématiquement une série de textes [. . .] pour les rebrancher sur un réseau ou sur une généalogie exclusive de toute dérivation latérale” ‘to systematically unplug a series of texts [. . .] to be able to plug them back into a network or genealogy that permits no lateral derivation’ (73). This is the gesture performed by Senghor’s preface, a gesture it has in common with prefaces written by colonizers to the works of colonized writers. From the colonizer’s perspective, removing the Arab substrate made it easier to present the colonized writer as within reach, culturally speaking, of the metropolitan French readership.6 Senghor, for his part, seems to use this gesture in order to be able to present sub-Saharan African literature as uncorrupted by foreign influence. It is for this same reason that Senghor insisted on the distinction between “littérature négro-africaine d’expression française,” which Senghor understood to imply “Black African literature of French character,” and “littérature négro-africaine de langue française” ‘French-language Black African literature,’ where the French language is simply a vehicle for the expression of Africanness. The reasons for unplugging the Islamic substrate are different, but the rhetoric remains largely the same. The infidelity in Senghor’s preface to Les plus beaux écrits de l’Union française et du Maghreb is the foreclosing of multiple cultural sources of the texts he is “translating.” Ia later section of this same preface (which is not reprinted in Liberté I), there is another gesture that proceeds directly from colonial logic, even if it does so from a position of greater intimacy with the texts in question than do the prefaces written by colonizers: La plupart des colonies des deux fédérations aofienne et aefienne n’ont été conquises qu’à la fin du XIXe siècle. La chute d’Abomey est de 1892; c’est en 1895 que les Français occupent les Etats du Mogho-Naba et Samory ne sera pris qu’en septembre 1898. Moins de quarante ans après la conquête, il se créait en A.O.F. une lit- térature négro-africaine de langue française; bien plus, certains de nos auteurs obtenait des prix littéraires. Most of the colonies in the French West and Equatorial African Federations were conquered only at the end of the 19th Century. The fall of Abomey dates from 1892. It is in 1895 that the French occupy the Mogho-Naba states, and Samory is taken only in September 1898. Less than forty years after the conquest, French- language Black African literature appeared in French West Africa. Moreover, some of our authors began obtaining literary prizes. (233) Senghor’s reference to “our authors” is ambiguous. On the one hand, it suggests an intimacy with or, more precisely, a horizontal relation to the texts he is prefacing. On the other hand, since he does not include himself in the group of authors he is presenting, “our authors” can be under- 82 Research in African Literatures stood as an expression of the preface writer’s hypertextuality, of a certain condescension or paternalism. This is not quite yet the preface as dialogue. Likewise, Senghor effectively repeats one of the recurrent tropes of the colonizing preface in his insistence on the rapidity with which Africans writers begin producing works in French. This constitutes a form of ethnocentric and hypertextual translation in that it views the literary production of the colonized through the lens of the colonizer and situates itself in a position of mastery vis-à-vis the text(s). The accomplishment is the colonizer’s, not that of the colonized. What distinguishes Senghor’s use of this rhetorical gesture from its use by his colonial predecessors, other than the obvious fact that it is not employed to maintain the colonial status quo, is that it coexists with language designed to carve out an autonomous space for the literature he is promoting. However, the proximity to colonial discourse on francophone colonized literature is striking and points to the discursive limitations at work in the early moments of the period of decolonization. The tension between a “poetic” or horizontal relation to the text and a relation of hypertextuality is clearer in later prefaces. Here, Senghor establishes his preface-writer’s authority more directly, and does so at the expense of the authority of the metropolitan literary institution over the object of francophone African literature. The essential argument of these prefaces and of Senghor’s literary criticism in general is that the works in question are the product of what Senghor calls the “Black sensibility,” which has been understood by most of Senghor’s critics as the expression of a Black essence. By extension, it is a Black African writer who is in the best position to write about or preface the work of another Black African writer. To give just one example of this rhetorical gesture, Senghor writes in his preface to Birago Diop’s Les nouveaux contes d’Amadou Koumba that it is “difficile, à un non-africain, de goûter pleinement [. . .] l’art de Birago Diop dans les dialogues et les chants” ‘difficult, for a non-African, to fully appreciate [. . .] Birago Diop’s skill in rendering dialogue and song’ (19). But this wresting of critical authority from the non-African critic does not imply that Senghor then positions himself horizontally vis-à-vis the African writer whose work he is prefacing. Many of Senghor’s prefaces end with a stinging critique of the work they are presenting. In his 1968 preface to Lamine Niang’s Négristique, Senghor tempers his praise with reference to “des maladresses et, parfois, des incertitudes de syntaxe” ‘awkward pas- sages and, occasionally, uncertain syntax’ (12) that trouble the poetry. Likewise, the 1962 preface to Tchicaya U Tam’si’s Epitomé ends with a reproach of the poet’s “défauts de jeunesse” ‘youthful mistakes’ (13). This is important in that it constitutes a breaking of the implicit pact of the preface.7 Even when Senghor does not break the pact of the preface in this way, he manages to indicate his role as patron, which is to say “master” or “father,” of this literature. In the first paragraph of the preface to Malick Fall’s Reliefs, which does not qualify its praise of the poet, Senghor writes: “‘Un apprenti de plus’, pensais-je en voyant, cités en exergue, pour chaque partie, des vers d’un poète sénégalais” ‘“another apprentice,” I thought Richard Watts 83 when I saw the verse of a Senegalese poet cited at the beginning of each section’ (7). That Senegalese poet is, of course, Senghor, and although he admits to changing his assessment immediately, the hierarchy between patron and poet has already been established. The key to understanding Senghor’s hypertextual positioning comes in a late preface to a work that has, in fact, nothing to do with literature: Pierre Dumont’s Le français et les langues africaines au Sénégal. In his preface to Dumont’s text, Senghor, whose nearly every preface is marked by some kind of formal self-consciousness, reflects on his position as patron and the rhetorical implications of that position: Le lecteur l’aura remarqué, ma préface sera sortie du modèle ordi- naire, où un maître présente le travail de son élève, comme je l’ai fait [ailleurs] . . . . Il s’agit, dans notre cas, d’une situation dif- férente: d’un assistant technique prêté par la France à la République du Sénégal. D’où le dialogue nécessairement noué entre le Chef de l’Etat et lui, et d’autant plus facilement que tous les deux étaient des enseignants de la même discipline. C’est ce dialogue, fait de franchise amicale, que je continue dans cette préface. The reader will have noticed that my preface does not conform to the typical model of the preface in which a teacher presents the work of his student, as I have done [elsewhere] . . . . Here, the situation is different. I am writing a preface to the work of a technical assistant on loan from France to the Republic of Senegal. Hence the dialogue that necessarily exists between the Chief of State and him, a dialogue all the more easily established since both have taught in the same field. It is this dialogue, infused with the spirit of friendly honesty, that I am continuing in this preface. (10) Here, the preface equals dialogue, and the implied literary contract that places the allographic preface writer above the author of the text in question is ostensibly elided. It is clear from this passage that if a dialogue— which requires that the two interlocutors be equals—can occur with a “technical assistant” from France, it is less likely, by implication, with a writer who is not quite his equal. The “maître/élève” ‘teacher/student’ model of literary patronage inscribes Senghor’s prefaces in the hypertextual-colonial model of cultural translation, a tendency only partially miti- gated by Senghor’s occasional suggestions of a more horizontal mode of prefacing based on equality. There is, finally, a tendency in these prefaces— admittedly less pro- nounced than the tendency to translate the cultural difference of these texts in a manner that is ethnocentric and hypertextual—to privilege the universal or at least broader significance of the work in question over its particular form of expression; to produce, in Berman’s words, a type of cultural translation that is more “Platonic” than “reflexive.” In a first instance, Senghor often says less about the precise mechanisms of the text he is presenting and more about what the text addresses. This is seen most 84 Research in African Literatures clearly in a preface to a critical work on African folktales in which Senghor, over the course of ten fairly dense pages, briefly mentions the author’s contribution on the subject on just the second and third pages. The rest of the preface exposes Senghor’s own ideas on the subject. The title of the preface alone, “Le réalisme d’Amadou Koumba,” is an indication of just how removed from the work—or, rather, the author’s work—the preface is. This too constitutes a dissolution of the pact between preface writer and prefaced author. A closely related gesture is the recuperation of writers into the category or movement Senghor is attempting to construct. In nearly all of the literary prefaces, there is a moment at which Senghor pass- es from a description of the specificity of a work to its inscription in the Negritude movement. After presenting Tchicaya U’Tamsi’s insistence on the image as the hallmark of the poems in Epitomé, Senghor avers that “Tchicaya est un témoin dont l’unique but, ici, est de manifester la Négritude” ‘Tchicaya is a witness whose only goal, here, is to express Negritude’ (10). Negritude refers, for Senghor, both to a state of being and to a movement. The fact that the word is offset typographically from the rest of the text suggests to me that the accent is being placed on the latter meaning. The problem, then, is that Tchicaya U’Tamsi’s work becomes the expression not of a Congolese specificity but of a sort universal of the African diaspora. Similarly, in the preface to Les plus beaux écrits de l’Union française et du Maghreb, Senghor shoehorns the works of the Caribbean writers René Maran, Aimé Césaire, and Léon-Gontran Damas into the “Afrique noire” category. Like André Breton in the Surrealist manifestos, Senghor uses the authority of the allographic preface to bring writers under his critical umbrella, and flattens their cultural and aesthetic specificity in the process. I do not marshal all of this evidence to suggest that Senghor’s prefaces simply reproduce the colonial gestures of authority of prefaces to francophone colonized literature from the years spanning the 1920s to the 1940s. Throughout Senghor’s prefaces is evidence of the will to crosscul- tural understanding that will be, perhaps, Senghor’s most important legacy. Still, at the same time that the prefaces considered here point a way out of the situation of cultural domination of the colonial period, they also rely on certain rhetorical strategies of colonial discourse for their authority. It is indeed striking how different these prefaces are from those written by the generation of writers who will assume or complement Senghor’s role as patron or promoter of this literary field. Edouard Glissant, who writes his first preface in 1959 to Kateb Yacine’s Le cercle des représailles and is an active preface writer to this day, begins his career as “patron” by explicitly refusing that role. Glissant identifies and partially resolves the problem of the verticality of the preface by using the collective personal pronoun “nous” ‘we’ in talking about Kateb’s text. A recent preface to Patrick Chamoiseau’s L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse has Glissant placing his commentary between Chamoiseau’s chapters, thereby trans- forming the preface writer into a sort of collaborator. Henri Lopes’s preface in Le pleurer-rire from 1982 is, for its part, a parody of the authority of Richard Watts 85 postcolonial dictatorships over texts that seems clearly inspired by colonial prefaces. These are just several examples among many of how the subse- quent generation of writers in this literary field manifests an awareness of and resistance to the use of the paratext as an instrument of authority and control. There is also a shift in these later prefaces in the mode of cultural translation, a shift that is the result of a new understanding of cultural difference. Senghor’s prefaces and their ambiguities are completely con- sonant with the rest of Senghor’s career, animated as it was by his desire to be a go-between, a figure who is both Senegalese and French, a bridge between what he views as two distinct cultures. Senghor was a fervent pro- ponent, especially later in life, of the métissage of these two cultures. But Senghor’s version of métissage was based, as his prefaces show, on a notion of original purity. Glissant, Lopes, and other postcolonial “patrons” are writing their prefaces at a moment when it is possible to imagine that the hierarchy of cultures no longer exists and, more importantly, that cultures are already mixed, if not always already mixed. They are no longer com- pelled to adapt the texts to a readership that is increasingly dispersed, culturally and geographically. The authoritative, “colonizing” preface belongs to those structures of authority that have perhaps not been entirely superceded, but beyond which the postcolonial author must try to write. Senghor’s prefaces belong to an episteme between the colonial and the postcolonial, an episteme where the only response to colonial authority is its symmetrical obverse.

NOTES

1. The paratext—most characteristically in the form of a preface by a colonial writer/administrator— to novels by so-called indigenous writers in North Africa in the 1930s and 1940s presents the works in questions as examples of the suc- cessful hybridization of French colonial and indigenous cultural and racial com- ponents. This constitutes a recuperation of those texts into the emerging nationalist project of the colonizers in Algeria who sought to create a “new race,” as they put it, and a new nation wholly separate from the metropole. See Watts, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur indigène?” 2. One of the most significant and disputed legacies that Léopold Sédar Senghor leaves us is the racially inflected version of the category of francophone literature. More than any other writer of his generation, Senghor actively worked on the construction of the literary field known historically as littérature négro- africaine de langue française (Black African literature in French), which is not typically subsumed under the more specific categories of “francophone African literature” and “francophone Caribbean literature,” or the more generic category of “francophone literature.” If university courses on francophone literature tend to include a section on Negritude, most often accompanied by a reading of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, I would argue that it has less to do with Césaire’s very limited use of the term in that text than it has to do with Senghor’s tireless work in his voluminous critical writing to link Negritude and francophone literature. 86 Research in African Literatures

3. A testament to his influence and the range of his intellect, Senghor’s prefaces appear in texts as diverse as a collection of lithographs by Marc Chagall, the French translation of the South African Peter Abrahams’s A Crown fro Udomo, an anthology of poets from the sixteenth century, a dictionary of French orthog- raphy, and the biography of a nineteenth-century missionary. 4. The term, borrowed from Genette, designates a preface written by someone other than the author. See his Paratexts, esp. 263-75. 5. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 6. See, for instance, Louis Bertrand’s preface to the 1925 anthology of Maghrebi literature, Notre Afrique, in which he presents Abdelkader Hadj’ Hamou’s subtle critique of Islam in the volume as evidence of a return “à la pensée et à la forme latines” ‘to Latin thought and form’ (20) in North Africa. 7. There is, as Genette points out, a type of allographic preface that does allow for the harsh critique seen in some of Senghor’s prefaces: the posthumous preface: “[T]he fact that the author has long been dead frees the preface from any sort of semiofficial status and (almost) from any obligation to attribute high value to the work” (270-71). That Senghor should include a gesture typically reserved for the dead in his prefaces to living—in fact, young—authors is suggestive, again, of his hypertextual positioning.

PRIMARY WORKS CITED

Prefaces by Léopold Sédar Senghor Cited (by date) “L’Afrique noire: la civilisation négro-africaine”. Les plus beaux écrits de l’Union française et du Maghreb. Ed. Mohamed El Kholti, Léopold S. Senghor, Pierre Do Dinh, A. Rakoto Ratsimamanga, and E. Ralajmihiatra. Paris: La Colombe, 1947. 165-262. “Le réalisme d’Amadou Koumba.” Les contes noirs de l’Ouest Africain: Témoins majeurs d’un humanisme. By Roland Colin. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1957. 7-16. “D’Amadou Koumba à Birago Diop.” Les nouveaux contes d’Amadou Koumba. By Birago Diop. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1958. 7-22. “De la poésie bantoue à la poésie négro-africaine.” Epitomé: Les mots de têtes pour le sommaire d’une passion. By Tchicaya U Tam’si. Tunis: Pierre Jean Oswald, 1962. 7-13. “Malick Fall ou une poésie à hauteur d’homme.” Reliefs: Poèmes. By Malick Fall. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1964. 7-14. “Lamine Niang: Poète de la ‘Négristique.’” Négristique. By Lamine Niang. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1968. 7-12. Preface. Le français et les langue africaines au Sénégal. By Pierre Dumont. Paris: ACCT- Karthala, 1983. 7-20.

SECONDARY WORKS CITED

Amselle, Jean-Loup. Branchements: Anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures. Paris: Flammarion, 2001. Berman, Antoine. La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain. 1985. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Richard Watts 87

Bertrand, Louis. Preface. Notre Afrique: Anthologies des conteurs algériens. Paris: Les Editions du Monde Moderne, 1925. Garrot, Daniel. Léopold Sédar Senghor, critique littéraire. Dakar: Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1978. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Glissant, Edouard. Preface. Le cercle des représailles. By Kateb Yacine. Paris: Seuil, 1959. 9-13. . “entre-dire.” L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse. By Patrick Chamoiseau. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. 16, 30, 54, 64, 76, 110, 128. Latitudes françaises: Poètes d’expression française, 1900-1945. Ed. Léon Damas. Paris: Seuil, 1947. Lopes. Henri. Preface (“Sérieux avertissement” under pseud. Anasthasie Mopekissa). Le pleurer-rire. By Henri Lopes. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1982. 9-12. Ngandu Nkashama, Pius. Négritude et poétique: Une lecture de l’oeuvre de Léopold Sédar Senghor. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992.