Rethinking Négritude: Aimé Césaire & Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Imagination of a Global Postcoloniality Yohann C. Ripert Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Yohann C. Ripert All rights reserved ABSTRACT Rethinking Negritude: Aimé Cesaire & Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Imagination of a Global Postcoloniality Yohann C. Ripert This dissertation calls into question the critique that has depicted the Francophone literary movement known as Negritude as a sole vehicle of black essentialism. By looking at recently published anthologies, archival documents, and lesser-known texts from 1935 to 1966, I show that in addition to the discourse on a fixed ‘blackness’ engraved in the neologism ‘Negritude,’ there is another set of discourses that forces us to rethink the movement as a philosophy of becoming. In particular, this dissertation stages the year 1948, when Jean-Paul Sartre gave Negritude its fame with the publication of his influential essay “Black Orpheus,” as a pivot for the definition of the movement as well as its reception. Since 1948, most of the critical engagement with Negritude has happened either through a reading of Sartre’s essay or the limited corpus that was available at the time. I thus argue that, by reading a broader range of the poets of Negritude’s literary and cultural production, one gets a sense that their vindication of Blackness is not only an essentialized invocation of a romanticized past, it is also an imagined unity within an evolving postcoloniality. This dissertation covers three areas within which this constantly reimagined unity is staged, from the youthful local publications of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor from 1935 to 1948, to their mature global interactions as statesmen in Dakar, Fort-de-France, Paris and Rome from 1948 to 1966. First, it looks at language and analyzes the relation of the poets to French. While the choice to adopt the idiom of the former colonizer has been criticized by merely every reader of Negritude, I show that they used French as a tool enabling violation, negotiating their relation to the metropole as well as other colonies. Second, it interrogates the often overlooked concept of métissage as common element for colonized subjects. With particular attention to problems of translation, I analyze how the poets used métissage as a political and ethical concept in order to reach to the African diaspora without referring to Europe as the unavoidable mediator. Third, it focuses on the First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar in 1966 as instrument for political practice. By investigating extensive documentation on the Festival’s organization, especially the influential role and presence of the United States, I show that art was used as a political tool to stage postcolonial unity in an otherwise global and competitive diversity. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter I - Negritude & Language 20 Introduction 20 I. What Language? 27 A. From a Philosophy of Bilingualism to a Politics of Languages 27 B. Existence and Essence 46 II. Negritude without negritude 63 A. Poetry and knowledge 66 B. Addendum: “Geneva and the Black World” 92 Chapter II - Negritude & Métissage 100 Introduction 100 I. Métissage: Between Biology and Culture 111 A. From 1935: the Anti-Colonialism of L’Étudiant Noir... 115 B. To 1948: ... and an Imagining of Globality. 128 II. Negritude in Worldly Meetings 145 A. The First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists (1956) 147 B. The Second World Congress of Black Writers and Artists (1959) 159 Chapter III - Negritude Between Arts and Politics 174 Introduction 174 I. 1963 - 1966: Imagining the First World Festival of Negro Arts 182 II. April 1966: On the Stage of the First World Festival of Negro Arts 202 III. After 1966: Learning from the First World Festival of Negro Arts 236 Conclusion 248 Bibliography 253 !i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This dissertation is not only the result of multiple years spent on a hunch for an object of study that kept evolving as I hopelessly tried to define it; it is also the product of a collaborative work with friends, colleagues, and advisors without whom I would have never been able to carry it through. For her infinite patience and meticulous reading of nearly every word I wrote during my graduate studies, pushing every one of them to their limits, slowly and non-coercively rearranging my desires, I am forever indebted to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. From transcriptions and bibliographic hunts as research assistant, to oral presentations and final papers written as her student, to learning to rewrite and rethink as a fortunate dissertation advisee, including New York Gramsci monument and Pen Hospital trips as friends, I have enjoyably learned more from Gayatri than I could have ever asked for, still discovering ramifications of her incomparable teaching as I transition to my next stage. For his unwavering trust in me and generous sharing of nearly everything I know in African literature and philosophy, I am eternally grateful to Souleymane Bachir Diagne. From the first class I took with Bachir to his most recent scholarship, my research trajectory has been greatly shaped by countless conversations, shared scholarly contributions, and a mentorship that has taught me more than any word can do justice. Many of the ideas and sources that continue to influence me have been introduced to me in unforgettable conversations, and it is with great humility that I “render unto Bachir the things that are Bachir’s.” For his inestimable involvement and tireless engagement with a project that kept moving outside of his countless fields of expertise, I am evermore thankful to Etienne Balibar. From our early discussions on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Claude Lévi-Strauss, to his courses on civic universalism and anthropological difference, Marx, Foucault and Althusser, Etienne has been a beacon of light in my often obscure ideas and references to European philosophy and literature. Magically expanding my framework while narrowing its focus, I owe to Etienne not only the foundation of this work in this present form but also its subsequent transformation. Inés Nam and Surya Parekh have read parts of this work in various stages, helping me to see what it is that I was actually trying to do. Pieter VanHove and Foad Torshidzi, through numerous conversations often resulting from our work for Gayatri, have helped and supported me more than I deserved. Finally, my most wholehearted gratitude goes to two women who, each in their own very different ways, have made this dissertation possible, through the vicissitudes of life and work. My mother, Eliane, who does not read English fluently, and yet has patiently read every word in the text as well as the footnotes, correcting mistakes, typos, and adding references that she looked up with the selfless goal of making this work–and her son–shine through. Thank you, Mom. My wife, Hannah, who was never trained in literary scholarship, and yet painstakingly immersed herself in my tortuous writing and style. She has given life to the text so that the audience could fancy the work of two intellectuals, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, whom she came to appreciate, admire and respect as much as I have. Thank you, my Love. May the reader enjoy reading these pages as much as I have enjoyed writing them. !ii To My Mother, Her courage, strength, and resilience, With ineffable love, profound respect and infinite admiration, Without whom neither these words nor the one who wrote them could have seen the light of day. !iii INTRODUCTION Negritude is dead. Long live Negritude! It is easy to determine with precision the date of birth of the word négritude: Paris, May 1935, L’Étudiant Noir.1 But with the death of Aimé Césaire in April 2008, arguably the last of the three “fathers” of Negritude and the poet who coined the word, can we retrospectively question what it came to be associated with: a movement vindicating an essentialized Blackness? Considering the long trajectory of an idea that lasted more than half a century, as well as the manifold writings, digressions, and sometimes contradictory routes that its alleged creators, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, took, can Negritude tell us a more convoluted story: not only of a pre-conditioned Black-being but also of an unconditioned Black-becoming? One way to address this question is to ask whether it is dead or has survived its creators and its critics. On the one hand, if it has not, we owe to one of the major francophone literary movements of the twentieth century to analyze its hopes and shortcomings, to learn from the mistakes of its practitioners, to understand the compromise its actors had to make and rethink how we, who have inherited their work, must pay our dues to Negritude and take it from there. On the other hand, if the movement has survived its creators, then we must investigate the conditions under which Negritude’s discourse first arose, how it has transformed in and adapted to a world in constant movement, question the foundations upon which it rests and that make its message still relevant, and finally, ask who has appropriated it in our contemporaneity–and how. 1 The word first appears in print in the third issue of the journal L’Étudiant Noir, in an article by Aimé Césaire titled “Nègreries: conscience raciale et révolution sociale,” p. 2. The article has been published anew in Les Temps Modernes No. 676 (2013/5), pp. 249-251. Edward O. Ako goes as far as claiming that Negritude did not exist as a movement until Lilyan Kesteloot defined and popularized it.