Marie-Hélène Koffi-Tessio  (Princeton University)
Black Diasporas in Paris: 'The Fact of Blackness' in the City of the Enlightenment

In the early twentieth century, France and in particular Paris turned out to be the place where many members of the African, Caribbean, and African American intelligentsia came into contact. It was in Paris that Senghor and Césaire met, got acquainted with the writings of Du Bois, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen, and created for themselves a space of learning in the margins of their mainstream education at Louis Legrand and Ecole Normale Supérieure. Those encounters, literary and personal, set them on the path that led to the creation of the Negritude movement. Exchanges between members of the diaspora culminated in significant events such as the 1956 Conference of Black Writers and Artists in Paris.

A place of active intellectual exchange and artistic life, Paris was also the center of colonial power, and encounters between members of the diaspora were sometimes surveilled by the police and reported to the colonial administration. Living in France had different implications for Americans and French-speaking Antilleans and Africans. The goal of this paper is to examine the significance of Paris as a locus of ethnic and identity awareness and a place for subversive learning and discourse. Some texts and events I will focus on include: Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (1925), British heiress Nancy Cunard's 1934 anthology Negro, Leon-Gontran Damas's Pigments (1937), and Senghor's famous 1948 Anthologie de la poésie nègre et malgache, with its preface by Sartre, "Orphée noir." I also want to investigate why a later generation of francophone Caribbean intellectuals and writers, such as Edouard Glissant and Maryse Condé, chose the United States over France as their "metropolitan" location.