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17. The Harlem Renaissance Abroad: French Critics and the New Negro Literary Movement (1924–1964)
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17. The Harlem Renaissance Abroad: French Critics and the New Negro Literary Movement (1924–1964) Michel Fabre I. BETWEEN WARS: 1924–1939 The first information ever printed in France on the New Negro movement was provided by Alain Locke to Martinique writer René Maran, who published it in Les Continents as “La jeune poésie africo-américaine” on September 1, 1924. This brief presentation of young African-American poets stressed their positive offerings as exemplified by Countée Cullen’s “The Dance of Love (After reading Maran’s Batouala),” reprinted in English. Les Continents, a newspaper edited by Maran and pro-Garvey Prince Kojo Touvalou Houénou, reached only a limited, mostly black audience. This presentation was followed in December 1925 by Maran’s essay on “Le mouvement négro-littéraire aux États-Unis” in the better-known magazine Vient de paraı̂tre. The Goncourt prize-winner stressed the role of periodicals such as The Crisis and Opportunity, as well as the work of historian Charles S. Johnson and philosopher Alain Locke in the Negro Renaissance. The authors mentioned were Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countée Cullen, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and journalist Joel A. Rogers. A detailed review of Walter White’s Fire in the Flint concluded that this “truthful, wellbalanced , human, and exceedingly moving” novel deserved to be translated into French.1 For a time, this was about all. In March 1926, a brief praise of J.W. Johnson ’s The Book of American Spirituals appeared in Le Mercure de France,2 and Jean Catel’s review of “Lettres anglo-américaines” in the December 1, 1927, 314 Mercure included a brief presentation of God’s Trombones followed by excerpts from “The Creation.” In the December 1928 Mercure de France, Catel also mentioned the new publication of Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, “the best book ever written by a colored American,”3 and Harold Salemson mentioned it most favorably in Le Monde.4 That year, 1928, Eugène Jolas edited an Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie américaine for Editions Kra, which had already published a translation of Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven. Cullen, Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer were represented in the anthology, each with one poem. Cullen, who had graduated from New York University and become famous in 1924 with “The Shroud of Color,” was introduced as “the son of a Protestant pastor.”5 Cullen’s “Simon the Cyrenian” was printed in translation. Langston Hughes’s studies and jobs as ticket collector and sailor were mentioned. He was “a Negro poet who makes use of the rhythms of jazz and Negro songs in his poetry.”6 Hughes’s “Po’ Boy Blues” followed. McKay’s Jamaican origin, his diverse jobs, and his work at The Liberator in 1920 were listed. “A full-blooded Negro, McKay brought a new violent accent to the poetry of his race.”7 His “Black Spiritual” was selected. Toomer was said to have been born in the South and to be “probably the most gifted poet of his race. The publication of Cane, a collection of stories or prose poems reveal[ed] his great originality and imagination . He live[d] in utter solitude away from literary circles.”8 “Harvest Song” was the Toomer poem selected. In Le Nègre qui chante, Jolas’s own study of Negro songs, Jolas insisted on the distinction between the pure primitivism of African-Americans living below the Mason-Dixon line and the imitation of it by whites. The blues, spirituals , work songs, and ballads expressed the yearnings of an oppressed people. Their African origins were not to be questioned. The themes and language of these songs were discussed but no allusion was made to the New Negro movement , and the selection was limited to folk songs.9 That same year, in “La poésie nègre aux États-Unis,” a brief article in Candide , novelist André Maurois praised the lyrical achievements of Cullen, Hughes, McKay, and Angelina Grimké and provided quotations from their poems. He devoted more space, however, to DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, a translation of which was to appear shortly in Paris.10 Academics, too, helped discover the New Negro. A Whitman scholar, Léon Bazalgette, was instrumental in getting Claude McKay’s fiction published by Editions Rieder. Sorbonne Professor Régis Michaud expressed interesting views in his Littérature américaine: America was the home of the blues...