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Coda: How to Recognize a Public Intellectual
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
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G&S Typesetters PDF proof Coda How to Recognize a Public Intellectual When I say that in about April 1934, human character changed, I am revising Virginia Woolf ’s declaration of a revolution in (bourgeois European) seeing, engendered by the 1910 Cézanne show in London. Nancy Cunard’s huge collaborative book, Negro,—an anthology of writing, photographs, music, drawings, ethnographies, and poems from Africa and its diasporas— signifies another change in the way certain white people might have seen the world at the time of its publication by Wishart in London in 1934. As a major thirties documentary, Negro gathered hundreds of writers to explode the myth of the racial inferiority of blacks. Cunard’s work and the cultural work of the book are part of a lost legacy of active public intellectuals, Africans, West Indians and South Asians who worked with London leftists as a new breed of public intellectuals with an international perspective. One could argue that the three-dimensionality of cubism that Woolf and Roger Fry found so exciting in 1910 had been discovered by Western artists in Paris in their encounter with African art. That same three-dimensionality was evident in the hundreds of drawings and photographs in Negro. But now the reader had no choice but to see that the artists were black. When Nancy Cunard finished her book and left the printing press to walk out of London to meet the hunger marchers from Jarrow, she had managed to produce a major paradigm shift in western culture. There was no longer any excuse for empire now that Africans could be seen in Negro as the authors of such sophisticated art. This very impressive book was evidence that black people were not racially inferior. Africans and their descendants , and by extension, other peoples of color, must now be accepted as sharing that quality Woolf called “human character.” In addition Nancy Cunard, George Padmore, and the other black intellectuals who made the Negro anthology must be recognized as public intellectuals and no longer dismissed as outside agitators. Seven decades have passed, and it is time to reclaim this heritage. 07-R2807-COD 11/3/03 12:46 PM Page 179 G&S Typesetters PDF proof To Nancy Cunard in the thirties Africans and the starving working classes of England were linked by their common humanity. But to others both groups remained as inhuman as Woolf ’s Victorian leviathan cook, “formidable , silent, obscure, inscrutable.” What was it that broke the racial taboo in one white woman writer and not the other? Both Cunard and Woolf knew Mulk Raj Anand. And Cunard was very close to the African and West Indian intellectuals in London at the time, in particular, Padmore. To Cunard they were all members of an international Left. Virginia Woolf and her husband were also members of the Left intelligentsia . But their personal lives and their political lives did not mix in the ways Cunard’s did. They may have passed Claude McKay at the 1917 Club or at the exhibition of Negro Art, but they never met. The cultural life of Bloomsbury in the thirties has been written as if there were no blacks or Indians in it, and as if the women in Bloomsbury, and even then her social and critical ideas are not taken seriously. Nancy Cunard is not on the map of English intellectual life in this period at all. In spring 2002 she was present in two major London exhibits, the Spanish Civil War Exhibit at the Imperial War Museum, and the Paris, Capital of the Arts, Exhibit at the Royal Academy. The seldom-seen sleek bronze version of Brancusi’s elegant abstract sculpture called Nancy Cunard was captioned by a dismissive reference to her as an heiress and a socialite. The Spanish Civil War exhibit made few concessions to women, except for the fact that La Passionaria’s very small black dress hung from the ceiling. Showing, courtesy of Hugh Ford, Cunard ’s own copy of Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War, the exhibit’s caption mentions Cunard as merely one of the organizers of the classic protest pamphlet, when she did all the work herself, and says nothing of her tremendous contribution, in poetry and journalism, to the struggle against Franco and fascism. Authors Take Sides is the center of most discussions of the literature of the thirties. Critics (and libraries) not only fail to acknowledge Cunard’s authorship , they discuss only the signatories who were famous writers. One...