-
9. Black Modernist Women at the Parisian Crossroads
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
227 Black Modernist Women at the Parisian Crossroads JENNIFER M. WILKS 9 In her 1932 essay “Eveil de la Conscience de Race” (“Awakening of Race Consciousness ”), Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal (1896–1985) not only predates Frantz Fanon’s assertion that, for the colonized Francophone individual, travel to Paris spurs the onset of racial consciousness. She also extends the claim by arguing that the construct of gender is as important as geography and nation in the articulation of racial identities. In an oft-cited passage explaining the genesis of La Revue du monde noir (The Review of the Black World), the bilingual publication that she cofounded and coedited, Nardal writes, Pourtant, parallèlement aux efforts isolés cités plus haut s’affirmaient chez un groupe d’étudiantes antillaises à Paris les aspirations qui devaient se cristalliser autour de la Revue du Monde noir. Les femmes de couleur vivant seules dans la métropole moins favorisées jusqu’à l’Exposition coloniale que leurs congénères masculins aux faciles succès, ont ressenti bien avant eux le besoin d’une solidarité raciale qui ne serait pas seulement d’ordre matériel . . . (The aspirations which were to be crystallized around “The Review of the Black World” asserted themselves among a group of Antillian [sic] women students in Paris. The coloured women living alone in the metropolis until the Colonial Exhibition [,] have certainly been less favoured than coloured men. . . . Long before the latter, they have felt the need of a racial solidarity which would not . . . be merely material.)1 This essay examines how Nardal’s critical triumvirate of gender (“women students ”), geography (“Paris”), and nation (“metropolis”) operates in her work as well as in that of her U.S. contemporary Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961). How—or why—does Paris serve as a narrative, social, or personal catalyst for Nardal’s and Fauset’s respective autobiographical and fictional personae? What 228 JENNIFER M. WILKS role does the French capital play for Fauset’s African American women that the U.S. urban centers featured in her work cannot? The goal is to consider Paris not as a nonracialized site of escape—a myth that has been carefully debunked by other scholars—but as an instrumental modernist crossroads where, through geographic and cultural dislocation, black women writers, such as Nardal and Fauset, negotiated intersecting categories of identity in their own lives as well as in those of their characters. As a means of building on the excellent comparative studies of African American and Francophone culture that have preceded my work—particularly Michel Fabre’s From Harlem to Paris (1991), Tyler Stovall’s Paris Noir (1996), and Brent Hayes Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora (2003)—the “ground of comparison” that undergirds my reading is the absence of a meeting between Nardal and Fauset: although both writers lived in Paris at one time or another, there is, to my knowledge, no record of these two black modernist intellectuals actually meeting.2 Likewise, in keeping with Cheryl Wall’s Women of the Harlem Renaissance (1995), T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Negritude Women (2002), and, again, Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora, I am interested in how African diasporic intellectuals incorporated gender into their understandings of modern black identities in ways that challenged the masculinism of the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude. The “crossroads” of my title is one that Nardal and Fauset explored independently of one another but that was similarly informed by an interwar black internationalism that, through its circulation of cultural objects, facilitated diasporic exchanges and, through its interrogation of social categories, paved the way for conversations about gender and class as well as about race. I have explored the masculinist underpinnings of black modernism in greater detail elsewhere, but they warrant revisiting here because questions of gender and mobility were central to the two figures around which those foundations were constructed: the Negritude hero and the New Negro. In Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; 1939), LéonGontran Damas’s Pigments (1937), and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Chants d’ombre (Shadow Songs; 1945) and Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry in French; 1948), the personae exploring and articulating their blackness, which is often brought into focus by real and imagined travels, are almost exclusively male. The women featured in this poetry are often mythic or static...