Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora

CHAPTER 8 Making Culture Capital: Présence Africaine and Diasporic Modernity in Post–World War II Paris

CHAPTER 8 Making Culture Capital Présence Africaine and Diasporic Modernity in Post–World War II Paris CedricTolliver Out of the ashes of World War II, Moscow and Washington, D.C., emerged with competing claims to be the economic, political, and military capitals of the world, while another world city, Paris, struggled to rebuild itself after the war’s destruction. Its power diminished , Paris clung desperately to its status as both the cultural capital of the world and the imperial capital of a far-flung colonial empire. As the historian Robert Gildea notes, “possession of the Empire served as the basis of the French claim to great power status , vis-à-vis Great Britain, the rival colonial power, and the United States, the dominant superpower” (19). That African diasporic writers and intellectuals gravitated to Paris in the years immediately following the war is partly explained by the fact of empire and by Paris ’s position as the world’s cultural capital. In turn, the city proved to be a crucible where anti-colonial writers and intellectuals gathered and organized on multiple fronts to bring about the demise of Paris as an imperial capital. They produced literature, instituted a literary journal, and organized cultural conferences, establishing a cultural front in the struggle to end western imperialism. Through this work these writers and intellectuals created forms of sociality and formed social relations that made culture capital and not merely ancillary to Présence Africaine and Diasporic Modernity in Paris 201 the political in the realization of African diasporic modernity. Intellectual life for African diasporic writers in Paris, if not always encouraged, was at least tolerated to a degree that contrasted sharply with the suspicion, commercialism, and political domination that asphyxiated writers in the different parts of the African diasporic world. For intellectuals like Aimé Césaire and Alioune Diop, who initially traveled from the colonies to the metropole to complete their educations, Paris offered an intellectual environment significantly less policed than in the French colonial territories. Richard Wright, for example, came to the decision to relocate to Paris from the United States partly out of his avowed need to escape the limits, commercial and otherwise, that restricted the purview of African American literature. Despite their differing places of origins and political circumstances , this group of African diasporic writers shared a conviction in the utility and suitability of culture as both a critique of the existing order and a vehicle for imagining and enacting its transformation. And finally, from a purely professional standpoint, these writers, like others residing there, could avail themselves of the extraordinary concentration of “literary resources” that made Paris “the capital of the literary world, the city endowed with the greatest literary prestige on earth” (Casanova 23–24). This prestige depended on such literary resources as neighborhood cafés, artistic and intellectual networks, sustaining relations with mentors, friends, and acquaintances , access to important journals, and general support for the “creative destruction” of received artistic traditions. In the period immediately following World War II, these institutions were a kind of siren call for African diasporic writers. Yet, these writers were not simply content to benefit from already existing institutions. In fact, they took a keen interest in creating institutions that might serve their particular audience and needs. The journal Présence africaine, founded in 1947, was one such institution. The journal published critical essays, literature, book reviews, as well as notices for events and matters of interests concerning Africa and its diaspora. Drawing work in French from writers such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Michel Leiris and in English from C. L. R. James, the journal provided a forum that placed culture at the center of the anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles of the day. Through this work writers created and were formed by currents of thought that took the erasure of African diasporic culture in dominant modes of representation as a primary concern and field of engagement. Accordingly, those who participated in the journal linked its presence in Paris and act of documenting that presence to the larger struggles of the world’s darker peoples to wrest authority over their own lives away from their erstwhile masters. 202 Cedric Tolliver For intellectuals like Césaire, Diop, and Wright making culture capital meant providing a critique of the Eurocentric understanding of modernity’s history in works that elaborated the histories of modernity contained in African diasporic experience...