Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde edited by Fionnghuala Sweeney and Kate Marsh (review)

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to globalized networks of black intellectual production in the twentieth century, and these important research findings have dramatically improved our understanding of the foundational role that artists, writers, and intellectuals played in defining and shaping aesthetic and political consciousness. Afromodernisms concentrates on ‘contrapuntal sites of Afromodernist activity’ and explores the ‘complex and geographically diverse range of contemporary Afromodernist practices comprising the body of work produced between the wars’ (p. 8). The title could be said to underplay the transversal nature of the relations considered, however, given that these extend not only from Paris to Harlem but also to the Caribbean, to which an entire section is devoted. The term ‘Afromodernisms’ is used here to refer to ‘the heterogeneous cluster of aesthetic and political responses to locally specific experiences of modernity, linking aesthetic practice to social engagement, and centred on the practice and representation of black women and men’ (p. 9). The role of Paris in such formations has been extensively rehearsed, offering ‘a European counterpoint to Harlem as a centre of black cultural and political activity in the period between the wars’ (p. 5). Afromodernisms thus builds upon and extends existing analysis, although the dialogue could have been further strengthened through a more concerted engagement with works such as T. Denean Sharpley–Whiting’s Negritude Women (2002), Susan Peabody and Tyler Stovall’s edited volume The Color of Liberty (2003), Gary Wilder’s The French Imperial Nation–State (2005), and F. Abiola Irele’s The Negritude Moment (2011). Gatherings in Paris served to bolster transnational race consciousness ‘in large part because these factors provided a concurrent opportunity for black and colonial peoples to breach, en masse as well as individually, the shells of containment that had hitherto confined them as political and cultural bodies to the US South and the European colonies’ (p. 5), although Tyler Stovall’s essay does remind us that ‘[b]lack activists did not necessarily see these global connections’ (pp. 24–25). Afromodernisms convincingly demonstrates the ways in which the period under consideration helped ‘define the aesthetics and politics of the twentieth century, and through this [the collection] links the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic’ (p. 14). Ultimately, it would have been beneficial had these advances been contextualized in relation to the role that pioneering black activists, many of them heavily influenced by international thinkers such as Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. DuBois, played in France during the interwar period in organizations like the Comité de défense de la race nègre and the Ligue universelle de la défense de la race nègre. Similarly, if the analyses presented here had addressed some of the critiques articulated in respect of the limitations of the overarching ‘Atlanticist’ framework, as well as analogous questionings of the centrality accorded to European metropolitan centres like Paris, readers could have been directed towards other, increasingly relevant critical paradigms that privilege alternative transdiasporic links, such as Afropeanism.