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Research in African Literatures 30.2 (1999) 194-221



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Inaugural Issues:
The Cultural Politics of the Early Présence Africaine, 1947-55

Salah D. Hassan


In the late 1960s, Editions Présence Africaine publishedMélanges (Réflexions d'Hommes de Culture), 1 a substantial four-hundred-page collection of testimonies, seminar papers, and essays, written in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the 1947 founding of the francophone journal of African and Black studies. In the early 1990s, a little more than twenty years after the publication of Mélanges, V. Y. Mudimbe edited an equally voluminous collection of texts, which carried the title The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947-1987 (1992) and celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the journal's founding. 2 Mélanges (Réflexions d'Hommes de Cultures) and The Surreptitious Speech use the occasions provided by the journal's anniversaries to assess developments in black cultural and intellectual activities and to announce new directions for research on Africa and the black diaspora. While both these collections mark time in relation to the founding of Présence Africaine, defining the year 1947 as a watershed in black cultural history, on the fiftieth anniversary of the first issue, I want to suggest that the year 1955 is equally important to understanding the early history of the journal.

Prevailing narratives of the origins of Présence Africaine insist on the continuity of the Présence Africaine project from 1947 through the 1950s and into the postindependence period. This tendency can be observed in the writings of critics as diverse as Lilyan Kesteloot, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Paul Gilroy. In contrast, I propose in this essay that the early history of Présence Africaine is marked by an ideological break that takes place with the inauguration of the second series in the summer of 1955. Primarily in a comparison of the inaugural issue of the first series (1947-54) and the inaugural issue of the second series (post-1955), I attempt to document the transformation of the journal's politics as it became increasingly the cultural embodiment of Pan-Africanism.

The mid-1950s transformation of Présence Africaine can be explained in terms of a redistribution of power among three main ideological formations that sought to determine the journal's intellectual orientation: liberal humanism, Pan-Africanism, and communism. In 1947, liberal humanism, based on the projection of a universal civilization and informed by European philosophical and ethnographic modes of thought, dominated the journal's editorial line. The inaugural issue of 1947 testifies unequivocally to the hegemony of these cultural values. The appearance of the new series marked the shift in power relations within Présence Africaine resulting from the emergence outside the journal of newly hegemonic sources of cultural legitimation on the periphery: political Pan-Africanism, nation-statism, African socialism, and nonalignment. The shift is apparent not only in the stated anticolonialism and antiracism of the new editorial collective [End Page 194] in 1955, but also in a reorganization of the division of intellectual labor and the political engagement of the literary contributions, confirming the decisive—although not uncontested—triumph of Pan-African forces associated with the journal. In the entire run of the first series, only the special issue Les Etudiants noirs parlent (no. 14, 1953) seemed to anticipate the oppositional cultural politics that dominated the new series in 1955. Before going on to examine the journal's history in more detail, I want first to return briefly to the collections of essays published to commemorate the twentieth and fortieth anniversaries.

Mélanges and The Surreptitious Speech are celebratory projects that seek to illustrate the centrality of Présence Africaine to the recognition of black cultural activity and the enrichment of African and Black Studies in the postwar era. Most of the contributors to Mélanges and The Surreptitious Speech do not deal explicitly with the early history of the journal or its historical impact on academic studies and creative writing. Rather, taking up topics that...

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