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The African Inspiration of the Black Arts Movement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
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The literary relations between the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude Movement have, we believe, been sufficiently documented. It has been demonstrated that Senghor, Damas and Césaire avidly perused the pages of Crisis, Opportunity and Garvey's Negro World—Journals in which Langston Hughes, Claude Mckay, Countee Cullen and Jean Tommer—the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, first had their poems published. It is equally literary history now, that some of the poems of the Afro-American writers were reprinted in such Parisian Black-oriented journals and little magazines as Les Continents, La Dépêche Africaine, Le Cri des Nègres, La Revue du Monde Noir and Légitime Défense. In this dissemination of ideas across the Atlantic, Paulette Nardal, Edward A. Jones, Louis T. Achille and Mercer Cook played the important role of literary intermediaries through their translations.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 1986 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
Footnotes
*
An earlier form of the article was presented at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in April 1985 as the Distinguished Alumni Lecture.
References
1 See Mercer A. Cook, "Literary Contacts: African, West Indian, Afro-American" in The Black Writer in Africa and the Americas. Ed. Lloyd Brown, Los Angeles, Hennesey and Ingals, 1973, pp. 120-140; Edward O. Ako, The Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude Movement: Literary Relations and Influences, Unpublished Ph. D. Thesis, University of Illinois, 1982; Samuel O. Assien, "The impact of the New World on Modern African Literature", Comparative Literature Studies, Spring 1977, pp. 74-93; Christophe Dailly, "Leon Damas et la Negro-Renaissance". Paper presented at the African Literature Association Conference, Gainesville, Florida, April 12-14, 1980; Irene Dobbs Jackson "La Negritude: morale d'un phénomène" in Littératures Ultramarines de Langue Française: Genèse et Jeunesse, 1971, pp. 21-31; Edward A. Jones, "Afro-French writers of the 1930's (sic) and the creation of the Negritude School". CLA Journal, 14 September 1970, pp. 18-34; Charles Larson, "African-Afro-American Literary Relations: Basic Parallels", in Negro-Digest, XIX, December 1969, pp. 35-42; and Ngandu Pius "Le rôle des noirs Américains dans la littérature négro-Africaine", in Congo-Afrique 11, 1971, pp. 337-344.
2 A dissertation or an article still needs to be written on the role of Mercer A. Cook as a literary intermediary between the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude Movement and between the Negritude Movement and the Black Arts Movement.
3 Robert G. Weisbord, "Afro-America's Africa Consciousness" in Ebony Kinship: Africa, Africans and the Afro-American, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1973.
4 I am extremely grateful to Alan Trachtenberg for some of the ideas expressed in this and the previous paragraph. For more information see his "Intellectual Background" in Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, Daniel Hoffman ed., Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1979, pp. 1-50.
5 William K. Tabb, The Political Economy of the Black Ghetto, New York, W.W. Norton, 1974, pp. 21-34. Tabb uses the internal colony model to describe the plight of black Americans as a colonized people. Like most Third World people, they have a low pro capite income, a high birth rate, their economy is dependent on external markets, their businesses lack capital and managerial know-how, the local businesses are owned by non-residents and the important local jobs are held by outsiders. In the case of black Americans, their main export is, of course, unskilled labour.
6 For excellent discussions of this period see John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, New York, 1967.
7 Quoted in Weisbord, Ebony Kinship, p. 15.
8 The term Mau Mau was used in the United States as a noun for the first time in Newsweek, November 1952, p. 44. However, it was used as a verb, to maumau (to threaten or terrorize) in Harper's of February 1971, p. 107. See Gerald M. Dalgish, A Dictionary of Africanisms, Contributions of Sub-Saharan Africa to the English Language, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1982.
9 Ebony Kinship, p. 14.
10 Quoted in Micheline Rice-Maximin "Frantz Fanon and Black American Ideologies in the 1960s". Contemporary French Civilization, Spring 1981, Vol. V, No. 3, p. 374.
11 Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: Black Power to Pan-Africanism, New York, 1971, p. 36.
12 This is the title of John Henrik Clarke's article in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, eds. Le Roi Jones and Larry Neal, New York; William Morrow & Co., 1968. Clarke ends his article with a quotation from John W. Vandercook's book Tom-Tom: "A race is like a man. Until it uses its own talents, takes pride in its own history, and loves its own memories, it can never fulfil itself completely", p. 18.
13 Ebony Kinship, p. 18. In the 1968 elections, there was a proposition to change the name of East Palo Alto, California, to Nairobi. Donald Reid who initiated the campaign argued that the lack of place names in America which are of African origin tends to perpetuate the unfounded belief that Americans—real Americans—are people of European descent and that people of African ancestry are not really Americans at all. The proposition never passed.
14 Janheinz Jahn, Muntu: The New African Culture, translated by Marjorie Greene, New York, Grove Press, Inc. 1961, p. 132. The concept of Nommo is similar to G. K. Galbraith's concept of the "word-fact".
15 Ibid., p. 135. For some of the ideas expressed here, I am indebted to A. James Arnold's excellent essay "La réception Afro-Américaine de Césaire: Un dialogue difficile aux Etats-Unis" in Césaire 70, eds. M. and M. Ngal and Martin Steins, Paris, Editions Silex, 1984, pp. 141-16. Also, Thomas A. Hale's article in the same book, "Césaire dans le monde blanc de l'Amérique du nord".
16 For example, the French edition of Claude Mckay's very influential novel Banjo, was published by Rieder in 1929. One must also mention that reviews such as African Forum, the organ of the American Society of African culture and the Massachussetts Review did a lot, through critical material, to popularize African literature in the United States. For example, African Forum carried the following articles: Vol. 1, No. 1, Summer 1965, James W. Ivy "President Senghor's Negritude", pp. 139-141; Vol. 1, No. 4, Spring 1966, Leopold Sedar Senghor "The Function and Meaning of the First World Festival of Negro Arts", pp. 5-10, Langston Hughes "The Twenties: Harlem and its Negritude", pp. 11-20, Thomas Melone "New Voices of African Poetry in French", pp. 65-74, Mercer Cook "The Poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor", pp. 134-136; Vol. 2, No. 1, Summer 1966, Ellen Conroy Kennedy "Four African Poets", pp. 103-107; Vol. 2, No. 3, Winter 1967, Mercer Cook "President Senghor's Visit: A Tale of Five Cities", pp. 74-86, Naomi M. Garrett, "The Spiritual Leader of Negritude. Hommage à René Maran", pp. 116-119; Vol. 2, No. 4, Spring 1967, Mercer Cook "The Poetry of Léon Damas, Névralgies by L. G. Damas", pp. 129-132, Emile Snyder "Introduction to French Negro Literature", pp. 132-134; Thomas Cassirer "Review of Abdoulaye Sadji's Tounka, Paris, Présence Africaine, 1965; Le Chant du Lac by Olympe Bhely-Quenum, Paris, Présence Africaine, 1965, pp. 134-136; Vol. 3, No. 1, Summer 1967, A. C. Brench "The Novelist's Background in French Colonial Africa", pp. 34-42.
17 Hoyt W. Fuller "Towards a Black Aesthetic" in The Black Aesthetic, Addison Gayle, Jr. ed., New York, Doubleday & Co., 1971, p. 9.
18 John O'Neal "Black Arts: Notebook", The Black Aesthetic, p. 47.
19 Ron Karenga "Black Cultural Nationalism" in The Black Aesthetic, p. 33.
20 Ahmed Alhamisi and Harun Kofi Wangara eds., Black Arts: An Anthology of Black Literature, Detroit, Black Arts Publications, 1969, p. 13. It was a common practice during this period for many Afro-Americans to use African names and to spice their language and writings with especially Swahili words and expressions.
21 Woodie King, ed., Black Spirits: A Festival of New Black Poets in America, New York, Random House, 1972, p. XVII.
22 Leroi Jones, Home: Social Essays, New York, William Morrow & Co., 1966, p. 252. Larry Neal, a leading theorist of the movement, indicates that Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), was the first to use the term "Black Arts" in a positive sense. The idea of the power of the word destroying the world as it is and rebuilding it in the image of black people, is also contained in Baraka's poems "Black Art" and "Black Dada Nihilismus".
23 This visit has been very well documented in Mercer Cook's article "President Senghor's visit: A tale of five cities". See note 16.
24 See "Leon Damas, The Humanist: A Memorial Dedication", New Directions, Vol. 5, No. 3, July 1978, p. 113.
25 Daniel L. Racine ed. Léon-Gontran Damas, 1912- 78: Founder of Negritude, A Memorial Casebook, Washington, University Press of America, 1979, p. 27.
26 Langston Hughes, Selected Poems, New York, Vintages, 1974, pp. 265-266.
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