234 Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the Presentimpact and content appealed to young black scholars. Th e
work of the writer and African colonial administrator René
Maran, whose novels, articles, and journal Les Continents
elucidated the mismanagement of the French authorities
in Africa and supported black cultural production, was of
particular importance to an intellectual community of
African descendents in Paris and was especially founda-
tional to Senghor’s theorization of symbiosis of African
and European civilizations. Maran was an important fi g-
ure in the promotion of the literature and social movement
surrounding the Harlem Renaissance in France, through
critical articles and in encouraging translations of African
American works. Maran hosted W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston
Hughes, Claude McKay, and others in Paris throughout the
1920s and 1930s, introducing black French scholars to the
works of their American compatriots. Paulette and Jeanne
Nardal’s La Revue du monde noir similarly promoted Af-
rican American writers of the Harlem Renaissance and
advocated Pan-African unifi cation around the sharing and
exchange of cultural production, a goal that the Negri-
tude writers later championed. Th e biting tone and sense
of urgency presented by the “New Negroes” of the Harlem
Renaissance particularly appealed to the Parisian students
who would compose the Negritude movement. During the
pre-Negritude period, the cultural exchange between Afri-
can Americans and French blacks was one-sided, yielding
the translation of many Harlem Renaissance writers into
French, but few French texts into English. One of the most
infl uential works translated into French was Claude Mc-
Kay’s novel Banjo, which depicted realistic race relations
in the African Diaspora, attempted to dispel interracial
prejudices propagated by colonial hegemony, and sought
to reconcile the supposed distinction between primitive
and civilized societies. McKay’s work was a common inspi-
ration for the varied foundations of Negritude in Nardal’s
revue, Légitime Défense, as well as the writings of Césaire,
Damas, and Senghor.
Although the Negritude movement gained consider-
able momentum in 1930s Paris through the activities of the
West Indian students, the writings of its major fi gures did
not reach a wider French audience until the late 1940s. In
many cases, the promotion of Negritude relied on the elite
French intellectual community to embrace its outpouring
and support its publication. Damas’s seminal 1937 book of
poems, Pigments, was the notable exception, although it
still carried, in the form of a preface, the stamp of approvalthey desired for communities of disenfranchised blacks.
In contrast to the political content of Légitime Défense,
L’Etudiant noir advocated social and cultural methods
through which African descendants could rediscover their
lost cultures and exercise their unique creative potential.
Th e students who authored these early formulations
of Negritude found inspiration in a variety of sources in-
digenous to their countries of origin, as well as important
texts to which they were introduced through their French
educations. A number of journals and newspapers circu-
lating in Paris in the 1930s catered to black audiences and
treated issues of race in the colonial situation, such as La
Voix des Nègres, La Race nègre, and La Dépêche africaine.
Although these periodicals were not as infl ammatory as
Negritude theory intended to be, they were a model plat-
form for the discussion of cultural confl ict. Th e Negritude
writers also admired the work of such anthropologists and
ethnologists as Leo Frobenius and Maurice Delafosse, who,
during the fi rst quarter of the 20th century, began to criti-
cally explore the social and cultural achievements of pre-
colonial African societies. Such studies posed a threat to
the French program of assimilation because they asserted
the existence of a unique African culture, and thus their
Léopold Sédar Senghor was a Senegalese writer and statesman,
and key fi gure in the Negritude movement. (Sophie Bassouls/
Sygma/Corbis)