Cunard’s personal motivations for putting together this monumental volume have been the subject of much salacious and excessively psychoanalytical speculation; these need not detain us, not least because they detract from the importance of the anthology’s insistently collective dimensions. While it is certainly true that her romantic relationship with the African-American jazz musician Henry Crowder, to whom she dedicated the volume, and concomitant alienation from her viciously racist mother, Emerald (Maud) Cunard, were shaping factors in Cunard’s life at the time she undertook the project, these factors, or theories of ‘self-abnegation’, are less interesting and significant than the work’s own intellectual contours, both as Nancy Cunard conceived of them and as they actually emerged in a volume of quite remarkable collective genius. Testimony to the coalitional nature of resistance itself, the book emerged as necessarily collaborative. It was rooted in Cunard’s friendships with black musicians, writers, artists and photographers, and her sense that any resolution of the ‘Negro question’ would require engagement with the histories and struggles of black peoples across the globe. In later correspondence with Dorothy Padmore, Cunard would recall that George Padmore, who would become a close friend, was ‘the principal and most important of the many contributors to the large African section of the work’, and would declare her own indebtedness to his ‘stupefying’ knowledge of Africa, ‘with its great complexity of conditions in all the diverse colonies, the comparisons to be drawn between them, the knowledge of local laws and circumstances, and how much more’.100 Cunard has been justifiably described as herself a living black internationalist network; equally, the text, and Cunard’s editorship of it, were made possible by the black internationalist moment, one in which learning about and from the lives of others was constitutive of solidarity.101 As one critic has noted of Negro, drawing on Walter Benjamin, ‘assembling, collecting, and curating as a cultural and aesthetic practice can make occluded and excluded histories visible’.102 Cunard described her own ‘arduous anthological road’, to which sustained study was integral, as one that ‘held many surprises’; before commencing it, she had asked herself whether she could ‘not learn a great deal in Africa, of the Africans themselves, they in their endless diversity’.103 Certainly, Cunard’s personal papers make clear that an enormous amount of work went into the making of the anthology, with copious notes, drawings, maps and letters among the preparatory materials for it. Signing off letters of solicitation addressed to a ‘Dear Collaborator’ with ‘Yours for the freeing of the innocent Scottsboro boys and the true emancipation of the Negro peoples’, Cunard worked into the anthology a unique combination of harrowing accounts of oppression and exhilarating portraits of black music, art and literature. The latter spoke to the existence of plentiful cultural and political resources for liberation and reconstruction. Scholarship has sometimes been befuddled by a text that is collaborative on a global scale, moving between representations of oppression and resistance, and attempting, despite the strong editorial presence of Cunard, to facilitate black self-representation in all its diversity. With photographs of jazz musicians and African art interleaved with visual depictions of lynching, Negro, some critics have suggested, is hampered by the lack of ‘an overarching narrative’ and ‘relies on the juxtaposition of many unrelated or loosely related materials’.104 But this is to overlook the volume’s explicit investment in heterogeneity as both content and form, setting itself as it does against monolithic and flattening narratives of blackness. The eminent African-American academic and critic Alain Locke wrote to Cunard after receiving his copy, describing it as
the finest anthology in every sense of the word ever compiled on the Negro. When I saw the announcements, I feared a scrap book, but by a miracle of arrangement, you have built up a unity of effect and a subtle accumulative force of enlightenment that is beyond all contradiction and evasion. It is just the kind of thing needed at this time; and all of us are grateful.105
Nancy Cunard in her print studio in France
As Jane Marcus has argued, the relative neglect of Cunard, ‘an autodidact, a self-made intellectual and political organiser’, in literary scholarship is striking.106 She suggests that the absence of Cunard in histories of both modernism and the Harlem Renaissance has been made possible by either dismissing her contribution to various fields of knowledge or belittling her as ‘an English heiress slumming in search of sex with black men’.107 (When Cunard arrived in the United States to commence research for the book, she received voluminous amounts of horrifyingly racist and misogynist hate mail suggesting that sex with black men was her main aim.)108 It could be argued that it is precisely Cunard’s deliberate undoing of the lines between modernist aesthetics and political engagement with race and empire, as well as the emphasis she placed on the raced black voice, that accounts for why she has, ‘until recently, been culturally and historically marginalized or ignored’.109 The story of Negro is one in which Cunard occupies the position of an auteur, but one who makes clear the importance of colonized and oppressed black people representing themselves. Cunard’s own interventions in the volume are better situated as part of the project of constructing solidarity through the anthology’s form, rather than ‘hierarchizing the interpretation of its contents’.110 Similarly, there is little sense of Cunard’s ‘refusal to acknowledge her race and class privilege as a white vanguard poet and activist’; if anything there is an insistence that, while white supporters must use their connections and resources, it was imperative for blackness to be central.111 Indeed, it was a question not of ‘including’ black voices, but of reconfiguring the understanding of world history to make black experience central to it – what Robin Kelley calls ‘the quest to situate black and brown peoples at the center of world history’.112 Throughout her writing career, privately and publicly, Cunard was insistent on the need for the colonized and oppressed to speak for themselves: ‘It is very good to have a book on Africa by an African’, she wrote of Africa Answers Back by Prince Akiki K. Nyabongo.113 ‘Permit me to ask’, she ventured in a scathing letter to the Spectator magazine on the topic of race and racism, sent sometime in 1931, ‘if you have ever discussed the subject with the person best qualified to speak on it: with the Negro himself?’114 In preparing the anthology, Cunard positioned herself as both a student of black life and a curator of its enormous diversity – succeeding, as one interlocutor noted, in bringing together its many dimensions in a ‘variegated and comprehensive’ volume. ‘What a marvellous, magnificent piece of bookmaking it is!’ noted another correspondent.115 She freely sought and received the advice and assistance of writers like McKay, who put her in touch with various Jamaican contacts, and Hughes, who regarded her as ‘one of my favourite folks in the world’.116 The volume was not easy to place with a publisher; in addition to carrying an explosive combination of radical politics and a direct confrontation with racial and colonial ideologies, it would require hundreds of pages of typesetting. The expensive printing (£1,500 – a small fortune) of the volume, published by Wishart in London after being turned down by publishers like Jonathan Cape and Victor Gollancz, was ultimately, and with a degree of poetic justice, funded by libel suits brought by Cunard against publications which had carried stories about her supposed liaisons with black men, such as the radical singer and actor Paul Robeson. Marcus is right to suggest that Cunard was ‘very much aware of the form of the anthology as cultural capital’, deliberately producing ‘a weighty and dignified tome’ that would materially represent the weight of black contributions to art, politics, letters and music. It was ‘necessary’ not only to make this book, but to make it ‘in this manner’, Cunard notes in her foreword.
Negro is regarded, even by some of its detractors, as a stupendous textual achievement, motivated by what Cunard described as ‘the longing to fight’.117 As early as 1932, McKay had told Cunard that, since her book ‘is so different in spirit and plan from anything that had been done before … it might become when it was published the
rallying-point for a strong new expression’.118 Introducing an abridged version in 1970, Hugh Ford noted pithily: ‘One of the most astonishing facts about Negro is its existence; another is its author’.119 Famously weighing eight pounds and nearly three inches thick, it brings together 250 articles written by 150 different people, the large majority black – from the United States, the West Indies and various African countries – but also several white authors from the United States, France and Britain.120 Samuel Beckett undertook many of the translations from the French, as did Cunard’s cousins, Victor and Edward.121 Other already famous names who contributed to it included Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes and André Breton; a significant number of authors included were black women. Within its 855 pages – which cover the United States substantially, but also Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Europe – 385 illustrations are to be found, including photographs of artworks. Manifestos, photography, sculpture, political analysis, historical retrospectives, ethnography – the volume covers a remarkable breadth of non-fictional genres, in addition to several pages of poetry and music, all aimed at elucidating not only the diversity and significance of black cultures, but also the history of enslavement, colonization and resistance. It was constitutively heterogeneous, a contrapuntal ensemble showcasing black voices of different political stripes. One contributor, Eugene Gordon, observes: ‘In general, the anthology is excellent, because it has brought together in one volume the opinions of persons who think about the negro in different ways’.122 At the same time, the common condition of oppression, from ‘the docks of Sierra Leone’ and ‘the diamond mines of Kimberley’ to the ‘banana lands of Central America’ and the ‘streets of Harlem’, made blackness not just one political standpoint among others, but one vested with an epistemic privilege out of which a transformative critical analysis might emerge on a global scale.123
Certainly, part of Cunard’s motivation, described in her satirical broadside against her mother and her friends in the London intelligentsia, ‘Black Man and White Ladyship’, was to address those willed gaps in historical understanding that gave enslavement and colonialism their justification – the lack of written records, supercities and machines:
‘In Africa,’ you say, ‘the Negro is a savage, he has produced nothing, he has no history.’ It is certainly true that he has not got himself mixed up with machinery and science to fly the Atlantic, turn out engines, run up skyscrapers and contrive holocausts. There are no tribal Presses emitting the day’s lies and millions of useless volumes. There remain no written records; the wars, the kingdoms and the changes have sufficed unto themselves. It is not one country but many; well over 400 separate languages and their dialects are known to exist. Who tells you you are the better off for being ‘civilised’ when you live in the shadow of the next war or revolution in constant terror of being ruined or killed? … How come, white man, is the rest of the world to be re-formed in your dreary and decadent image?124
In her own initial planning notes for the volume, even as she knew that music, art and photography might be central, Cunard would explicitly solicit ‘outspoken criticism, comment and comparison from the Negro on the present-day civilisations’ across continents.125 Cunard wanted the anthology to be one among many correctives to what she regarded as the prejudiced and paternal handling of African topics by so many white writers. One of the most innovative and politically significant curatorial principles governing Negro is the illumination of connections between languages, art, music, literature, folklore and customs, on the one hand, and resistance, organization, movements, achievements, leadership, protest and self-assertion, on the other. Thus, the 800-odd pages give us not a seamless but a textured, sometimes unwieldy, constellation of writers, genres and themes, from Zora Neale Hurston on black forms of ‘expression’ to short biographies of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Phillis Wheatley; from harrowing descriptions and photographs of actual lynchings to memoirs of racism, accounts of starvation in Cuba and labour conditions in Jamaica; from poetry by Langston Hughes to sheet music for songs to Barongo proverbs and polemics on the state of Africa and the West Indies by Hughes, George Padmore and Ben Azikiwe. Far from being articulated from the perspective of a European understanding of universalism, the anthology sought to understand universalism itself differently, as articulated from multiple sites, and as a rather more textured ideal than had been rendered by colonialism.126 To put it in Aimé Césaire’s resonant words, what was being mooted was ‘a different idea of the universal. It is a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all’.127
Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva has observed that ‘Cunard’s anthology ventures into ideologically treacherous ground’, risking accusations of ‘the European appropriation and re-contextualization of African art’.128 Cunard has not been immune to such charges. Yet, these would only have traction if the authorship of the anthology could be defined as solely Cunard’s, or its main purpose an exercise in European modernism. Accusers would, however, need to overlook the extent to which the anthology aspired to produce an understanding of the universal that was precisely not reducible to the European, or even to modernism. As Goloubeva indicates, it is necessary to be attentive to the ‘world-historical’ dimensions of the anthology – but also, I think, to its iterative interest in the black contribution – African, African-American and West Indian – as constitutive of ‘world history’.129 In this light, it is, as Warren Friedman suggests, ‘remarkable that Negro has largely disappeared as a cultural and historic document’, if nonetheless symptomatic of how the privileged archives of anticolonialism have been so partially and patchily put together.130 Forged in a crucible which brought together avant-garde culture, communism, anticolonialism, jazz and anti-racism, Negro is anything but a footnote. Rather, it is a collective document – or, as Raymond Michelet, Cunard’s collaborator on the anthology, saw it, a livre collectif of anticolonialism as necessarily constituted by contending voices from the colonial and transatlantic peripheries.131 Peter Kalliney suggests that Negro ‘constitutes one of those very special sets of circumstances in which white and colonial intellectuals were almost, but not quite, equal partners in an institution of cultural production’.132 While it is the case, as McKay’s comments also make clear, that white allies like Cunard had access to more powerful networks and institutional resources than black writers, for Cunard herself the equality of participants in the Negro project was key; white contributors to the anthology were not paternalist mentors but ‘honest defenders, admirers of the Negro on an exactly equal footing’.133 The anthology itself, in other words, enacted solidarity through cross-racial alliances. It was, in many ways, as Hugh Ford suggests, an effort to bypass the discourses of ‘extending’ rights in favour of the assertion of something like ‘black power’.134 What Cunard was trying to avoid for black voices is, ironically, what happened to her in the end – written out of cultural history, ‘marginalized by being transmuted into an iconic figure’, and thereby converted into a containable ‘cultural footnote’.135 The relative neglect of Negro is not, then, simply a signifier of missing individual pieces in a modernist puzzle, but also part of the larger and even more consequential elision of crucial dialectical strands in the history of anticolonialism.
While some attention has been paid to its place in the history of modernism, and, via Brent Hayes Edwards’s important work, to its role in ‘recording’ black internationalism, the Negro project has been largely overlooked as a central text in its own right in the annals of anticolonialism and in the history of specific endeavours to form transcontinental and cross-racial alliances of resistance.136 Its importance really lies in its unashamedly exploratory and reverse-pedagogical aims – Africa teaching Europe, colony teaching metropole, and, in some cases, black teaching white. With resistance as its central thematic, Negro’s subversive potential can be gauged from the fact that it was banned as seditious by colonial administratio
ns in parts of Africa and the Caribbean. As Cunard makes immediately clear in her foreword, the most important aspect of the anthology of some 150 black and white voices (although two-thirds are of African heritage) is its emphasis on ‘spirit and determination’ in struggle as a response to oppression. Throughout, there is a sense of black life as fundamentally shaped by resistance to oppression and attempts to crush that resistance; the anthological ‘panorama’ which documents both phenomena is for the ‘recording of the struggles and achievements, the persecutions and the revolts against them, of the Negro peoples’.137 In this sense, the scandal of Scottsboro is metonymic, ‘part of the effort to force into the dumbest and most terrorised form of subjection all Negro workers who dare aspire to live otherwise than as virtual slaves’.138 Seriously engaged as it is with music and art (sheet music is included), the Negro anthology has its own keynote; ‘the chord of oppression, struggle and protest rings, trumpet-like or muffled, but always insistent throughout’.139 Black art, education, letters and music are important as documents of a ‘diverse genius’, and a ‘spirit of determination … to break through the mountain of tyranny’, even as some black people cleaved to the idea that ‘justice will come to them from some eventual liberality in the white man’.140 Writing in 1932, when the glittering hopes of 1917 remained a beacon for many, Cunard is open about her own conviction ‘that it is Communism alone which throws down the barriers of race as finally as it wipes out class distinctions’.141 As one critic has noted, ‘far more important than speculations about what the Soviet Union may have accomplished (and did not) in terms of race relations, is the appeal of revolutionary rupture to open the present moment to alternative visions and possibilities outside of European cosmopolitanism’.142 Although Cunard was never herself formally allied with the Communist Party and many of her contributors were not communists, the anthology was put together at a historical moment when communism clearly provided a compelling vision of internationalism and cross-racial solidarity. In one sense, then, the anthology puts black and white voices in engagement not only with each other, but also with communist internationalism. At the same time, the anthology’s dialogical attempt to bring together multiple voices across national, racial and political lines sets itself within a longer history of alliances of solidarity between Europeans and non-Europeans: ‘From the beginning of the Anti-Slavery struggle to the present-day official and social obstructions of the Colour-bar there have been voices to protest against the infamous treatment of coloured people.’143 It is with a black fellow-traveller’s voice that the volume opens – Langston Hughes’s ‘revolutionary voice of liberation’ insisting famously: ‘I, too, am America.’144
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