By Noelle Kim '25 and Paul-Louis Biondi '24

This section represents a part of a collection of periodicals created by artists and intellectuals across the Francophone black diaspora. In particular, the following periodicals are highlighted: La Revue du monde noir from 1931, L’Étudiant Noir from 1935, and Tropiques from 1941 to 1945. We also gesture to the afterlives of Negritude and surrealism in Présence africaine, publishing from 1947 until the present. Emerging from the 1930s black student movements in Paris, all these journals illustrate a thorough engagement with surrealist modes and ideas, as each of them attempted to elaborate a politics and poetics that would center Black subjectivity, writers, and culture. However, these periodicals were not always in agreement regarding the articulation of this new Black subjectivity, as they navigated a contentious political landscape.

Many of these periodicals’ contributors belonged to similar social and intellectual groups which collectively elaborated and circulated the concept of Negritude – the famous term created by Aimé Césaire, which came to represent an entire movement of black literary theory and criticism started in the 1930s. As a movement, Negritude disavowed European assimilation and looked to Africa and African civilizations before colonization as sources for the cultural development of black Francophone diaspora.

Unlike the other periodicals in this digital exhibit which creatively combine text and image, this set of journals, published from the mid-1930s to mid-1940s, is text- and literature-centric, focusing on the intellectual, political, and cultural development of black diasporic identities, and ultimately articulating an anticolonial discourse.

While our chosen selection showcases many important moments in the anticolonial landscape of the 1930s and 40s, we want to emphasize that they do not constitute the first attempt at elaborating a black consciousness in the Francophone world. Writers like Suzanne Lacascade, author of Claire-Solange, âme africaine (1924), or René Maran, author of Batouala (1921), as well as other surrealist-imbued publications such as Légitime défense (1935), helped form the textured landscape of black Francophone literary, cultural, and political movements.