L'Étudiant noir
By Paul-Louis Biondi, '24
Access the scans of this periodicals via Gallica Periodicals, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
L’Étudiant noir represents one of the first significant projects by the founding intellectuals of négritude and the Negritude movement. Published in 1935 in Paris, the student journal was dedicated to writing about the black colonial diaspora of the French empire. The journal itself was not a new publication, but rather a new title with a new focus. Originally, the publication assumed the title L’Étudiant martiniquais, it served as the bulletin for the Association of Martinican Students in France and ran from 1932 to 1935 under the leadership of Edme Joseph-Henri, president of the association. However, it changed under the editorship of Aimé Césaire, who also assumed the presidency of the association in 1934, and its focus shifted towards a collective exploration and vision of black Francophonie (Miller, 2010). Alongside Césaire L’Étudiant noir’s editors included Léopold Sédar Senghor, Birago Diop, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Ousmane Diop Socé (Michel, 2000). On their own part, Césaire and Damas were childhood friends, having met at their Martinique high school, the Lycée Schoelcher. As for Césaire and Senghor, they met in Paris in 1931 at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand while studying for the entrance exam for the École Normale Supérieure (Diagne, 2023). It is not quite clear how the rest of the group met, other than sharing their overlapping experience as black diasporic students in Paris. Some scholars also indicate that Suzanne Césaire acted as an editor for the journal, although no mentions of her name appear in the journal (Kelley, 2000; Sharpley-Whiting, 2002).
The central interest of L’Etudiant noir and these writers was the study of Africa, its civilizations, and its cultures as well as the study of diasporic history and cultures. To do so, they drew upon a number of existing anti-colonial intellectual movements, including notably surrealism. While its subtitle noted it as the “Journal of the Association of Martinican Students in France,” the journal in fact assembled many French students from various colonies, who had come to study in France during the 1930s. Among the notable contributors are figures such as Paulette Nardal, Georges Gratiant, Aristide Maugée, and André Charpentier. The purpose of this endeavor was the development of a literary culture that would accurately represent the varied black Francophone diasporic experiences, a topic which, until the 1930s, had been heavily ignored throughout the French colonial empire (Richardson, 1996; Joseph-Gabriel, 2019). Though L’Étudiant noir was not the first journal to engage with these issues, even in Paris, it set the stage for the emergence of Negritude.
Within the publication, its contributors drew on a number of intellectual strains that centered on ideas of liberation from oppression, especially cultural oppression. Among these tenets, Marxism and surrealism stand out as important tools and sets of ideas precisely because of their investment in authentic freedom. L’Étudiant noir very much saw in surrealism a revolutionary capacity that sought to liberate individuals from the shackles of a post-Enlightenment, industrialized society, which alienated individuals from the world around them. And surrealism was one of the few movements in a politically charged Europe that explicitly expressed anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sentiments. As colonial subjects within the French empire, the journal’s editors integrated some of surrealism’s ideas while working towards their own project of black diasporic cultural and literary production. Particularly, the surrealist emphasis on reawakening the unconscious and the insistence on human dignity to center authenticity resonated in L’Étudiant noir.
In an article titled “Humanism and us: René Maran” in the first issue of L’Étudiant noir, Henry Eboué works within this question of ‘authentic freedom.’ The engagement with René Maran, a writer whose novel Batouala openly criticized European colonialism and was subsequently banned in France, highlights the limitations of freedom within the French colonial empire. Questioning the basis upon which literary production has emerged in France, Eboué points to the formal qualities of poetry and the emphatic reason-driven flow of prose as constricting to the project of creation. Humanism, as such, seems nothing more than a poetic form of telling individuals how best to live and setting out rules for the very work of creation. Instead, Eboué emphasizes the need for a new humanism, one that turns towards new ways of experience beyond the rational and the discovery of a “new world” (Eboué, 1935). This is at the core of the surrealist project. In this manner, surrealism’s ideas resonated with L’Étudiant noir and provided a perspective, within a Europe already primed to criticize the very project of Western civilization.
That being said, the journal and its contributors were mistrustful, and perhaps rightfully so, of Western ideologies in general. Reflecting on Negritude’s attachment to surrealism and the beginnings of the movement, Senghor writes in the 1960s: “We accept surrealism as a medium and not as an end, as an ally, but not as a master. We were willing to be influenced by surrealism, but only because surrealist writing rediscovered Negro African speech” (Senghor In Kesteloot, 1974). The short-lived journal wove for itself a complex tapestry of engagement and refusal to set the basis by which to promote the dignity of black people. This meant using only those aspects of surrealism and Marxism that could move their project in this direction. The emphasis was then on the new – new ways of seeing, new ways of experiencing, and new sources of knowing. This is the surrealist geist that animated L’Étudiant noir. Given the short run of the journal and the number of years it took to find its place in the archive, only one of the issues, no. 1 from March 1935, remains readily available today.
No other issues were thought to have survived until 2008, when Christian Filostrat published articles from issue 3 (May-June 1935) in his book, Négritude Agonistes (2008). Up until then, in academic circles the primary significance of the journal had been a controversy over whether L’Étudiant noir was at the origin of négritude or not. The claim that the journal originated the movement had been supported primarily by Lilian Kesteloot in her book, Black Writers In French, as well as in interviews with Negritude poets such as Damas, who stated that “Césaire coined the word in L’Etudiant noir” (Damas In Kesteloot). Ako contested Kesteloot’s and Damas’ claim precisely because only the first issue remained from the journal (Ako, 1984). Within the first issue, "négritude" was nowhere to be found, even though its articles contending with similar issues of culture, society, politics, and assimilation
However, in the third issue, republished by Filostrat, Césaire in his article titled "Racial conscience and social revolution,” deploys négritude once, but somewhat differently. As Christopher Miller traces out, the basis of négritude in Césaire’s 1935 article was quite different from what would be articulated later by the movement. While later conceptions of négritude will emphasize the connection of the Black subject with a knowledge of authentic and positive blackness, “Racial conscience” attempts to assert race as primarily an issue of social revolution by placing it within Marxist, revolutionary discourse. However, even when utilizing Marxist rhetoric of worker alienation under capitalism, Césaire shifts the focus from class to race and attempts to elaborate the manner in which black colonial subjects have found themselves alienated from their blackness. “Racial conscience” marks thus the beginnings of the line that will be maintained by the Negritude movement, in a markedly Marxist manner: racial identity as a central and universal issue for the social revolution for those in diaspora and under colonial conquest.
Miller calls this move by Césaire, inserting race in a discourse on class, an attempt to “throw the bomb of race at the communist orthodoxy” (Miller, 744). This move could be seen distinctly as a surrealist one. Césaire understood surrealism as a “poetic tool, a means to use language” (Richardson, 7). In this sense, the manipulation, or cannibalization, of Marxism allows for the emergence of something entirely new.This insertion of ‘race’ into a thought which elided race and focused on class, refashions Marxism into a weapon against a race-deficient anti-capitalist discourse.Working from and beyond surrealism and Marxism to critically develop itself, L’Étudiant noir represents thus an important beginning for the crucial undertaking of négritude and of a “new consciousness among black French-speaking students,” which often questioned its place within the Francophone and Western world (Sharpley-Whiting, 2).
Bibliography
Ako, Edward O. “‘L’Étudiant noir’ and the Myth of the Genesis of the Negritude Movement.” Research in African Literatures 15, no. 3 (1984): 341-353.
Césaire, Aimé. "Conscience raciale et revolution sociale." L'Étudiant nour, issue 3 (1935): 3.
Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. “Négritude,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition). Edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ negritude/#:~:text=Upon%20his%20arrival%20at%20the,of%20their%20fairly %20long%20lives.
Eboué, Henry. "L’Humanisme et nous: René Maran." L’Étudiant noir, issue 1 (1935): 4.
Filostrat, Christian. Negritude Agonistes: Assimilation Against Nationalism in the French Speaking Caribbean and Guyane. Cherry Hill: Africana Homestead Legacy, 2008.
Kelly, Robin D.G. “A Poetics of Anticolonialism.” In Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. New York: NYU Press, 2000.
Joseph-Gabriel, Annette K. Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019.
Michel, Jean-Claude. The Black Surrealists. New York: P Lang, 2000.
Miller, Christopher. “The (Revised) Birth of Negritude: Communist Revolution and ‘the Immanent Negro’ in 1935,” Publications of the Modern Language Associations of America 125, iss 3 (2010): 743-749.
Richardson, Michael. Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. New York: Verso Books, 1996.
Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Negritude Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.