Gradhiva N°19 « L'Atlantique Noir »

Description

Negro anthology, similar to a documentary survey, is a work of great formal and theoretical modernity. It was in 1931, the year of the Colonial Exposition and the "affair" of young black Americans of Scottsboro, that Nancy Cunard, born in England in 1896 and symbol of the Anglo-Saxon and French avant-garde of the years 1920, embarks on the realization of this historical anthology.
Composed of articles, archives, photographs, drawings, portraits, press extracts, poems, musical scores, testimonies and statistics, this eight-hundred fifty-fifty book two hundred and fifty articles and one hundred and fifty authors.
The contributors are activists, intellectuals, journalists, artists, poets, academics, anthropologists; African-Americans, West Indians, Africans, Malagasy, Latin Americans, Americans, Europeans, women and men. Among others, Samuel Beckett, Georges Sadoul, Ezra Pound, Langston Hugues, Zora Neale Hurston, Georges Padmore, Alain Locke, Georges Lavachery, Jomo Kenyatta and Kenneth Macpherson are collaborating. Nancy Cunard, poet, model, publisher, collector, activist, journalist, symbolizes a time when artistic-literary avant-gardes and political commitment were intertwined. It is through the visit of the major themes addressed in Negro Anthology that this issue of Gradhiva highlights the artistic networks, literary, and transnational policies woven by Nancy Cunard in the years 1910-1930, which made this anthology a monument of black history.