The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars 9780226773858

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[First Page] [-1], (1) T H E F R E N C H I M P E R I A L NAT I ON - S TAT E

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The French Imperial Nation-State

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NEGRITUDE & COLONIAL HUMANISM B E T W E E N T H E T WO WO R L D WA R S

Gary Wilder the university of chicago press chicago and london

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Gary Wilder is associate professor of history at Pomona College. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2005 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2005 Printed in the United States of America

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——— isbn (cloth): 0-226-89772-9 isbn (paper): 0-226-89768-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilder, Gary. The French imperial nation-state : negritude and colonial humanism between the two world wars / Gary Wilder. p. cm. isbn 0-226-89772-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 0-226-89768-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. France—Colonies—Africa, West—20th century. 2. France—Colonies—Caribbean Area—20th century. 3. Nationalism—Africa, West—History—20th century. 4. Nationalism—Caribbean Area—History—20th century. 5. Africans—France. 6. Blacks—Race identity—Africa, West—History—20th century. 7. Blacks—Race identity—Caribbean Area—History—20th century. 8. France—Ethnic relations. 9. Blacks—France. I. Title. jv1818.w54 2005 323.1'09171'24409042—dc22 2005008094 ⬁ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements 䡬 of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.

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To my parents, Arthur and Marilyn Wilder [-5], (5)

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{ CONTENTS }

Acknowledgments ix [-7], (7)

Part 1: The Imperial Nation-State 1. Introduction: Working through the Imperial Nation-State 2. Framing Greater France: A Real Abstraction 24

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Part 2: Colonial Humanism 3. Toward a New Colonial Rationality: Welfare, Science, Administration 4. A Doubled and Contradictory Form of Government 76 5. Temporality, Nationality, Citizenship 118

Part 3: African Humanism 6. Negritude I: Practicing Citizenship in Imperial Paris 7. Negritude II: Cultural Nationalism 201 8. Negritude III: Critique of (Colonial) Reason 256 Conclusion: Legacies of the Imperial Nation-State

Notes 303

Bibliography

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295

Index 387

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{ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS }

A major project so long in the making inevitably accumulates more debts of gratitude than can properly be acknowledged in a few sentences. Research for this book has been supported generously by grants from the University of Chicago, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. Pomona College has graciously extended liberal amounts of time and research funding so that I could complete this volume. Pomona has proven to be an exceptionally congenial milieu in which to pursue my scholarship. I owe special thanks to my exemplary colleagues in the history department—Ron Cluett, Sid Lemelle, Victor Silverman, Pamela Smith, Miguel Tinker-Salas, Helena Wall, Ken Wolf, Bob Woods, and Sam Yamashita—for their stimulating conversation and constant support. Many extraordinary students at Pomona have also provoked my scholarship in numerous ways. Laura Ephraim and Emily Klancher in particular provided substantive help with revisions. I will always be grateful for the unflagging support for my work extended over the years by my dissertation advisors Leora Auslander, Jean Comaroff, and Moishe Postone. Their intelligence, experience, and assistance have helped me to sharpen my vision and navigate a course in this profession. Equally important were the insightful comments and professional endorsements provided generously by those who carefully read the manuscript—Julia Adams, Antoinette Burton, Dan Sherman, George Steinmetz, and Tyler Stovall. I owe a great deal to their open-minded critical engagement with this project. Additionally, I thank my editor at the University of Chicago Press, Susan Bielstein, for her advice, patience, and belief in the project, and my copyeditor, Kathryn Gohl, whose hard work was much appreciated. This book has also benefited greatly from the critical feedback offered at various stages of its completion. I thank the participants in discussions hosted by the Red Line Working Group, the Social Theory Workshop, the Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modern France, and the African Studies Workshop—all at the University of Chicago, the Scripps College Faculty

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acknowledgments

Research Seminar, the Center for Cultural Studies at University of California at Santa Cruz, the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California at Riverside, the European History and Culture Colloquium at UCLA, the Duke University Press Politics, History, and Culture series editorial board, the Institute of French Studies as well as the Social Theory and Historical Studies Workshop at New York University, and the history departments at the University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, California State University at Long Beach, and Pomona College. I also offer heartfelt thanks to scholars too numerous to mention or whom I might have forgotten whose encouragement, suggestions, and criticism have helped improve this project. These include my other dissertation readers Arjun Appadurai, Barney Cohn, and Tom Holt as well as Anthony Appiah, Talal Asad, Pascal Blanchard, Peter Bloom, Alice Bullard, Tony Chafer, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Armelle Chatelier, Anna Clark, Mary Coffey, Judith Coffin, John Comaroff, Fernando Coronil, Mamadou Diouf, Stephane Dufoix, Ellen Furlough, Jan Goldstein, Lynn Hunt, Benetta Jules-Rosette, Gene Lebovics, Philippa Levine, Achille Mbembe, Simon Njami, Sue Peabody, Kevin Platt, Emanuelle Saada, Amanda Sackur, David Shafer, Julie Skurski, Bill Sewell, Ann Stoler, Margaret Waller, Francoise Vergès, and Patrick Weil. In France, M. Dion at the colonial archives provided much needed guidance, and Michel Fabre shared invaluable bibliographic resources and scholarly insight with me. Unspeakably important has been the deep and abiding engagement with my work by trusted friends whose collegiality, intellect, and integrity inspire me. I have leaned especially hard on and learned more than I can say from Andrew Aisenberg and Laurent Dubois, whose incisive readings helped guide my revisions, and Manu Goswami, my cherished long-term interlocutor. My work has also been well nourished by the insightful comments, conversation, and friendship of my Ithaca cronies, now scholars, Jeff Melnick and Matthew Trachman; my Chicago cohort, Bill Bissell, Neil Brenner, Nick DeGenova, Elisa Camiscioli, Anjali Fedson, Gautam Ghosh, Cecilia Novero, and Josh Price; and my California colleagues, Dan Birkholz, Malek Doulat, David Lloyd, Panivong Norindr, Marina Perez de Mendiola, Paul Saint-Amour, and Victor Silverman. I turn regularly to these compadres for feedback, perspective, guidance, and solidarity. Without them I would be lost. Profound gratitude is reserved for those who have truly sustained me on so many fronts for the duration of this project: Robin Lippert, Paula Gorlitz, and especially my parents, Arthur and Marilyn Wilder. Thank you also Mark Kaplan and Amy Zimmerman for becoming family in Chicago. Above all, I could not have written the book that I have without the love, wisdom, and careful eye

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acknowledgments

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of Rachel Lindheim, my true partner, closest friend, and coconspirator through every twist and turn. – – – Extracts from or earlier versions of some chapters have been published previously. Chapter 2 appeared as “Framing Greater France,” Journal of Historical Sociology 14, no. 2 (June 2001): 198–225. Parts of chapters 3 and 4 appeared in “Colonial Ethnology and Political Rationality in French West Africa,” History and Anthropology 14, no. 3 (2003): 219–52; and in “The Politics of Failure: Historicizing Popular Front Colonial Policy in French West Africa,” in French Colonial Empire and the Popular Front: Hope and Disillusion, ed. Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Part of chapter 6 appeared in “Panafricanism and the Republican Political Sphere,” in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Tyler Stovall and Sue Peabody (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and in “Practicing Citizenship in Imperial Paris,” in Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives, ed. John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Part of chapter 8 appeared in “Race, Reason, Impasse: Césaire, Fanon, and the Legacy of Emancipation,” Radical History Review 90 (September 2004): 31–58.

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Introduction: Working through the Imperial Nation-State

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What are we to make of the fact that republican France was never not an imperial nation-state? It is no secret that successive republics were instituted within the framework of a broader and prior colonial empire. Nevertheless, French historiography is typically guided by a national paradigm for which a correspondence between territory, population, and state is considered normal and the existence of colonies is treated as exceptional. There is a frequent tension between the categories that historians use to analyze either the French nation-state or its overseas colonies and the empirewide economic, social, administrative, and publicity circuits that delimited France as an imperial nation-state. The point here is not only that the metropole and its overseas colonies exercised a reciprocal influence upon one another, but that France’s parliamentary republic was articulated with its administrative empire to compose an expanded and disjointed political formation that must be analyzed in its own right. Once we refigure the nation-state as imperial, disjunctions within and between French territories, populations, and forms of government may be treated as intrinsic features of the national-republican past rather than as obstacles to national-republican ideals. The focus of historiography then shifts

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chapter one

away from apparent contradictions between the promises of republican universalism and colonial or racist practices to the antinomy between universality and particularity that existed within both the metropolitan and colonial poles of the imperial nation-state, and which expressed itself in discourses as well as practices.

Working through the Imperial Nation-State This book explores a period of French history during which metropolitan and overseas publics were remarkably self-conscious about the structural relationship between the continental nation and its overseas colonies. Following World War I, the persistence of the empire served as one of the few sure signs that France itself had survived the war in a recognizable form. Supposedly external and secondary colonial possessions curiously came to signify the durability of the self-contained French nation, especially in the context of disruptive sociopolitical transformations between the wars. Through a new discourse of Greater France, a large sector of public opinion regarded a revitalized empire as the guarantor of international prestige and economic prosperity. Colonies were reconceptualized as integral, if legally ambiguous, parts of the French nation. This emergent national-imperial imaginary consolidated as postwar socioeconomic conditions further integrated metropolitan and colonial societies. Yet the very forces driving imperial interdependence also disrupted many of the empire’s underlying precepts. Although Greater France was at the apex of its power by World War I, the genesis of a long crisis of colonial authority may be traced back to the interwar decades. This incipient crisis generated public debates—official and nongovernmental, metropolitan and colonial, including citizens and subjects— concerning the relationship between the republic and the empire, the legitimacy of colonial power, and the juridical status of colonized peoples. This book focuses on two intersecting movements to revise the imperial order: one by republican reformers elaborated a new logic of administration in West Africa (colonial humanism), and another by African and Antillean elites in Paris formulated new currents of cultural nationalism. Each developed in relation to France’s disjointed imperial character, which they also exemplified. Colonial humanism was an extension of metropolitan productivism, statism, and welfarism. Yet the peculiar requirements of colonial politics led administrators in French West Africa to treat local populations as members of distinct

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sociocultural wholes. Policies were therefore shaped by a dual imperative to transform and to preserve indigenous societies simultaneously. The systemic contradiction between requirements to rationalize and differentiate led to paradoxical dictums that guided French colonial projects: socioeconomic individualism without juridico-political individuality, social development without civil society, citizenship without culture, nationality without citizenship. A new colonial rationality placed subject peoples in a politically effective double-bind that racialized them as minor members of the French nation. But it was also self-undermining and created possibilities for critical political interventions. Concurrently, expatriate Africans and Antilleans participated in metropolitan French civil society and constituted an alternative black public sphere through which they raised questions about republicanism, nationality, and rights as they intersected with colonialism, culture, and racism. These subjectcitizens confronted the emancipatory and oppressive aspects of both the universalizing and particularizing dimensions of French colonial politics. Out of this political field a younger group of student-poets emerged, in the mid-thirties, who would compose the Negritude movement. Their cultural politics challenged the double bind of colonial racism through a series of double gestures. They rejected assimilation while celebrating cultural métissage, claimed political equality while demanding cultural recognition, sought a place within the republican nation as “Negro-Africans” while identifying with a transnational Panafrican community, collaborated with colonial reformers while envisioning an alternative Greater France as a nonracial supranational federation, engaged in rational-critical debate while formulating a critique of colonial rationality itself. My starting point is that reformist colonial humanism and black cultural nationalism, as well as their intersections, become intelligible from the perspective of France as an imperial nation-state in crisis. Conversely, these interrelated movements provide a vantage point for grasping France as an imperial nationstate organized around a constitutive contradiction between political universality and particularity. This study has an imperial scope. It traces interpersonal, institutional, and discursive networks that included republican policymakers in Africa as well as Africans and Antilleans in the republican metropole. These empirewide circuits delimited a common political field whose members belonged to an imperial cohort that transcended clean distinctions between colonizing French citizens and colonized African subjects. The scale and composition of these networks exemplified one way in which France was an imperial nation-state. Additionally, they

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generated reflections upon and projects addressing the national-imperial order, an issue then forcing itself into political consciousness, some of which I analyze below. This book thus extends recent scholarship on the intersections between French colonial and metropolitan histories. 1 It does so through an inquiry into political form and political rationality that seeks to displace conventional oppositions between the French colonial empire and national republic, racism and universalism, the national and the transnational. The analysis refuses to fetishize one side of these oppositions as a privileged standpoint from which to critique the other. Apparent contradictions between republicanism and colonialism cannot be transposed into a distinction between universalism and particularism. There were universalist and particularist dimensions of republican and colonial poles of the imperial nation-state, each of which contained emancipatory and oppressive dimensions. We cannot adequately understand the national-imperial order if racism and colonialism are treated as signs of the absence or failure of republicanism understood one-sidedly as universalism. Such a gesture, still common in French colonial historiography, effectively protects an idealized republicanism by pointing to its supposed violation rather than exploring its actual operation. French colonialism provides a fruitful occasion to raise questions about the limits of a national history paradigm that often affirms republicanism’s universalist self-understanding. There is a risk, however, that by simply applying this paradigm on a broader scale, French historians of colonialism will reenact that which they are supposed to explore: the incorporation of overseas territories into a republican national metanarrative. This tendency appears throughout Alice Conklin’s A Mission to Civilize, a monograph that merits attention here not because it represents a varied body of historiography but because it is so readily cited in writing about Third Republic colonialism. 2 Conklin studies the way in which the oppressive policies of the French civilizing mission in West Africa were informed by supposedly emancipatory universalist republican values to which colonial administrators were genuinely committed. This promising starting point might have led to an examination of internal links between republicanism and colonialism. But Conklin’s ability to present an integrated account is undermined by the methodological individualism that guides her analysis. She focuses on the motivations of individual policymakers in order to determine whether their intentions were disinterested (genuine) or self-interested (in the service of political objectives). She then compares administrators’ sincere attempts to help Africans through projects influenced by republican principles to the way in which such efforts were under-

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mined by self-serving political interests. Because she does not explore how government in West Africa was sincerely republican and genuinely colonial, France’s oppressive practices there appear to be anomalous (e.g., ironic or cynical failures). Such an evaluation is only possible because Conklin conflates republicanism with universalism, which is assumed to be inherently opposed to colonial racism (reduced to particularism). She does not recognize the ways in which contradictions between universality and particularity were internal to republican, colonial, and racial discourses and practices. Instead, Conklin focuses primarily on contradictions between plans and implementation. This analytic leads her to condemn (as tainted) science that serves political interests as well as policies that use science cynically. By criticizing the colonial misuse of ethnography, Conklin implies that disinterested science would objectively inform enlightened policy and reduce oppression. She does not recognize the racializing power of real science. Similarly, by arguing that administrators’ sincere attempts to improve African lives were undermined by cynical interests, she preserves the ideal of disinterested improvement projects. She does not explore how welfare policies were real instruments of colonial government. Ultimately, A Mission to Civilize functions to protect the purity of republican universalism, scientific knowledge, and improving gestures from the contaminating influence of racism, self-interest, and instrumental politics. It thereby folds French colonialism into a canonical narrative of republican universalism that remains as undisturbed as the national paradigm that is its starting point. Conklin’s affirmative historiography compares the West African administration to a mythically self-identical republic that never existed historically. The French nation-state was always a disjointed political form. Its administrative, liberal, and parliamentary dimensions did not always align with one another. Citizenship, nationality, and the people were at once abstractly human (universalist) and concretely cultural (particularist) categories. Imperialism meant that French territories, populations, and governments did not correspond to one another seamlessly. These obscured structural contradictions became increasingly evident under the Third Republic. By the end of World War I a new state–economy–society diagram meant that French government was organized less around liberal individualism than around statist, productivist, and welfarist forms of corporatism. Interwar colonial administration was a variant of postliberal politics, not simply a violation of parliamentary republicanism, which no longer existed. Likewise, metropolitan state politics shared features of colonial administrative rule. Differences between them, such as the racial divide between rulers and ruled, cannot be translated into distinctions between

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republicanism and racism, liberalism and authoritarianism. Colonial humanism was simultaneously universalizing and particularizing; the imperial nation-state was at once republican and illiberal. Like Conklin, colonial reformers and colonized elites also often protected the French national-republican ideal while denouncing its colonial violation without exploring the underlying connections between them that sustained the national-imperial order. Scholars must beware of the tendency to enter into what Dominick LaCapra, adapting Freud, has called a transferential relationship to history, whereby “the considerations at issue in the object of study are always repeated with variations—or find their displaced analogues—in one’s account of it.” 3 Otherwise, LaCapra explains, they risk acting out rather than working through history. 4 His analysis refers to the ways in which scholars of historical trauma tend to reenact victims’ traumatic experience. But scholarship on historical perpetrators also risks reaffirming their self-understanding. Instead of acting out republican colonialism, the following chapters attempt to work through the imperial nation-state. Acting out would incorporate colonial societies into an expansionist national historiography that conflates republicanism and universalism. Alternatively, working through entails situating (not mastering or resolving) the sociopolitical dilemmas raised by French colonialism in relation to the nation-state as an imperial political form. An adequate history of imperialism must take the empire itself as its object and starting point. Rather than study how French republicanism might have been played out in the colonies or how colonialism might have affected national identity, it would question received understandings of the national republic as a self-contained entity that can be considered apart from the imperial nation. 5 Although interwar reformers and nationalists frequently enacted aspects of republican colonialism, they were not condemned endlessly to act out its dilemmas. They also explored the imperial implications of French national history as well as the national implications of French imperial history, recognizing the imperial nation-state as an inescapable reality through which they had to work. Because it was an intrinsically contradictory form whose crises opened possibilities for systemic transformation, immanent critique—identifying within it alternatives that pointed beyond it—was a quintessential type of working through. Insofar as these historical actors self-consciously engaged the national-imperial order that confronted them, historians interested in “working through” it should follow their lead. An approach to working through that avoids the binary reasoning criticized above would treat the imperial nation-state as an artifact of colonial modernity.

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This broad term refers variously to the impact of colonial capitalism on local societies and its articulation with other modes of production, colonized peoples’ novel and often subversive appropriation of Western institutions, and the constitutive role of colonialism, non-Western populations, and their encounter in the making of modern Europe. A common thread links these meanings: imperialism created novel sociopolitical formations that were irreducibly different from those in the West yet were incontestably modern and inseparable from their European counterparts. Many recognizable aspects of modernity were notably absent from or prohibited in most colonial societies; examples include free labor, private property, abstract individuality, impersonal common law, disenchanted civil society, and representative government. Yet the often extreme economic exploitation, social violence, racial hierarchies, and authoritarian politics endemic to colonialism were neither pre-colonial survivals nor symptoms of European regression. They were effects of modern capitalism, rational bureaucracy, scientific administration, normalizing state practices, technological development, urbanization, and the like. This seemingly simple point may nevertheless generate complex analyses when it guides historical inquiry into the peculiar modernity embodied by and generated through colonialism. Such an optic does not only allow us to specify the internal dynamics of colonial societies more precisely. It also enables a multifaceted and global (in both senses of the term) view of modernity, not as one composed of plural alternative modernities but as a worldwide if heterogeneous dynamic that works through and on Western societies but is neither possessed nor controlled by them. Thinking in terms of colonial modernity—working through it—allows us to begin to write French history from a properly imperial (not imperialist) standpoint that would resist reducing it to national categories but would generate novel insights into national history. Marx concludes the first volume of Capital by linking primitive accumulation to New World colonization. He writes: “It is the great merit of E. G. Wakefield to have discovered, not something new about the colonies, but in the colonies, the truth about capitalist relations in the mother country,” namely, that there was nothing normal or natural about a free-labor market. 6 Studying interwar French West Africa may similarly illuminate French political relations on an imperial scale. It would highlight the fact that the disjointed relationship among culture, nationality, and citizenship has been a feature not a failure of the national-imperial state. It would also underscore that alternative methods for combining these elements were long embedded in French national-imperial history.

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Antinomies of the (Imperial) Nation-State Starting with the specificity of the colonial modern as well as the ways in which colonial dynamics provide crucial insight into metropolitan contradictions may help us to account for a persistent feature of French and British imperialism across the colonial periphery: the tension between coexisting policies to abstract and modernize or to differentiate and primitivize subject populations. 7 Rather than treat this recurrent contradiction as a sign of state ambivalence or failure, we can explore the way in which it might be a structural feature of colonial modernity on a very general level. One way to do so requires linking this long-term tension to a deeper antinomy between universality and particularity that is expressed on multiple scales (national, colonial, imperial) and at various levels of abstraction (in policies, in political forms, in their underlying rationality). Although this antinomy was central to administrative rationality in West Africa between the wars, it was not restricted to colonial policies. It was a durable legacy of the French Revolution that was inscribed in the very structure of the modern nation-state. The term antinomy, central to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, refers to a contradiction between two propositions, each of which is obtained by correct reasoning and is equally logical. 8 Both sides of an antinomic equation are valid; neither element is prior to, realer than, or the cause of the other. No amount of clear thinking can overcome such an opposition. Although Kant’s deployment intimates a useful structural understanding of contraction, he treats antinomy as a philosophical problem. In contrast, Lukács develops a sociohistorical understanding of antinomies, grounded in a critique of Kant’s idealism, that might help us grasp the nation-state as a contradictory form. Lukács refers to the opposition between subjectivism and objectivism as “antinomies of bourgeois thought.” His insight is that these seemingly irreconcilable social visions—human beings as free producers of society versus human beings as determined products of society—do not constitute an intellectual dilemma. Rather, they express valid truths about separate aspects of existing capitalist social relations. He argues that under capitalism, autonomous individuals do freely enter into market relations even as reification creates a quasiobjective second nature that determines social behavior. 9 His sociohistorical framework reconciles subjectivism and objectivism as grasping equally real but one-sided dimensions of a two-dimensional modern society. Here neither subjectivity nor objectivity is more valid than the other; both are real or concrete abstractions. 10

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Lukács’s understanding of the determinate relationship between social categories and social consciousness derives from Marx’s understanding of the doubled character of capitalist modernity under which social relations are at once subjective and objective, abstract and concrete, universal and particular. Marx demonstrates that this doubleness is embedded in the elemental commodity form whose “dual nature” is abstractly universal and concretely particular. As he explains, “the relative form of value and the equivalent form are two inseparable moments, which belong to and mutually condition each other.” For Marx, this “double form” is a function of the dual character of labor under modern capitalism as “equal and abstract,” on the one hand, and “concrete and useful,” on the other. 11 Insofar as Marx’s Capital accounts for the abstracting transformation of incommensurable qualities into equivalent quantities, which also enables social distinctions, it can be read as an inquiry into the antinomy between universality and particularity. Marx explains that in a society of generalized commodity production, “every particular kind of useful private labour can be exchanged with, i.e., counts as the equal of, every other kind of useful private labor.” He shows that money facilitates this abstraction by mediating the “equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour.” The “direct exchangeability” of particular commodities requires that they “express their values in the same equivalent.” But Marx explains that this medium of equivalence must come from within the social formation itself: “a particular kind of commodity acquires the form of universal equivalent, because all the other commodities make it the material embodiment of their uniform and universal form of value.” At that point a “specific kind of commodity . . . becomes the money commodity, or serves as money.” Marx characterizes money under capitalism as “the particular equivalent form.” 12 It is not only simultaneously universal and particular, but its universality is grounded in its very historical particularity. Although Marx is concerned with the commodity form and social relations, we may adapt his insight about universalism’s self-grounding character to a framework for understanding the nation-state and political relations. Here I bracket the vexing question as to whether the nation-state is essentially a capitalist state derived, at a very abstract level, from the peculiar value form of commodity-mediated social relations. 13 Others might characterize the nationstate and capitalism as encompassing independent sets of relations that shared common conditions of historical emergence and whose respective developments have been structurally entwined. 14 Either way, there is no disputing that in the modern period, a political order mediated by formally equivalent (and

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juridically equal) rights-bearing citizens corresponded to a social order mediated by formally equivalent contracting individuals. 15 Whether dual aspects of an overarching capitalism that over time became relatively autonomous from one another or distinct spheres that became historically articulated, modern socioeconomic and political relations became interdependent elements—variously enabling and interrupting one another— of a larger sociopolitical assemblage. Because capitalism and the state, in Bob Jessop’s terms, were “structurally coupled” and “strategically coordinated,” they can be neither analytically separated from nor reduced to one another. 16 Even if at an abstract level the state is derivable from the commodity form, we might usefully extend Marxian methodology in order to develop nonreductive accounts of the mature nation-state as a political form. Such work, at once theoretical and historical, would attend to its underlying structure, logic, imperatives, contradictions, and tendencies toward crises. 17 The challenge is to analyze political forms on their own terms without hypostatizing a political sphere as external to capitalist social relations. Like the commodity, the modern nation-state had to serve as its own transcendent foundation. Like money in capitalist society, citizenship functioned as a “particular equivalent” within this political order. Both media addressed one of the paradigmatic dilemmas of a disenchanted modernity. Particular social formations no longer grounded in divinity or monarchy had somehow to generate universal precepts to which they would then be subject as if they were external and a priori. 18 This sociohistorical condition has been expressed philosophically in paradoxical formulations such as Kant’s categorical imperative (freedom is duty), Rousseau’s general will (obedience to society is really obedience to self ), Adam Smith’s invisible hand (self-interest produces public goods), and Hegel’s cunning of reason (historical contingency produces worldhistorical destiny). Politically, this peculiar requirement of modern society presents itself as a problem of sovereignty. Hannah Arendt makes this very connection: “The same essential rights were at once claimed as the inalienable heritage of all human beings and as the specific heritage of specific nations, the same nation was at once declared to be subject to laws, which supposedly would flow from the Rights of Man, and sovereign, that is, bound by no universal law and acknowledging nothing superior to itself.” She argues that human beings, by virtue of their abstract humanity, were supposed to be the “source as well as [the] ultimate goal” of human rights. 19 Existing prior to national membership, these rights were the condition of possibility for national self-government. However, Arendt emphasizes that the French Revolution also insisted that the nation was

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sovereign; neither rights nor legal authority could exist before or above it. Both the object and subject of legality, the nation had to serve as its own normative foundation. This then was the genesis of what Arendt identifies as “the secret conflict between state and nation” that “came to light at the very birth of the modern nation-state, when the French Revolution combined the declaration of the Rights of Man with the demand for national sovereignty.” She implies that the nation-state is a doubled political form founded upon both universality and particularity: abstract human rights and concrete national rights enable and entail each other. Arendt outlines the historical process that gradually identified citizenship with national membership, which she denounces as a “perversion of the state into an instrument of the nation.” 20 This reduction of human rights to national rights, for example, meant that Jewish emancipation would be paired with sociocultural anti-Semitism. 21 Arendt’s structural analysis of the nation-state thus helps us to account for the matrix linking race, nationality, and rights in modern political formations organized around abstract universality. She explicitly questions the identity between territory, nation, and state presumed by Western political theory but disrupted by phenomena such as imperialism, pan-ethnic movements, and the proliferation of stateless peoples after World War I. 22 Arendt pays special attention to democratic nation-states that pursue colonial projects beyond their territorial frontiers and thereby undermine their own political principles. This is because “the genuine consent at its base cannot be stretched indefinitely. . . . The nation . . . conceived of its law as an outgrowth of a unique national substance which was not valid beyond its own people and the boundaries of its own territory.” An expanded nation-state would by definition have to fully integrate conquered territories juridico-politically. But the imperial disjuncture between territory, state, and nation, as well as the racism that distinguishes between nationals and natives, prohibits such integration. A colonizing nation-state therefore faces the paradoxical challenge of having to “enforce consent” from conquered peoples, and overseas government would inevitably “degenerate into tyranny.” Arendt’s prediction of colonial tyranny (hardly groundbreaking in itself ) assumes its full analytic purchase when she adds, “and though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.” 23 She explains that in colonial societies, race replaces the nation as a principle of the body politic and bureaucracy replaces parliament as a principle of government. Insisting that these colonial perversions have metropolitan implications,

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she traces connections between nineteenth-century imperialism and twentiethcentury fascism. Whether or not we find her specific historical argument persuasive, we can learn from her attempt to identify systemic continuities between metropolitan and colonial politics, to situate race at the center of modern European nationality, citizenship, and human rights, and to link both to the nation-state as grounded in a constitutive contradiction between universality and particularity. 24 She does not simply criticize colonialism on humanitarian grounds; she develops (implicitly but powerfully) an immanent critique of the (imperial) nation-state as a political form. Unfortunately, Arendt’s insistence on a reified distinction between the social and the political prevents her from exploring the dynamic relationship between political economy and the state. She cannot acknowledge that the debased socioeconomic practices she often condemns are inextricably entangled with the idealized republican tradition she wants to revitalize. Nor does she adequately work out the relationship between her structural analysis of the nation-state and her historical examinations of its manifestations at lower levels of abstraction. However, Michel Foucault’s conception of political rationalities as socially embedded, historically specific, and irreducible (see chap. 3) provides a useful bridge between Marx’s arguments about the nonidentical crisis-prone character of a self-grounding capitalist modernity and Marxian arguments about the interpenetration of political economy and the state, on the one hand, and Arendt’s insights into the contradictory structure of the nation-state and its imperial dilemmas, on the other. Combining elements from each of these thinkers points toward a framework for analyzing the (imperial) nation-state as a political form founded upon the antinomy of universality and particularity that must nevertheless be analyzed in relation to political economy and in historically specific contexts. We can then explore how immanent contradictions within the nation-state between universality and particularity, the civil and the political, democracy and rationality, parliament and administration, have shaped modern history. Just as scholars discuss phases of capitalism, we can trace conjunctural crises and transformations of political rationality. Liberalism, welfarism, and neoliberalism are rooted in a the nation-state form. But each order has its own governmental strategies, technologies, knowledge, and targets that must be studied in their own right. Poststructuralist theory has long implored us to reinterpret capitalism through non-Marxist categories such as discourse, culture, and desire. In contrast, I am suggesting that we fold lessons from Arendt and Foucault

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into a modified Marxian framework for understanding the noneconomic dimensions of our political modernity through an imperial optic. This framework would allow us to resituate seeming contradictions between French republican universalism and its supposed (internal and external) enemies as contradictions within the nation-state itself. We could then avoid having to explain racism, nationalism, and other particularisms one-sidedly as antithetical to republicanism. Such gestures often criticize either a false universalism that is designed to mask or justify real particularizing practices or a limited universalism that has not been sufficiently extended to all social groups. 25 By focusing on the absence of republicanism, or its failure to be realized, such gestures often do not examine the way existing republicanism worked politically. A more integrated treatment of universality and particularity as interrelated dimensions of republican, national, and colonial politics would address the way universalizing practices have had particularizing effects and particularizing practices have served republican objectives over the long-term history of modern France. 26

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0.0pt PgV People, Nation, Empire It is possible to interpret the post-Revolution French nation-state in terms of successive crises of universalism that were provisionally stabilized and then displaced into other domains. Schematically, this dynamic was played out over membership struggles whose arena shifted from the people (1789–1848), to the nation (1870–1914), and then the empire (after World War I). These historical developments corresponded to the three distinct universalizing processes that Pierre Rosanvallon identifies, within the French Revolution, whose historically specific convergence shaped the modern nation-state: the liberalization of civil society, the democratization of political society, and the rationalization of government. 27 The eighteenth-century French republic was founded upon the interrelated principles of autonomous individuality, citizen self-government, and an impersonal rule of law. Abstract universal individuals acting as citizens would constitute an objective legal order to which they would be also be subject. They composed “the people”—a disembodied sovereign in whose name the republic was created and in whose legal authority the constitution was grounded. But this was an underspecified category defined in terms of abstract humanity (whether conceived of as a natural property of all persons or as a product of

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political association) and concrete nationality (ascribed to a pre-political community). 28 French peoples’ rights were derived at once from their humanity and their nationality. The founding Declaration insisted that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” even as it also announced that “the principle of all sovereignty rests essentially in the nation.” 29 Here then was the founding antinomy between universality and particularity: equally valid starting points would lead to contradictory consequences. The dual universal–particular character of the nation-state was embodied in the citizen, its elemental category. Insofar as citizenship was a function of one’s abstract human rights, it expressed universality, and insofar as it was secured by membership within a concrete national entity, it expressed particularity. This republican institution thus functioned as a “particular equivalent”—a universalizing or abstracting category that depended on and produced historical particularity (a historically specific designation that depended on and produced abstract human and legal universality). As a medium of universal equivalence within a particular territory, citizenship marked the fundamental distinction between national and foreigner. Within the nation, citizenship institutionalized a distinction between the mass of people who were granted civil rights and the fraction of the population who were vested with full political rights. Given that all human beings were supposed to be free and equal members of a self-governing nation-state, political exclusion was henceforth only legitimate for those groups whose members did not meet the new criteria of individuality, rationality, and autonomy. The republican order thus created categories of persons such as minors, domestic servants, the indigent and propertyless, women, and (former) slaves, all of whom were not acknowledged as properly independent human subjects. 30 The point is that new forms of inequality were enabled by and entwined with republican principles; they expressed rather than violated the new political universalism. Furthermore, republican universalism was defined as much by rational government and a liberal social order as it was by popular sovereignty and political equality. 31 In the early years of the republic, the very ambiguity of categories such as the people, the nation, and the citizen stabilized the constitutive tension upon which the nation-state was founded. 32 They did so by conflating universal humans and particular nationals and by condensing liberal, democratic, and rational modes of universalism. Through the concept of popular sovereignty deployed against monarchial privilege, revolutionary republicans constructed their own universal norms, which appeared to be grounded in nature and reason rather than in a historically specific social order. 33 However, after several decades this

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provisional solution generated new problems that intensified following the first international crisis of capitalism in the 1840s. As William Sewell has demonstrated, French workers insisted that they were the sovereign people who should be self-governing. They argued that they should be citizens because labor, by creating society, was the source of property, and property was the requirement for citizenship. They also expanded the scope of republican liberties by demanding that the state guarantee their right to work. 34 Jacques Donzelot interprets the 1848 revolution in terms of a growing confrontation between two equally legitimate and irreconcilable versions of republican rights: bourgeois property rights and working people’s right to work and to reject an unjust social order. He argues that republican universalism had shifted from being a source of social integration to a source of social conflict. 35 In other words, workers responded to their sociopolitical disenfranchisement by attempting to disarticulate the previously conjoined liberal capitalist and democratic parliamentary legacies of 1789. They used one dimension of republican universalism against another to challenge unjust social hierarchies and political exclusions. In the wake of the 1848 revolution a reconfigured universalism founded upon associations and social equality began to emerge. Once the Second Republic recognized social rights as legitimate, the very rationality of republican politics began to shift. The state became more responsible for promoting social cohesion and protecting social welfare. Rights discourse shifted from the political sphere of individuality and legality to the social sphere of working and living conditions. Under the Third Republic new discourses of solidarity conceptualized society as an interdependent collectivity maintained through relations of social debt rather than a social contract among autonomous individuals. 36 After a second global economic crisis in the 1870s, the scale of capitalist production increased, the boundaries between economy, society, and government were redrawn, and the nascent welfare state expanded. A postliberal sociopolitical order was emerging. Simultaneously, the state undertook projects to nationalize French society through programs of economic, institutional, and cultural integration. 37 When the republican state took responsibility for social rights, the material stakes of national membership increased. Political tensions surrounding the universalism and particularism of the sovereign people–nation then shifted to conflicts over French nationality in relation to foreigners. By the 1880s the nationality question became further charged after a new round of massive immigration of eastern and southern Europeans. Although xenophobia at this time is often rightly associated with the far right, Gérard Noiriel reports that national and municipal republican assemblies passed a series of anti-immigrant

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measures. He refers to immigration as a republican invention and demonstrates that the French state created the contemporary conception of nationality through legal and administrative reforms. The 1889 nationality law sought to abolish autonomous communities within a supposedly unified France. Social legislation began restricting social benefits to French nationals. Government agencies charged with the identification, surveillance, and expulsion of foreigners were created. 38 Foreigners, in short, became a newly marked social category. Instruments designed to erase them also publicized them. Disputes about visibility, nationality, and foreignness also revolved around Jews. Following their emancipation during the Revolution, most French Jews identified with the nation, pursued cultural assimilation, and supported republican universalism. 39 But precisely when Jews lost their formal corporate identity and were interpellated into the modern republican nation-state as abstract universal individuals, they were racialized. Paradoxically, the increasing invisibility of Jews in public life during the nineteenth century served to confirm the anti-Semitic suspicion that Jews were hidden internal enemies of the nation. Emancipated Jews exemplified both abstract universal citizens and unassimilable outsiders fixed to their concrete particularity. 40 The Dreyfus affair may have crystallized the legendary confrontation between varieties of integral nationalism and defenders of republican universalism. 41 But we need to remember that the Third Republic’s national homogenization project paradoxically required foreigners and Jews to be publicly visible, distinct within and from the broader population. The very logic and instruments of republican uniersalism—a rational(izing) administration, social scientific knowledge, and assimilating techniques—worked to particularize segments of the population. During the Belle Époque, societal rationalization detached itself from and began to eclipse liberalization and democratization, those other universalizing modes of republicanism. The fin-de-siècle nationality conflicts were settled provisionally by World War I, when a public consensus around the idea of France as a singular and indivisible nation was reaffirmed across the political spectrum. But wartime violence and its destabilizing postwar consequences fueled another crisis of republican universalism. 42 The pervasive social transformations accompanying postwar reconstruction, another round of immigration in the twenties, and the unprecedented worldwide economic crisis of the thirties provoked radical (labor, socialist, and fascist) movements that began to undermine parliamentary republicanism. 43 Revitalized regionalisms also challenged national homogenization. 44

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During and after World War I this crisis of republican universalism was partly stabilized through renewed attention to the colonial empire as a source of national unity as well as economic prosperity. However, the growing size and spreading awareness of visibly different colonial populations stabilized Third Republican nationality conflicts by allowing the nation-state to be reconfigured as white and European. It is telling that by the end of World War I, working-class disaffection with national unity ideology was partly expressed through race riots directed against colonial workers in the metropole. 45 Yet the war also accelerated socioeconomic interdependence between metropolitan and overseas France, which in turn stimulated colonial migration, population mixture, and new currents of antiimperialism. Interwar movements to reconceptualize the imperial order developed among republican reformers and colonial critics. Membership struggles gradually shifted away from either individual autonomy or national identity and revolved increasingly around axes of race and the question of empire. France’s colonial empire had long been a site where republican universality was entwined with particularizing practices. The contours of post-Revolution republican politics were partly determined by colonial struggles over slavery, emancipation, and self-determination in the French Antilles. 46 After the first abolition in 1794, as Laurent Dubois demonstrates, a new “republican racism” in Guadeloupe enabled a regime of labor coercion as the “price of liberty.” 47 The lesson to be drawn from Dubois’s work is not that the republican government failed to institutionalize the emancipation it promised but that the new exclusionary logic was strictly republican: because centuries of slavery had so degraded slaves’ moral and intellectual aptitudes, they would not be capable of the rational thought and independent will necessary to exercise their natural human freedom. A revolutionary idea of liberty thus worked to racialize free blacks. 48 Similar examples could be drawn from the entire history of French colonialism. The point is not that republican universalism was restricted in the colonies but that intersecting national and colonial politics were shaped by an underlying antinomy between universality and particularity. In the following chapters, I explore the way this antinomy played out during the interwar years on an imperial scale through a series of crises, transformations, and debates concerning the national-imperial state.

Risking Interdisciplinarity Moishe Postone argues that because universality and particularity are both internal features of capitalist society, it is inadequate to critique particularism

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from the standpoint of a normative universality or vice versa. 49 Nor, he maintains, should we become preoccupied with the contradiction between (universal) ideals and (particularist) reality because both belong to modern society. Instead, according to Postone, we must critique the socially constituted antinomy itself in order to reconfigure its elements by identifying immanent possibilities within the existent order that point beyond it. 50 When extended to doubled political formations such as the French imperial nation-state, Postone’s perspective allows us to analyze the political antinomy between universality and particularity at various levels of generality without simply affirming one side of the opposition at the expense of the other. Critical understanding that does not merely mimic the antinomic operation of nationalimperial politics forces us to assume an analytic standpoint that is internal to this system. We need to work through rather than act out the antinomy between universality and particularity. This means remaining attentive to multiple modes of universality (e.g., economic abstraction and legal equivalence or liberalizing, democratizing, and rationalizing dimensions of republicanism) and the ways existent aspects of universality and particularity might be radically reconfigured in transformative ways by historical actors (e.g., associational or ethnographic universalism, African humanism). To argue that a constitutive antinomy recurred over time at various levels and in multiple expressions (depending on local conditions) does not mean that French national-imperial history was determined by it mechanically. But linking the antinomy between universality and particularity to France as an imperial nation-state allows us to account for the internal connections between historical eras, between different colonial empires, and between different levels of a given imperial order (such as everyday struggles, conjunctural crises, political form, and underlying categories). Doing so allows us to explore historically specific political rationalities without having to treat history as pure contingency. Explaining his attempt to ground the modern bourgeois state in capitalist social forms and class relations, Joachim Hirsch writes, “this is not a question of the logical deduction of abstract laws but of the conceptually informed understanding of an historical process, in which . . . objective tendencies . . . assert themselves through the mediation of concrete political movements and processes . . . and conflicts.” 51 This elegant formulation may similarly describe my approach to studying political forms on their own terms though in relation to political economy. Methodologically, this inquiry into imperial crisis, political form, and categorical antinomy must combine concrete empirical and abstract theoretical modes of analysis. Accordingly, this is an interdisciplinary study located at the

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intersection of French political history, the historical anthropology of colonialism, and social theories of modernity. 52 Neither conventionally defined social or intellectual history, this is a historical analysis of rationalities, categories, and forms as mediated through crises, struggles, and debates. It is at once empirical and theoretical. Such an approach risks frustrating empiricist historians as well as political philosophers. But my hope is that working on the frontiers of these fields will allow for insights not readily available to studies located exclusively within a single discipline. If throughout the work I attend to what Edward Said has called the “worldliness” of texts, this does not mean that I mistake them for the whole world. 53 But neither do I oppose texts with that which “really” happened historically. To do so would presuppose a reflectionist theory of knowledge that locates texts and discourses above or outside of society. This stance would imagine that scholars could discover an unmediated reality from which they could observe society and write history. Instead, I treat the production of texts and circulation of discourses as specific types of social practice that merit historical analysis. The methodological challenge is to avoid either fetishizing texts (reading them only in relation to themselves or to other texts) or sociologizing them (reading them reductively as effects of their conditions of production). 54 I analyze texts in order to elaborate the political and discursive fields that made interwar colonial and anticolonial politics intelligible. 55 This historical inquiry is concerned with more than social meanings, however. It seeks to identify links between interwar conceptions of the world and the refractory categories, or concrete abstractions, around which the empire was organized. Drawing insight from Marxian theory, we can recognize that categories such as nation and citizen, or even universality and particularity, are at once conceptual and sociohistorically constituted. 56 In the following chapters, I repeatedly challenge ideological dichotomies between discourse and practices or plans and implementation by analyzing concrete abstractions that were at once imaginary and real, discursive and structural, constructed and effective. Accordingly this book tries to analyze social problems theoretically and to understand theoretical problems as socially and historically constituted. It draws methodological inspiration from thinkers such as Marx, Arendt, and Foucault, who have produced historically grounded theoretical analyses that are also theoretically rigorous historical inquiries. Conceptual questions and historical problems are the point of departure for such work; neither their objects nor methods are defined a priori by disciplinary protocols. The French imperial nation-state was an internally contradictory artifact of colonial modernity that was simultaneously imaginary and real, abstract and

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concrete, universalizing and particularizing, effective and defective, modern and illiberal, republican and racist, welfarist and mercantilist, Franco-African and Afro-French, national and transnational. Constitutionally impure objects such as this require equally contaminated research methods drawn from multiple fields and applied to heterogeneous evidence for an argument that operates at several levels of abstraction. I indicate, in the following chapters, the mediations between categories, forms, crises, contests, and debates. The many unintended consequences of interwar projects and policies should be ascribed neither to incompetent implementation nor to irrepressible subaltern agency. Nor were they a function of the inevitable gap between clear rhetoric and messy reality. They were linked to an intrinsic messiness that was expressed equally in projects and practices. Against the grain of common tendencies within French and colonial historiography, I argue that the imperial nation-state’s dysfunctional dynamic was not arbitrary; it was rooted in a contradictory political rationality that generated recurrent structural impasses. The paradoxical policies that I discuss were elements of a self-undermining system whose very operation aggravated many of the crises it was designed to address. But it was precisely because colonial humanism was doubled and contradictory that immanent possibilities for criticism and transformation were possible. Microhistories of everyday life and ordinary people are often fetishized for supposedly enabling us to get beyond state projects or discourses so that we can see “messy reality” or “what actually happened” or “resistance”—the stuff, we are told, that is located “on the ground.” This study is guided by a conviction that archival research does not simply lead us from abstractions to the so-called real world. Rather, it reveals that the seemingly abstract categories that we consign to political philosophy are often precisely what are at stake in everyday policies and ordinary public debates. In chapter 2 I analyze Greater France as a real abstraction, an imaginary figure of colonial nationalism that also expressed the actually existing economic, social, and cultural interpenetration of metropolitan and colonial life under the interwar imperial nation-state. In chapters 3, 4, and 5 I analyze colonial humanism as reform movement, political rationality, and method of administration in French West Africa. Chapter 6 bridges debates among reformers over colonial citizenship in French West Africa to citizenship practices among expatriate African and Antillean communities living in imperial Paris. With periodicals and organizations, they constituted an alternative black public sphere through which to confront the persistent contradictions of the imperial order. In chapters 7 and 8 I explore the ways in which the early Negritude movement extended

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black cultural nationalism and colonial humanism through rational-critical discourse on the existing imperial nation-state, exercises in political imagination that envisioned an alternative transnational political federation, and a critique of Western rationality and modernity from the standpoint of Africanity. These final chapters condense what is perhaps this book’s overriding question: What kind of relationship to the normative categories of Western political modernity—such as civil society, citizenship, humanism, and reason—can be cultivated by colonial peoples whose own domination had been mediated by those categories? Before continuing, I need to clarify several terms used throughout the book. I translate indigène as “native.” Although I do not place the term in quotes with every use, it should be understood that this is a constructed colonial category and not an ontological designation. For nègre and noir, rather than deciding in each case whether to use either “Negro” or “black,” I acknowledge the historical specificity of these racial categories by using the French term whenever possible. Otherwise I translate both as “black.” 57 Finally, I want to specify four interrelated meanings of the term humanism as I use it in this book. Epistemologically, humanism refers to a subject-centered philosophy of knowledge grounded in individual consciousness. Sociologically, humanism treats humanity as singular; all people are seen as members of a universal human family that transcends racial and cultural particularities. Ethically, humanism insists that human beings are the source and object of all values. Politically, humanism maintains that in a post-transcendent world, sovereignty resides not in god, or nature, or the king, but in humanity itself. All people, from this perspective, are endowed with human rights by virtue of their humanness and are thus entitled to participate as free and equal members of self-governing polities. The curious itinerary of these concepts during the interwar period are traced in the following sections as reformist administrators and cultural nationalists sought to formulate a new relationship between universality and particularity adequate to an imperial nation-state.

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Historians have often treated the discourse on Greater France that circulated after World War I as part of an ideology that attempted to justify, mystify, or publicize French colonial activities. They have been concerned primarily with its breadth or effectiveness. 1 Alternatively, this chapter focuses on the determinate relationship between the figure of Greater France and the imperial character of the French nation-state at this time. The former, I suggest, functioned not so much to obscure the relationship between the nation and its colonies as to specify it. By staging and seeking to stabilize contradictions within the imperial nation-state, the discourse of Greater France expressed, even if it also distorted, central features of the interwar imperial order.

Toward an Imperial Nation-State The Third Republic, as is well known, marked the triumph not only of imperial republicanism within the nation but of republican imperialism overseas. Propelled by a protectionist response to the 1870s economic crisis, a nationalist response to France’s recent territorial losses, a sharpening of inter-empire

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rivalries, and the lobbying efforts of various colonial interest groups, the size of the French empire increased dramatically in the decades preceding the Great War. Just as significant, the republican state transformed its inherited colonies into a structured imperial entity now conceptualized as a political whole. Despite the empire being composed of juridico-politically diverse colonies, it was gradually integrated within an overarching imperial bureaucracy. 2 Within specific colonies a civil and civilizing administrative apparatus emphasized public works, health, and education. 3 By the turn of the century, when military rule had been largely replaced by civilian administration, a rationalized and republicanized imperial apparatus was firmly in place. In short, the French state’s project to integrate the nation, assimilate provinces, and constitute republican citizens was entwined with its overseas project to integrate the empire, assimilate its colonies, and constitute colonial subjects. Each French state, whether or not republican, confronted tensions arising from colonial conquests that incorporated non-European peoples into an expanded polity composed of nationals. But this challenge was especially acute for a republican polity premised on civil equality and self-government, one in which the people-nation in principle were the state. Because the modern French nation-state was forged in relation to colonial populations within an imperial system of which it was always an integral part, it was never simply a self-contained parliamentary republic that also happened to possess overseas colonies. But because its imperial heritage did not wholly negate its republican form, modern France was not simply an empire-state either. Constitutionally, the Third Republic was simultaneously a parliamentary state whose authority derived from popular consent and a colonial state whose authority derived from political conquest. It had somehow to reconcile the precept of national-popular sovereignty with a legalized racial distinction between rulers and ruled. It is therefore appropriate to characterize France by World War I as an imperial nation-state. 4 The term indicates the dual character of France as a single political formation in which parliamentary republican and authoritarian colonial elements were structurally interrelated and not simply added to one another. Specific challenges confront a nation-state that has expanded geographically, incorporated different populations, and rules according to nonparticipatory principles. But the disjointed relationship among territory, people, and government should not then lead us to establish an antithesis between metropolitan republicanism (defined by democracy and civil society) and overseas colonialism (defined by tyranny and racism). Doing so would not only obscure the systemic institutional relations between republicanism and varieties of social inequality in metropolitan France. It would also

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preclude our recognizing the way in which imperial rationalization (state centralization, bureaucratic administration, specialized governmental knowledge) was a universalizing legacy of Revolutionary republicanism that tied the parliamentary and colonial states to one another. The crucial analytic question is not how the universalist republican nation was able to maintain and justify a racist colonial system, but how republicanism, bureaucratic authoritarianism, and colonialism were internal elements of an expanded French state that were articulated within an encompassing imperial system. The term imperial nation-state is not only a theoretical designation. I also use it to signal concrete historical conditions that characterized France in the age of empire. It refers to the growing imperial scale of economic, demographic, and cultural circulation during the Third Republic, especially after 1900, when France was becoming a national-imperial society. The imperial nation-state was at once conceptual and material; more than just an idea or ideal, it was a system (of empirewide networks). I have already mentioned the imperial administrative grid that both mirrored its metropolitan counterpart and was integrated into it. Additionally, long-standing economic circuits linked Paris, Bordeaux, and Marseille to colonial resources and markets in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. By the early twentieth century, an interdependent imperial economy was well established. French colonial capitalism remained largely mercantilist, was unevenly profitable, and comprised a relatively small percentage of France’s total foreign trade. 5 But such seemingly archaic economic practices were integrated into a broader imperial political economy. Since at least 1900, according to Jacques Marseille, the empire had become a favored site for the export of French capital, and colonial commerce played a fundamental role in national economic growth. Secure and expanding colonial markets were especially significant for key if aging sectors of French capitalism, such as the textile and metallurgy industries. By World War I, the empire had become France’s third largest trading partner and went on to become the first in 1928. French consumers and industries became increasingly reliant on colonial agricultural products. 6 Economic interdependence throughout the empire only increased during and after the war. After financial losses on investments in Russia and the Ottoman Empire, French investment capital was redirected to the colonies. Plans for postwar reconstruction assigned a crucial role to the imperial economy. The state’s commitment to promoting an empirewide economic system was outlined in a 1917 economic conference organized by the Ministry of Colonies, followed by the creation of agencies in 1919 and 1920 that would serve as official liaisons between metropolitan and colonial businesses. These organizations

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complemented existing colonial economic interest groups, such as the Colonial Union (1893) and chambers of commerce in imperial port cities. Growing international economic competition after the war also reinforced France’s neomercantilist stake in colonial protectionism, with measures such as the 1928 customs law that led to a dramatic increase in imperial commerce. 7 The war also accelerated the process by which metropolitan finance capital transformed family-owned colonial trading houses into joint stock companies linked to banks and shipping lines. In French West Africa such concentration allowed the Compagnie Française d’Afrique Occidentale and the Société Commerciale de l’Ouest Africain to become monopolistic, international, and highly profitable during the 1920s. Along with the Banque d’Afrique Occidentale, they dominated economic life there during the interwar years. 8 These imperial economic circuits generated corresponding networks of social circulation. Colonial officials sought to promote or regulate systemic demographic movements such as the trade diaspora that led Syrian and Lebanese merchants to settle throughout the French empire, the seasonal migration of labor within West Africa from the unproductive Sahel to richer coastal plantation zones, and the emigration of native populations from French to neighboring British colonies (either to find work or flee taxation and military recruitment). 9 At a different level, the colonial state sponsored what Benedict Anderson has called administrative and educational “pilgrimages” that enabled colonized civil servants to circulate among their childhood homes, metropolitan training institutes, and their governmental posts elsewhere in the empire. 10 But rather than facilitate an independent national consciousness among colonized elites, as Anderson describes, these pilgrimages, which were not confined to individual colonies, reinforced the material and conceptual infrastructure of the national-imperial state. Such imperial social movement also included the military, labor, and educational migrations that propelled non-Europeans from French colonies to the metropole. These included the large numbers of colonial troops who served France in World War I and who then associated with counterparts from various colonies; many of these troops remained in France after the armistice. 11 During the war, colonial workers, primarily from North Africa and Indochina, were also recruited to fill jobs in French factories. After the war, many of them formed the nucleus of enduring immigrant communities that also included African and Malagasy dockworkers. Along with an educated class of Antillean professionals and university students from across the empire, this expatriate colonial population continued to grow during the 1920s. 12 Colonial soldiers, workers, professionals, and students were not simple

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immigrants. They composed a social network that facilitated movement back and forth between the metropole and its colonies as well as between France’s colonial federations. These various forms of circulation provided sectors of French and native populations with concrete experience that they belonged to a broad imperial system that disrupted provincial definitions of nation and colony. Empirewide social circulation also corresponded to cross-cultural intercourse, which intensified during this period. During the 1920s and 1930s, a growing preoccupation with “primitive” African, Asian, and Oceanic cultures linked universities, museums, journalists, novelists, visual artists, and musicians. Exchanges between colonial intellectuals, the European avant-garde, and political activists popularized the idea that non-European peoples were members of distinct societies possessing autonomous histories, cultures, and even civilizations. 13 This was an ethnological era characterized by fieldwork, study missions, artifact collecting, colonial expositions, tourism, cultural commodification, and primitivist entertainment. Such cultural exchange, expropriation, and objectification constituted another sphere of imperial circulation that linked natives and nationals as well as continental France and its overseas territories, albeit on paternalistic and racist terms. Once we recognize the existence of these spheres of empirewide economic, social, and cultural circulation, it becomes easier to reframe the familiar metropole–colony binary. A new topos emerges in which Paris can be seen as one among many nodes in an imperial network. Of course it was a privileged hub of the imperial system in which massive military, economic, and administrative power was concentrated. But Paris did not simply rule its overseas territories from a distance. If colonial government must be understood as continuous with the French state, the metropole must also be understood as the very center of an empire of which it and the colonies were integral parts. Paris was a fundamentally imperial city. To identify France as an imperial nation-state is to refer both to this altered topography as well as to the peculiar political form that I discussed previously. In short, the French imperial nation-state was a concrete historical reality. By World War I, France was neither a typical nation (that also possessed overseas colonies) nor a straightforward empire. At the same time, however, imperial France was also a political fiction promoted by colonial publicists in and out of government, even if most French people remained relatively uninformed about the empire. 14 After the war, in other words, the status of France as empire was curiously doubled. It was at once real and imaginary, concrete and abstract, present and represented, crucial for the French victory yet invisible, integral to the nation yet separate from it. The question of imperial France thus generated

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a great deal of public discussion, one product of which was the discourse of la plus grande France, which had great currency during the interwar period.

The Discourse of Greater France Under the Third Republic the empire was imagined and debated more intensively than ever before. By World War I, despite large reservoirs of public indifference and political hostility to overseas adventurism, republican advocates had identified colonialism with patriotism, thereby linking imperial expansion to the national project. 15 After the war, republicans promoted the general but imprecise idea that the colonies were somehow integral parts of la plus grande France, an expanded French nation. The figure of Greater France expressed both a historical reality and a political ideal. On one level, this concept reflected the confidence of a strong state possessing an organized empire at the height of its power. But this was also an imaginary figure of political desire. It revealed the anxiety of an imperial nation-state confronting crises of republican and colonial legitimacy. As domestic social conflict undermined the national solidarity of the war years and the fragile international peace raised public concerns about national security, France’s colonial empire began to figure prominently in postwar national self-understanding. Despite metropolitan debates about the future direction of the colonial project, a broad spectrum of political opinion identified the empire as a crucial component of economic growth, national renewal, and international prestige. 16 The discourse of Greater France coincided with interwar challenges to republicanism. After the war, French lower-middle and working classes began to feel alienated from parliamentary politics. Legislators failed either to stabilize the falling franc quickly enough in the 1920s or to respond adequately to the depression in the 1930s. Party conflicts and a weak executive resulted in unstable parliamentary coalitions and revolving governments unable to formulate coherent national policies. Frequent corruption scandals further eroded public trust in politicians. Trade unions, the Communist Party, and fascistic leagues further challenged republican institutions. The growing hostility to parliamentary politics reached a peak in the national political crisis of 1934, when far-right militants almost succeeded in toppling the government during the Stavisky affair. 17 The figure of Greater France thus emerged in a period of postwar national republican crisis. Of course, ancien régime mercantilism as well as Revolutionary and Napoleonic expansionism attempted in different ways to extend the

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nation beyond its hexagonal frontiers. But after World War I, the vision no longer implied a homogeneous national space that extended abroad. It understood the empire as an aggregate of heterogeneous colonies, each of which was distinct from metropolitan France but which together constituted a more or less coherent imperial formation, diverse but unified. 18 Interwar public commentary struggled to specify the relationship—either real or ideal, among republic, state, nation, and colonies—that was condensed in this figure. The discourse of Greater France contained and staged certain dilemmas facing the nationalimperial state. The republican figure who contributed most to defining the terms of the interwar colonial debate was Albert Sarraut. As Radical Party deputy, governorgeneral of Indochina, and minister of colonies, Sarraut elaborated a program for a new colonialism that would be rational, profitable, and beneficent. His legendary 1921 legislative proposal for colonial development, which I discuss in chapter 4, depended on and promoted a conception of Greater France. Sarraut’s “methodical and precise plan” for state-financed public works and social services overseas made two implicit claims: first, separate colonies composed a single empire requiring coherent and coordinated direction; second, this empire should be managed according to republican legal procedures. His proposal did not only challenge the requirement that colonies be financially self-sufficient but called on the national assembly to formalize the plan in a legislative act. “Our magnificent colonial domain,” Sarraut explained, “will thus find itself shielded, by the force and the authority of law from coincidences and uncertainties.” He argued that consistent national policy for colonial development could only be ensured through parliamentary legislation to “prevent hasty improvisations that would not so much express the view of the general interest as that of personal conceptions.” The final article of his bill required progress reports to be regularly published in order to “allow for measures of publicity that would permit parliament and the public to follow step by step the realizations of the program.” 19 Sarraut, in short, sought to integrate colonial administration and parliamentary democracy by submitting the former to the authority of the law, the general interest, and publicity. His plan thereby attempted to elaborate a formal juridico-political framework for the increasingly integrated relationship between France and its empire. After the failure of his legislative proposal, Sarraut developed the conception of Greater France more explicitly. He insisted that “the future power and prosperity of the Mère-Patrie” depended on “the increased strength and wealth of the ensemble of overseas Frances.” He thus endorsed what he saw as the “the ineluctable incorporation of French life into the immense colonial life . . . [a]

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movement of integration that will amplify the existence of the Patrie.” On one level, he made a demographic argument: “The idea, the image, little by little is becoming clearer in peoples’ minds of a new entity in which the continental fatherland and overseas Frances, if not merged, at least in close solidarity, will make up the real strength of a plus grande France whose security would rest no longer on 40 million, but on 100 million human beings, and which can expect all of its food to come from a domain 20 times bigger than the patrie maternelle.” But for Sarraut, these colonial territories and populations were “no longer only ‘markets’ . . . they are living entities, creations of humanity, integral [solidaire] parts of the French state, which, through scientific, economic, moral, and political progress, we will help to access great futures, in the same way as other parts of the national territory.” 20 It is not entirely clear here whether Sarraut is identifying colonies with the French state, nation, or territory. But through the language of unity, integration, and solidarity, he certainly regarded colonies as integral elements of an overarching imperial entity that encompassed the metropole. These themes recurred in a 1923–24 lecture series in Paris at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques that included colonial administrators and national deputies. Introducing the lectures, Henri Brenier, a former economic officer in Indochina, repeated the lesson learned during the Great War that French military and financial security depended on colonial strength. Other participants went further and affirmed Sarraut’s integral vision by insisting that the goal of native policy was “to make France a nation of 100 million men.” The challenge and triumph of this “greater nation” was seen to rest in its ability to create unity out of heterogeneity. For example, Albert Duchène, director of political affairs in the Ministry of Colonies, implicitly compared France to the novel entities created by imperial Rome: “France is above all a continuation of Gaul. It is a country in which the most diverse ethnic elements have melted together over the ages.” In a register of sentimental nationalism, Duchène announced: “Citizens, subjects, protégés, are nothing but surnames; at moments of common danger ‘French’ is the family name.” 21 With this familial metaphor, Duchène reinforced the idea of “a sacred union, national unity, the unity of the French empire.” 22 Others combined familial imagery with industrial metaphors. Octave Homberg was a banker and businessman with investments in Indochina, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. 23 His widely read book rejected proposals to sell colonies in order to raise financial capital. Homberg demanded state investment in colonial development (la mise en valeur) as part of a coherent imperial economic policy based on an idea of “total France”: “There is today one France

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forming a single block, like a metal forged by fire; to detach a part of this block would ruin the homogeneity of this pure metal.” He explains, “one doesn’t sell one’s brothers. . . . Our colonies are not . . . a property: they are truly the most fecund and sacred part of our territorial formation; it is thanks to them that France, despite its poorly closed wounds, is still a world-important nation.” 24 Homberg called for a policy of imperial integration: The goal . . . is to attach the colonies to the metropole as solidly as possible— to work to cement the unity of this total France. Just as formerly the policy of our . . . sovereigns was to combine diverse provinces . . . into a French unity, today the Republic should, respecting the variety of faraway colonies, integrate them entirely into our national life, to the point where this “France of all the continents” with the same blood, beats to the same rhythm in the same heart. 25

The discourse of Greater France thus combined republican nationalist images of solidarity with integral nationalist images of organic community. It is unclear whether these declarations of national-colonial unity were supposed to be descriptive, prescriptive, or merely symbolic. At times Greater France appeared to be a “phantasmatic” expression of the imperial imaginary. 26 Here its objective was to promote a colonial consciousness (and to structure unconscious colonial desires) among an ignorant or indifferent metropolitan citizenry. The pragmatic Sarraut wrote hopefully of colonial policy becoming “a national idea, creating a new spirit.” 27 Brenier published the lectures on colonial policy in order to stimulate the interest of public opinion. Homberg argued that a coherent colonial policy would raise public consciousness about Greater France, even as informed public opinion nourished by education, the press, cinema, conferences, and expositions was a requirement for such a policy. 28 Such discussions of Greater France were meant to instill in the French public a sentiment of belonging to and having a stake in an empire on which the future of the nation depended. In turn, it was believed that a more widespread imperial subjectivity would make “Greater France” more real. This instrumental understanding of colonial discourse was promoted by Léon Archimbaud, a Radical deputy and member of the Parti Colonial lobby, in La plus grande France (1928). He too invoked “a nation of 100 million inhabitants” and asserted that colonies cannot be sold because a nation cannot alienate itself. French citizens, in Archimbaud’s estimation, needed to recognize “that our colonies are indispensable to us, and that without them, France would no longer be France.” 29 Archimbaud suggested that state-directed popular education about colonialism would foster an “imperial mentality” among

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the metropolitan public. He compared the consciousness of national belonging that existed in provincial France to the feeling of imperial membership that he hoped French nationality would provoke. 30 Here nation-making and empiremaking were presented as analogous and interrelated. But the discourse of Greater France emphasized imperial heterogeneity as much as it did national unity. Advocates, as I discuss in chapters 3 and 4, maintained that distinct cultural groups required different forms of rule that would, as Léon Barety announced to the Sciences Politiques audience, “respect [their] beliefs” and “preserve [their] laws and customs.” 31 If, as Albert Duchène claimed, “France . . . shows itself, in its vast empire, to be respectful of everyone’s rights,” the rights extended to native members of the French national family were cultural not political. 32 There was never a question of replacing rule by decree with the rule of law in the empire. Although the ideal republic sought to transcend legal pluralism, Greater France had been founded upon it. Partisans of Greater France, as I show in chapter 5, always coupled invocations of a unified empire-nation with warnings against extending citizenship to culturally backward and politically immature natives. For Henri Brenier, “one of the most delicate problems of colonial policy” was balancing “the need to extend political rights to natives gradually, when [they] are worthy of understanding their use and importance,” with “the prudence required if we want to avoid the trouble that the ignorance and passion of men insufficiently prepared for their role as electors will not fail to create if we proceed too quickly.” 33 Likewise Sarraut argued that granting French citizenship to colonial masses would be “an error as pernicious to our protégés as to France itself.” But he emphasized that these rightless wards under French “tutelage” would nevertheless be members of the nation: “the link that unites them to the metropole is less that of vassalité than that of solidarité, it is the link of the national family.” 34 Sarraut concedes that while other colonial powers (namely, Britain) may grant greater political rights to their subjects, France compensates with “a sincere tenderness. . . . Paternally against our breast, we softly press the humble face of our black or yellow brother, who hears our hearts beating in unison with his.” 35 This family metaphor signifies the benevolent paternalism that French colonialism idealized. Colonial brothers were counted among the new national family of 100 million Frenchmen but within a structure of paternity, not fraternity. 36 The discourse of Greater France included colonial populations within the nation, while excluding them from the polity by defining them as hommes rather than citoyens, social rather than political beings. By dissociating nationality from citizenship, the figure of Greater France sought to mediate unity and diversity, interiority and exteriority, membership and inequality.

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Although some currents of the discourse sought to stabilize colonial contradictions, other currents simply staged them. In his canonical manual on colonial law, Arthur Girault advocated integrating the colonies into the national legal order even as he argued against extending French citizenship to colonial populations in the name of protecting public order. 37 He acknowledged that colonial policymakers confronted a dilemma: “Either [political] rights will be the exclusive prerogative of native Frenchmen and we must fear that they may abuse them in prejudice against the rest of the population as we have seen in Algeria and Cochin-China. Or these rights will be granted to all inhabitants without distinction and then native Frenchmen, being the least numerous, in turn could be oppressed as is proved by the example of the Antilles.” Similarly, Girault observed that those who regarded native voting rights as “the only means to conserve France’s colonies into the distant future” and those who believed they were the “surest means to lose them in the near future” agreed that this was “the most serious problem that a colonizing people can face.” He warns that all colonizing nations must sooner or later confront the dilemma between allowing the “dissolution of [their] empire” or granting “colonial representation,” whether in an imperial parliament or a metropolitan assembly. 38 Other interwar critics proposed institutional arrangements that might transcend this imperial dilemma. Outre-Mer, a reformist policy journal published by the École Coloniale, was especially interested in addressing the constitutional challenges posed by juridico-political pluralism. M. Latron called for the creation of a “colonial charter” that would organize the empire around distinct systems of government while preserving metropolitan sovereignty. 39 Pierre Lampué wanted to formalize the status of French colonies as “State territory” or “integral parts of the State.” 40 He argued that despite its “juridical diversity,” the empire consisted of colonies subject to the same constitutional laws and ruled by the same state organisms (government and parliament) as the metropole. Charles Michelet called for an imperial constitution that would specify the rights and duties of the metropolitan and colonial collectivities comprising the empire. But in a provocative departure from the dominant discourse, he did not subsume the colonies within an expanded French nation. Instead he envisioned an imperial federation composed of distinct semiautonomous nations (France and each of its colonies) that would be under the jurisdiction of a single imperial not national state. 41 These writers, in sum, presented exercises in political imagination that took Greater France seriously by envisioning legal categories and political arrangements adequate to the national-imperial state.

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A signal contribution to the discourse of Greater France that sought both to stabilize existing contradictions through family metaphors and to overcome them through innovative proposals was made by Robert Delavignette, the prominent interwar reformer. He suggested provocatively that if Africa was becoming increasingly French, France was becoming increasingly African. 42 His focus on national-imperial articulation was especially acute in Soudan– Paris–Bourgogne, an extended essay that bridges his early novels and later policy writing. In 1934 Delavignette attended celebrations in West Africa to commemorate France’s conquest of the Sudan, and then returned to Paris during the civil unrest following the Stavisky affair. Soudan–Paris–Bourgogne recounts his experience of geo-political disjunction as he leaped from Africa to Paris, and from colonial administration to republican crisis, at such a charged moment in French national history. Delavignette describes himself as an African-identified Frenchman who feels alienated as he wanders through a national capital traversed by political disorder. Narrating his itinerary among the sites of France’s colonial governing complex (ministries, bureaucracies, associations, journals, schools), Delavignette elaborates an imperial geography of the metropolitan city. He compares the rioting right-wing extremists with African tribes. After seeking out his bureaucratic colleagues in Paris, he reflects on the intimate relationship between the republic and its colonies. By the end of the narrative, Delavignette has retreated to his native Burgundy, where he reconnects with his provincial childhood. Notwithstanding its sentimental primitivism and regionalism, this work develops a remarkable vision of Greater France as an imperial nation-state. Delavignette suggests that France’s colonies are not inert possessions but have exercised a transformative influence on the nation. Drawing a then common analogy between Roman Gaul and French Africa, he writes, “the natives were not changed. It was they, on the contrary, who changed those who commanded them into natives.” Although Delavignette opposes colonial citizenship, he insists that “in this excessive Africa, our victory will be . . . to make a province out of the colony.” Far from making a conventional argument for assimilation, Delavignette is underlying the reciprocal determinations linking the nation and its colonies. He insists that his own imperial personality was shaped by belonging equally to West Africa, Paris, and Burgundy. Each, for him, was an equivalent pole not only of his personal geographic imaginary but of the greater French nation. “Contemplating my three homes I discover that the Sudan, despite its foreignness . . . will from now on be a part of the Occident,

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just as Paris and Burgundy. . . . And from the depths of the Sudanese bush I am conscious of myself marching to a New Occident.” 43 In Delavignette’s renovated France, the nation and its colonies are implicated in one another. He calls on the post–World War I generation of French and African youth to embrace this “new world rising”: You have a unique historical opportunity to think, to create by thought, not only a European France, but an African France. . . . It is yours, the Sudan. It is a part of your patrimony. . . . Use this Sudan to remake the Cité, even in France. Africa is the salvation of Europe! Yes, if she leads you to remake France. Colony, capital, province! Mix these three old words together in your head, without giving them any hierarchical meaning . . . that is the work of the New Occident that calls to you. 44

Despite the romantic rhetoric, this is not only colonial apologia. It is at once a recognition of the historical conditions shaping France as an imperial nationstate and an exercise in political imagination. Delavignette’s vision is both descriptive and prescriptive, empirical and performative. It grasps the peculiar character of Greater France as both real and imaginary. When Delavignette later became director of the École Coloniale, he declaimed to the students: “You should understand your profession on a global scale.” “The France that you represent is not only a territory of Europe. It constructed an imperial cité in Africa and Asia.” Delavignette reminded these future colonial stewards that as administrators of this imperial polity they would be charged with “national renewal.” 45 He exhorted them to carry with them into the field “an imperishable memory of Paris, capital of Greater France,” hoping that they would be “conscious of participating in the life of an Empire that federates 60 million black and yellow men with 40 million European French people.” 46 For Delavignette, colonial government could regenerate the nation as an imperial polis.

A Concrete Abstraction The discourse of Greater France referred both to something that actually existed—the new networks of imperial circulation that I have described—and to something only envisioned—an imperial mentality, an imperial constitution, an integrated national-imperial polity. As such, this discourse was simultaneously utopian and heterotopian. Foucault defines heterotopia as “a kind of

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effectively enacted utopia in which . . . all other real sites that can be found in the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” If we take colonial discourse to be a type of national self-reflection, Foucault’s use of a mirror metaphor to discuss the relationship between utopia and heterotopia may help us to understand the curious political ontology of Greater France. He writes, The mirror is after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens behind the surface. . . . But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction to the position that I occupy. . . . it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. 47

Greater France, “at once absolutely real . . . and absolutely unreal,” functioned as a type of political mirror that exerted a “counteraction” on its own utopian self-image, revealing that colonial conditions were both more and less than they appeared to be. The legendary 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris—an event that lasted six months and was visited by more than 30 million people—expressed this idea of Greater France as both utopia and heterotopia. Arguably a climactic moment of interwar public interest in the empire, the exposition assembled colonized peoples, constructed facsimiles of their architectural forms, and staged native cultural tableaux. 48 Governor-General Olivier, the exposition’s principal organizer, characterized the event as “a concrete and living representation of the French people’s colonial empire.” 49 He emphasized that its objective was “to show the true face of colonialism to those who are ignorant about it or only possess a distorted image of it.” 50 Minister of Colonies Paul Reynaud inaugurated the exposition by invoking its aim to create a colonial consciousness among visitors who would be induced to feel as though they were citizens of Greater France. 51 One tourist characterized the Exposition as “a stroll through all five continents”: “I advise travelers who fear ocean voyages to journey around the world by way of the Exposition. . . . Distances are abolished, oceans are removed.” Visitors could circle the park in a car painted with zebra stripes and driven by a guide wearing khakis and pith helmet who appeared to have “the soul of those old colonials disillusioned by twenty years in the tropics.” 52 The French reading public was also able to enjoy

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such ersatz exotic voyages through virtual travel writing published in the pages of metropolitan periodicals that reported on the exposition. This imperial spectacle was not, however, simply a scene of entertaining escapism. At the concluding session of the concurrent Congress on Colonial Education, Henri Bonnamaux called on metropolitan educators “to complete” the exposition by spreading a message to schoolchildren that would “penetrate the entire nation” regarding “the privileged position that they occupied in the world” by virtue of the French empire. He hoped that such education would foster an “imperial mentality” so that “the entire nation feels that its very life depends on the preservation of its colonial domain, on its economic development [mise en valeur], on ever closer soul to soul contact with the native.” 53 The colonial exposition, in other words, was neither only a symptom of the imperial imagination nor the source of officially sanctioned illusions. It was part of an institutional complex devoted to cultural pedagogy. The objective was not simply to address metropolitan public opinion but to create a new imperial public that would correspond to the imperial nation-state. Scholars have rightly characterized the exposition as an idealized vision of the empire, a collective ideological illusion or hallucination, and a colonial fantasy or fictive simulated reality. 54 But we must also recognize that this public performance of Greater France grasped and expressed something fundamental about the existing imperial order. Its phantasms and hallucinations were rooted in concrete sociohistorical conditions. The exposition may be understood as an exemplary site at which the contradictions of Greater France were staged and stabilized: it included the colonies within an expanded national vision, even as it racialized colonial subjects and confirmed their forms of life as irreconcilably different. This imperial spectacle signified the integrated relationship between the republic and its colonies while indicating the troubling reality of the metropole as an increasingly imperial space. Mimicking immigration circuits, the exposition literally brought a new cohort of colonial subjects to live in Paris. 55 Prefiguring the emergence of interwar anticolonial nationalisms, the event provoked boycotts and counterdemonstrations by African, Maghrebian, and Indochinese activists living in Paris. 56 To use Henri Lefebvre’s terms, this exposition was both a “representation of space” created by colonial ideologists and a “representational space” that created possibilities for reconfiguring the national-imperial order itself. Lefebvre treats such varieties of space as concrete abstractions, which he defines as concepts that make social relations possible, forms that have a social existence, abstractions with practical power. He characterizes concrete abstractions as “things/not-things” that “both embody and conceal social relations.” Such

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“ideological objects overburdened with meaning” are “neither a substantial reality nor a mental reality.” 57 Greater France was a concrete abstraction: an ideological thing/not-thing—neither only an object nor merely an idea—with a real social existence that both expressed and obscured the economic, social, and cultural relations of an imperial nation-state. Greater France was both more and less than interwar colonial discourse claimed it to be. Of course the promise of fully including colonial populations in the French national family was never realized. Yet in many respects Greater France was disruptively real. New empirewide networks of economic, social, and cultural circulation posed challenges to the colonial power that produced this representation. The imperial order presupposed clear distinctions among metropolitan and colonial territories, peoples, and government. Through familial metaphors that dissociated nationality from citizenship, the discourse of Greater France sought to reinforce those distinctions while binding natives to the empire. It mediated unity and diversity, interiority and exteriority, membership and inequality. But the figure of Greater France also grasped the very real interpenetration of metropolitan and colonial societies. By blurring the very distinctions it sought to maintain, it reaffirmed the need to separate nationality from citizenship throughout the empire. The discourse of Greater France identified the colonies as integral parts of the nation and suggested that France would be incomplete without the empire as a necessary supplement. Yet by excluding natives from the republican polity, this discourse insisted that the colonies were outside of the nation-state, a secondary and superfluous supplement. 58 But this is not a poststructuralist aporia; it was a historically specific political impasse. Both assertions expressed an equivalent if one-sided reality and desire of the imperial nation-state. Each of these claims was both true and fantastic. We cannot simply dismiss the discourse of Greater France as empty rhetoric about national-imperial unity that was designed to distort ugly realities about colonial oppression. There was a determinate relationship between the symbolic order of power and its corresponding sociopolitical form. 59 The discourse of Greater France expressed something real about the underlying contradictory conditions of France as an imperial nation-state. Lefebvre reminds us that Marx’s critique of ideology and fetish forms was not meant to unmask ideas in order to expose an unmediated reality. Rather he analyzed real things in order to reveal underlying social relations. 60 Similarly, instead of treating the discourse of Greater France as an attempt to mask the real relationship between the republic and its colonies, we can see it as specifying this new imperial entity, whether or not deliberately, within which

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parliamentary and authoritarian rule were articulated and metropolitan and colonial populations associated. This discourse was a type of imperial nationalism that sought to redress the postwar sense of socioeconomic, geopolitical, and moral weakness as well as the social divisions, political conflicts, and cultural crises that seemed to be sharpening. Debates about Greater France converged with other attempts to restore national order in a climate of pessimism, hedonism, and insurrection on the one hand and conservativism, nostalgia, and commemoration on the other. 61 The public effort to stabilize and stage contradictions between republicanism and colonialism signaled that France’s status as an imperial nation-state was forcing itself into political consciousness. The chapters that follow explore how problems embedded in the discourse of Greater France were acted out and worked through in postwar projects undertaken by colonial reformers and cultural nationalists on an imperial scale.

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Toward a New Colonial Rationality: Welfare, Science, Administration

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After World War I, administrators in French West Africa or Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF) confronted the same national-imperial tensions that the discourse of Greater France staged and sought to stabilize. They addressed intersecting sets of relations that anchored the modern French nation-state. These relations were gradually modified by the transition from liberalism to welfarism and assumed peculiar forms in an imperial context. They included relations among state, economy, and society; among territory, people, and government; among culture, nationality, and citizenship; and between parliamentary and administrative government. Propelled by structural and conjunctural pressures, this cohort of reformers elaborated a coherent if contradictory rationality for colonial rule. This chapter outlines its conditions of emergence and its governmental scope. Colonial rationality in AOF linked practical science and scientific administration within a paternalist system of rule that combined the recognition of ethnic difference with an ethic of indigenous well-being. Periodizing transformation is always arbitrary and heuristic. World War I was not the singular turning point for colonial politics. There existed precedents for the ideas, initiatives, and institutions that shaped interwar Africa policy. But these elements linked up with one another in novel ways after the war

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to form a new rationality for rule in AOF. World War I created conditions that required governmental attention even as it accelerated transformations already under way. Scholars often explain interwar policy shifts in terms of short-term events within the federation, such as doctrinal revisions, European personnel shortages, better-trained individual administrators, failed development plans, and resistance to the colonial state. 1 Significant as these factors certainly were, the reorientation of colonial politics can only be fully grasped when the longerterm emergence of French welfarism, the systemic substrate of political rationality, and the latter’s intrinsic connection to political economy are taken into consideration. [44], (4)

Thinking through Political Rationality Here I am building on the conception of political rationality deployed, if never fully developed, by Michel Foucault. 2 I treat it primarily as an analytic term that refers to socially and historically specific logics of political practice. 3 Rather than analyze the generic modern state in terms of rationalization or reification, Foucault preferred this narrower optic in order to discern “the specific type of rationality the state produced.” 4 Political rationality thus allows us to specify states historically insofar as administrative, liberal, and welfare states were organized around distinct questions and principles. 5 For any given time period, this concept also allows us to specify an object sociologically insofar as political rationality is distinct from other socioeconomic and cultural logics but adjusts to, articulates or coordinates with, and uses them. 6 Additionally, political rationality specifies an object methodologically insofar as it is “something midway between the state as a type of political organization and its mechanisms.” 7 Reducible to neither “political theories” nor “political choices,” political rationality as Foucault identifies it is “the root of a great number of postulates, evidences of all sorts, institutions and ideas we take for granted.” 8 More generally, he situates his inquiries somewhere “between social history and formal analyses of thought.” 9 His “target” is neither institutions nor ideas, but “the conditions which make [practices] acceptable at any moment” insofar as they possess “their own specific regularities, logic, strategy, self-evidence, and ‘reason.’ ” 10 Rather than focus exclusively on either objective conditions or subjective representations, Foucault is concerned with “the forms of rationality that organize their ways of doing things” and “inscribe themselves in . . . systems of practices . . . because . . . ‘practices’ don’t exist without a certain regime of rationality.” 11

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In sum political rationality is a differentiating analytic category that can be used to study any type of political order by attending to its “regulative scheme of governmental practice.” 12 This entails identifying a regime’s specific objectives, strategies, tactics, technologies, targets, and associated forms of knowledge. More importantly, it seeks to elaborate the underlying logic that relates each of these to the others. Political rationality, then, is a mediating or relational category through which we can recognize the shared substrate linking ideas and institutions, plans and policies, discourses and practices. Exploring political rationality therefore allows us to move beyond the one-sided alternatives of (subjectivist) intellectual history and (objectivist) institutional history. Political rationality condenses political questions, answers, and methods. It is the calculus that makes governmental means and ends intelligible in a given time and place. It calls forth certain political subjects (actors and agencies as well as issues to be dealt with) and political objects (goals as well as targets). It constitutes terrains of administrative practices and horizons within which they are thought. Political rationality, in other words, is generative not definitive. It is a particular matrix and metric of government, not a set of rules or propositions. Political rationality is neither an aggregate of utterances by political actors nor an ideological justification for political action. It is implicit, unconscious, and inchoate even as it also assumes conscious, explicit, and programmatic forms. Political rationalities generate identifiable logics, aims, and strategies that were not necessarily formulated by calculating subjects. 13 Political rationality is neither a blueprint for action nor an anterior spirit that determines practices. It is inseparable from the projects, institutions, and forms of knowledge in which it is embedded. Each element of this continuum formulates problems and in turn provides answers for the others in a mutually sustaining dynamic. If Foucault, however, uses political rationality as general analytic category, he also uses it as a specific historical category. As such it signals not that any political system has its own systemic rationality but that the Western administrative state is distinguished from all others by the fact that it is governed according to rational principles, techniques, and objectives. This state also presupposes and produces scientific knowledge. As it has developed since the sixteenth century, according to Foucault, rational government and political rationality have been characterized by the economic management of resources and the social management of individuals and populations. He traces the latter back to a form of pastoral power in which shepherd-leaders supervised and cared for their flock. 14

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In the eighteenth century, Foucault recounts, it was the police who gradually assumed responsibility for promoting living conditions, as a political strategy to strengthen the state, through the administration of public services and the management of behavior. 15 By “taking care of living” and making “a political object of human happiness,” policing reversed traditional political logic: “Happiness of individuals is a requirement for the survival and development of the state. It is a condition, it is an instrument, and not simply a consequence.” This enterprise required police to address “society . . . social beings . . . social relations.” As Foucault explains, “the state has essentially to take care of men as a population. It wields its power over living beings as living beings, and its politics, therefore has to be a biopolitics.” 16 With political rationality Foucault extends his earlier description of biopower as constituting “population as a political problem” and “life as a political object.” 17 Interdependent processes of demographic, agricultural, and economic growth, he indicates, channeled state energy toward “the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.” 18 As population welfare became “the ultimate end of government,” a new “era of ‘governmentality’ ” was inaugurated. 19 The pastoral form of power spread throughout society as diverse public and private institutions promoted social health, welfare, and security while also producing corresponding knowledge. These decentralized initiatives began “to refer” to the state at the same time that power relations were “progressively governmentalized, that is to say, elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions.” 20 Foucault therefore declares that “what is really important for our modernity . . . is not so much the étatisation of society, as the ‘governmentalization’ of the state.” 21 The concept of governmentalization, which critics often use to fetishize centralized state power, actually deemphasizes it. Foucault suggests that “the state . . . does not have this unity . . . this rigorous functionality . . . this importance; maybe, after all, the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction.” 22 His crucial point is that in the modern era there is no stable boundary between state and society. Governmentality “is at once internal and external to the state . . . which makes possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private.” 23 Foucault’s formulation differs from modernization narratives in which states expand inexorably into civil and private spheres. 24 His claim is that dispersed and socially embedded political technologies link up with one another in societywide circuits that converge in the modern state, which then serves

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as their framework if not their source. According to this model, states do not colonize social relations; instead, social institutions invest the state. Modern power for Foucault is at once socially immanent and inseparable from an overarching superstate. This is why the state for Foucault seems to be nowhere and everywhere. Governmentality, his term for welfarist political rationality, shapes and is shaped by a multiplicity of public, private, and hybrid sites (both administrative and scientific) that gradually link up through the state, which coordinates but does not contain them. 25 Political rationalities are grounded in diverse processes, institutions, and projects that do not always align. There is no necessary correspondence between a given state and a unified or single political rationality. A political rationality might also be propelled by contradictory imperatives. Because it more closely resembles a paradigm than a prescription for government, a single political rationality might generate numerous, often incompatible, projects. Any political rationality also exists, whether productively or agonistically, within a broader field that includes other political rationalities. Finally, political rationalities are entwined with but not reducible to other socioeconomic rationalities with which they may converge or conflict. 26 Whether as an analytic or historical term, political rationality refers less to a thing than a condensed set of relations—between thought and institutions, among projects, and among economic, social, and political domains. 27 By recognizing that contradictions often exist within a given political rationality, between competing political rationalities, and between political and other socioeconomic rationalities, this term does not presume political formations to be closed and self-identical functional systems. It allows that they may be the target of an immanent critique. In both its methodological and historical senses, political rationality provides a powerful optic for examining the long-term development of the French welfare state as well its subsidiary colonial administration after World War I in West Africa.

Welfarism The interwar reorientation of colonial administration cannot be understood apart from the broader reconfiguration of state, economy, and society relations that took place under the Third Republic. This reconfiguration was the result of a decentralized process entailing cooperation and contestation among representatives of government, business, and the public. Countless interdependent actions were channeled through and eventually coordinated by the state. At

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stake was not simply the location of a boundary between stable public and private spheres but the very meaning of these terms as concrete abstractions. Most generally the scale and scope of the French state expanded. New social legislation, government agencies, and police addressed working, living, and family conditions (as well as behavior and mentalities) in the name of public and moral health, social security, and political order. Within these domains, the state deployed new media (civil law and administrative regulation), new technologies (censuses, actuarial tables, fingerprinting, photography, identification cards), and specialized knowledge produced by investigators, technicians, and experts. As policymakers conceded that poverty was structural, insurance technologies allowed risk and responsibility to be socialized across the entire population. Developments in statistics converged with the reification of “society” as an integrated entity whose purported laws could be better discovered, predicted, and manipulated. 28 Such state instruments—protecting social rights, promoting social conditions, managing social relations, ensuring social solidarity—gradually became state objectives. These symmetrical means and ends expressed and helped generate a new postliberal political logic organized around population welfare. The gradual shift away from liberalism was prompted by the need to address contradictions intrinsic to the republican nation-state: between human and national rights, capitalism and democracy, parliament and administration, freedom and order. The locus of public power began to shift from legislators to administrators. The modality of government reformers shifted from transforming individuals to managing their milieu, from prohibition to regulation, from punishment to education, from moral responsibility to social probability. New sociopolitical technologies were dispersed among public and private actors yet channeled back through a reified state with which they also became identified. These were all components of “welfarism”—a broad political rationality (not restricted to state-funded social benefits) that entailed objectives, strategies, technologies, and targets that distinguished it from liberalism. Republican state transformations unfolded in relation to a parallel process of economic restructuring. Across the industrialized West, especially after the worldwide 1873 depression, a transition from liberal capitalism to welfare capitalism was fueled by states’ need to reproduce capitalist social relations, to moderate economic cycles, and to maintain social order, employers’ desire for a healthy, productive, and compliant labor force, and workers’ demands for better, legally protected working conditions. Concessions to labor were designed to stimulate economic development and to contain the sociopolitical dangers created by economic crises. In France weak domestic markets, overproduction,

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foreign competition, and militant syndicalism eroded a broad consensus on the virtues of economic liberalism. By 1914 industries began to experiment with corporatism, join cartels, extend paternalistic benefits to employees, and lobby the state for protective tariffs. 29 During the war, emergency regulations, powerful ministries, and public– private consortiums allowed the state to intervene in all aspects of the economy. Planners envisioned a new era of association between enlightened employers and more productive but better paid workers. A national income tax was established, rent controls were introduced, colonial workers were recruited, and public health campaigns were initiated. State agencies, municipal governments, and private mutual associations cooperated on nascent public assistance programs. Word War I thereby accelerated the process through which diverse postliberal initiatives linked up to form a new state–economy–society diagram founded on statism, productivism, and welfarism. 30 Despite a postwar backlash, these currents became more firmly rooted in French society in the coming decades. 31 During the 1920s the pace of industrial concentration, cartelization, and Taylorization increased. New holding companies and public–private “mixed companies” were created. 32 Technocratic administrators, managers, and trade unionists agreed that economic rationalization, labor regulations, and social security benefits would promote growth and social harmony. 33 In 1928 a comprehensive social insurance law for all French employees was passed. Publicly administered benefits were paid for by contributions from employers, workers, and the state to private funds. 34 This hybrid approach to welfare was exemplified when a family allowance system was formalized by industrialists in the 1920s and then coordinated by the state in 1932. 35 Conservative and progressive social initiatives paid special attention to population management, public health, family practices, and urban planning. 36 Through such projects, state and nonstate actors cooperated within circuits that linked government, experts, and knowledge. Recently professionalized social workers compiled data during home visits that informed social policy and social theory. 37 New scientific-administrative complexes called forth their own objects of regulatory action. In sum, a variety of social, economic, and political reform movements on the left and the right undertook postliberal projects that emphasized community, solidarity, and morality as well as order, efficiency, and hierarchy. Welfarism was not an ideology; it was an overarching political rationality that allowed for multiplicity, conflict, and contradictions. 38 Welfarist projects were at once effects and engines of the reconfiguration of state, economy, and society relations. The transition from liberalism to welfarism was driven less by a single rupture

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than by a combination of structural contradictions, long-term transformations, and the conjunctural crises attending war and reconstruction. Over time, dispersed public and private actors and agencies linked up with one another to form a larger assemblage that was gradually coordinated by the French state. Existing ideas and institutions were absorbed by and reoriented toward this new political logic. The transition from liberalism to welfarism had its West African counterpart in the related shift from a civilizing mission concerned with economic exploitation and individual behavior to a colonial humanism oriented toward economic development, native welfare, and the management of indigenous populations. A new art of colonial government in West Africa linked practical reason and administrative science. The remainder of this chapter outlines the emergence of this new colonial rationality.

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National Crisis and Imperial Legitimacy France’s colonies were not simply influenced by metropolitan welfarism; they participated in the very process through which state, economy, and society relations were reconfigured. The empire became increasingly integrated under the Third Republic, and it followed that France’s colonies figured into the wartime economic mobilization as well as strategies for postwar regeneration. The war provoked more extensive economic cooperation between the metropolitan state and French West Africa, between the colonial government and private European trading houses, and between administrators and African producers. The French state called on colonial AOF to contribute to national defense by provisioning metropolitan consumers and industries with necessary agricultural products. An alliance of businessmen, bureaucrats, and politicians hoped that state intervention, rational economic planning, and public–private cooperation could do for productivity in Africa what it had done for the munitions industry at home. 39 In the next chapter I show how the colonial state in West Africa responded to these national demands, during and after the war, through an interrelated set of postliberal policies for economic development, population improvement, social welfare, and cultural management. Underlying them was colonial humanism, a systemic political rationality that extended and modified metropolitan welfarism. The war also generated political pressures for colonial reform. As I discussed in chapter 2, numerous actors insisted that a strong and productive empire would ensure national prosperity, security, and prestige. However, the

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postwar appeal to the empire as integral to the nation was mounted precisely when imperial legitimacy was being challenged internationally. A new geopolitical order emerged after the war, featuring the United States and the Soviet Union as young but ascendant powers. For different reasons Woodrow Wilson and V. I. Lenin supported the rights of colonial peoples to national self-determination. When Ottoman and German colonies were redistributed to France and Britain by the League of Nations, they were reclassified as mandates entrusted to supervising states only until their populations became capable of self-government. After the Russian Revolution provoked worldwide anticapitalist unrest, western European states feared nationalist revolts in their colonies. Such liberal and radical challenges to colonialism encouraged antiimperialist movements in Europe and its overseas territories. In light of these multiple pressures, France, Britain, and the Netherlands began to reconceptualize colonial politics. In France, communists, journalists, and colonized militants joined forces to criticize colonial abuses in Africa and Asia. 40 Government officials and public opinion conceded that the nation owed colonial populations a “blood debt”— better treatment in return for their military service and political loyalty during the war. Challenges to imperial legitimacy were further amplified by a politicized population of colonial immigrants—veterans, workers, professionals, and students—residing in metropolitan France (see chap. 6). Their demands exacerbated an imminent crisis of authority in French West Africa linked to demobilized colonial soldiers, deracinated peasants, and disenfranchised elites, both rural and urban (see chap. 4). In short, the nation was seeking to reground itself in an empire whose own political logic required revision. Economic insecurity, national and international public opinion, and the fear of colonial unrest provoked public debates about the legitimate forms and methods of colonial rule. The state began to concede to arguments that racial superiority, the natural right to exploit unclaimed global resources, and the old civilizing mission were no longer adequate grounds for overseas expansion and subjugation. Minister of Colonies Albert Sarraut became a leading proponent of colonial reform. Acknowledging France’s wartime debt to colonial manpower, raw materials, and markets, he envisioned a new paternalism that would henceforth rest on economic development and social administration. According to his often-quoted dictum, “France has repudiated the long-standing brutal conception of [mercantilist conquest] based on the eternal inequality of races and on the right of the strongest. . . . The only right that it now recognizes is the right of the strong to protect the weak.” Sarraut reassured the metropolitan public that this approach to

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colonial government would generate economic and human wealth to ensure the metropole against future threats. 41 The minister elaborated a vision of colonial welfarism that linked economic productivity and social improvement through an interventionist state. In addition to providing legitimacy, this new political logic would guide subsequent policies.

Prewar Precedents Sarraut’s integrated vision synthesized and modified several prewar colonial precedents. As society became a positive object of scientific knowledge, intellectuals and policymakers had redirected their attention from liberal conceptions of abstract humanity toward concrete populations formed by distinct histories, cultures, and mentalities. Social reform would no longer be about working on universal individuals but about working through particular communities and would require scientific knowledge of their milieu. 42 Colonial theorists such as Léopold de Saussure (1899) and those gathered at the International Congress of Colonial Sociology (1900) took up this particularist conception of social life to repudiate the doctrine of colonial assimilation—both cultural and political—as scientifically unsound, administratively ineffective, and politically dangerous. Colonial populations, it was argued, were members of organic societies. French institutions and practices would be alien and unwelcome impositions, violations of their cultural integrity that would disrupt their proper evolutionary trajectory. This culturally relativist and politically conservative critique of assimilation generated support for the alternative doctrine of colonial association formulated by figures such as Joseph Chailley-Bert and Jean de Lanessan and officially sanctioned by ministers of colonies at the various French Colonial Congresses between 1904 and 1907. 43 Colonial humanism was a broad political rationality that cannot be reduced to the narrow doctrine of association. Remember that the term association was derived from corporatist and welfarist discourses. But many of the prewar figures who endorsed colonial association anticipated and contributed to the new postwar colonial rationality. Notable among them was Jules Harmand, who wrote Domination et colonisation (1910) after decades of administrative and diplomatic experience in Indochina, India, and Japan. Unlike the later interwar reformers, Harmand delineated a version of colonial association that was based on a utilitarian concept of imperial expansion justified by a natural hierarchy of races. Harmand argued that the empire only exists for the sake of the metropole, imperial government is necessarily based on inequality, and

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colonies “are not integral parts of the national territory and cannot be considered to be the patrie.” 44 Yet his thinking prefigures interwar colonial projects insofar as it identifies “native policy” as “the problem to which all others are subordinated.” In his economic (in both senses of the term) formulation, “the best policy will be that which best utilizes the conquered people . . . while making them suffer the least. . . . It will be able to create bonds between the interests of the conqueror and those of the subjects such that whatever serves one also serves the other.” Harmand proposed that “substituting mutual aid for pure and simple exploitation” would create a relationship of “reciprocal utility” between colonizers and subjects. Good government, he argued, “wants to improve natives in all ways . . . that are profitable to [them] by allowing [them] to evolve according to [their] own plan, by keeping everyone in his own place . . . by only touching the habits and traditions of its subjects with a light hand.” Recognizing the interdependence of social science and social administration, Harmand observed that this commitment to “the conservation of a subject people’s institutions . . . and respect for its past . . . implies a perfect knowledge of natives and of their psychology . . . their manners and their ideas . . . that could be acquired not only through specialized training, but by an extended stay in the milieu.” 45 Although subsequent postwar reformers would be less politically conservative than Harmand, they would pursue his native policies based on reciprocity, cultural conservation, and ethnographic expertise. A decade later, colonial theorist Louis Vignon called on the state to elaborate native policy as a national duty. Dismissing assimilation as “French idiocy,” he believed pace Joseph de Maistre in the elemental particularity of human groups: “abstract man [l’homme en soi] does not exist. There are Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, Blacks, Yellows . . . there is no absolute man.” Yet Vignon also maintained that “all individuals belonging to the human race have a right to existence, even more, to respect for their family, their property, their religion.” Echoing Harmand, he advocated “the art . . . of leading [natives] slowly, at their own pace . . . toward a better social, political, and economic state . . . that will respond to their mentality. . . . To guide [conduire] our subjects, it is indispensable to know them well.” Ideally, ethnologically informed officials would assess the stage and pace of native social evolution, study indigenous political systems, and identify local intermediaries through which to govern. By “ameliorating the material condition of natives [and] satisfying their interests,” the field administrator (whom Vignon called “the central character of the system”) would pursue colonialism’s fundamental objective: “general prosperity [and] the consolidation of French domination.” 46

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Representatives of the next generation of reformers who attended Vignon’s classes at the École Coloniale recall rejecting his right-wing political orientation. They criticized the racism implicit in the policies that he, along with de Saussure and Harmand, promoted. 47 Yet these predecessors envisioned native policies that linked economic development to social improvement in ways that their more progressive students would pursue. Books by Harmand and Vignon attempted to formalize governing strategies that had already been developed in the field by a number of prewar colonial administrators, such as Joseph Gallieni in Sudan, Indochina, and Madagascar (1886–96), Hubert Lyautey in Morocco (1912–25), and Léopold Sabatier in Indochina (1913). These figures, whose politics ranged from republican to conservative, developed socioeconomic strategies of pacification, cultural preservationist approaches to modernization, and ethnographically informed paternalism. 48 In French West Africa, as early as 1902, Governor-General Ernest Roume affirmed that the goal of administration should be to respect all native customs as long as they did not conflict with the principles of civilization and to allow indigenous populations to evolve according to their own capacities and histories. If before 1914 policies guided by these formulas sought to dismantle indigenous political structures, wartime Governors-General Francois Clozel and Joost Van Vollenhoven began to regard indigenous political systems and local elites as instruments of colonial administration rather than obstacles to it. 49 By the end of World War I, existing strategies of colonial administration— native policies based on ethnographic knowledge and cultural preservation, economic development through social improvement, reliance on indigenous intermediaries—were synthesized and reoriented toward novel objectives as administrative imperatives shifted from socializing individual natives to managing native societies. A general recognition of African social differences would evolve into a scientifically based preoccupation with distinct, organic, and dynamic social totalities. The old civilizing mission would be supplemented by a new colonial welfarism. The consolidation of this new political logic was facilitated by, even as it produced, a cohort of reformers who were especially concerned with the intersection of practical reason and rational administration.

New Reformers The postwar colonial reform movement was led by a cohort of administrators who came to occupy influential positions within the imperial apparatus

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after leaving their posts as field administrators. This was a transitional group. They were trained by the generation of pre–World War I soldier-imperialists charged with conquest and pacification, yet they prefigured the post–World War II technocrats concerned exclusively with development. They were selfdefined bush administrators who became scholars, policymakers, and public intellectuals. These individual reformers helped revise the colonial project while serving as local African administrators early in their careers. But the new colonial rationality cannot be reduced to the intentions or utterances of exemplary individuals. Rather than treat these former commandants—powerful local administrators who ruled African populations and embodied French authority—as the originators of colonial humanism, we need to recognize that the very figure of the autonomous field agent was one of the movement’s principal effects. As an informed, methodical, caring, and independent public servant, this figure became a metonym for France in Africa. By treating these ideologues of colonial humanism as a cohort, we can better appreciate the way they belonged to an interpersonal network, circulated through institutional nodes, and were embedded in an impersonal discursive field. If they helped shape the new colonial rationality, they were also shaped by it. Maurice Delafosse was a crucial bridge between prewar and postwar cohorts of administrator-ethnographers. 50 If the earlier group was motivated largely by the antislavery campaign, questions of African Islam, and legal questions related to property rights, later reformers were concerned largely with the internal dynamics of African societies and ethnicities. Delafosse, who was also an important intermediary between colonial administrators and metropolitan social scientists, charted this course in works such as Haut-Sénégal-Niger (1912). This holistic representation of an African region—including geography, linguistics, ethnology, history, and culture—extended the administrative ethnography that Fran¸cois-Joseph Clozel had initiated in Côte d’Ivoire beginning at the turn of the century. 51 Delafosse entered the colonial administration by way of the French army, where he had served in an antislavery unit in the Sahara. After studying briefly at the École des Langues Orientales in Paris, he was posted to Côte d’Ivoire and Sudan before being promoted to director of political affairs for GovernorsGeneral Clozel and Van Vollenhoven in Dakar. Until the end of the war he advanced ethnologically informed policies of collaboration with indigenous auxiliaries in order to prevent social fragmentation in AOF. His deep knowledge of African societies drew the attention of his superiors and later made him a legendary figure among colonial reformers. 52

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After the war, Delafosse began a second phase of his career as a metropolitan scholar, teacher, and informal policy advisor who insisted on the sociocultural and historical integrity of African civilizations. His academic and policy writing, his courses at the École Coloniale and École des Langues Orientales, his role in creating the Institut d’Ethnologie, and his active participation in learned societies account for his pronounced influence on the next generation of administrator-ethnographers. 53 Hubert Deschamps, one of his former students at the École Coloniale in the early twenties, recalls the mentor’s message: The native, as producer and consumer, is the basis of colonial commerce and prosperity. Economic development [mise en valeur] must be created by natives and for natives. The [African] race must be protected and developed, its institutions conserved during the slow, effective evolution of the masses. . . . Administrative intervention, except for the maintenance of order, must be discrete and persuasive. Whites must . . . know, advise, and take an interest in natives without destroying anything. . . . Your vocation is to work for the natives. 54

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Each of these elements—economic development, cultural conservation, paternal surveillance and persuasion, and the colonial vocation—would be pursued by interwar reformers whose careers were also modeled after Delafosse’s. Consider Henri Labouret, Robert Delavignette, and Georges Hardy, whose writings I discuss in the next chapter. The former two served as colonial soldiers before becoming local commandants. 55 Labouret’s early service focused on suppressing rebellions among the Lobi people in Haute-Volta. 56 His field reports reveal a nineteenth-century colonial mentality: “these backward, primitive, individualist populations knew no other law than that of the most savage vengeance, they lived in a state of complete anarchy and permanent hostility, considering all foreigners as enemies.” Yet Labouret also recounts conducting tours in order to establish “permanent administrative contact . . . with still rebellious natives, the education of whom has been initiated.” 57 The measure of their “submission” was not only payment of taxes but participation in commercial activities. 58 Despite his military background, Labouret decided that colonial authority depended more on promoting than on crushing village social life. This pursuit earned him high professional evaluations. His success as “a pacifier of the Lobi region” was ascribed retrospectively to “the methodical action of a fortunate native policy.” Ultimately, Labouret’s superiors were as impressed with his knowledge of native languages and societies as with his suppression of native rebellions. 59

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Robert Delavignette’s years as a local administrator were spent in Niger and Haute-Volta (1922–31). His formative experience, on which his reputation was also made, was as an assistant commandant in Banfora (Haute-Volta) beginning in 1927. His predecessor had been stabbed for intervening in a local conflict over a chief who, after an earlier rebellion, had been appointed by the French authorities. Rather than restore order through direct force, Delavignette pursued social peace through economic development and cultural recognition. Under his stewardship, peanut production increased and a peanut-oil press was installed in the district in a belief that development would increase colonial revenue and address local needs simultaneously. 60 Tersely acknowledging that “in several months he has improved a difficult situation,” the administration praised Delavignette’s socioeconomic strategy: “In developing peanut cultivation, he created commercial and industrial activity in a region in which economic transactions had been of little importance.” Additionally, he “restored tranquility and trust among a population that had been tormented” by political intrigue, which they concluded “had created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion throughout the district.” This evaluation confirmed an earlier claim that “the administrative methods adopted and the economic results obtained by M. Delavignette place him at the head of his young generation.” 61 That Labouret and Delavignette were rewarded for attempting to win the trust and improve the lives of ordinary Africans is evidence of the reorientation of colonial politics then under way. Not coincidentally, another influential reformer, Georges Hardy, was a teacher and scholar. Before serving as director of education in AOF (1912–19), Hardy had been a lycée history and geography professor in France. Recommending him for a colonial promotion in 1915, Governor-General Clozel called him “ingenious in his search for means to execute policy.” Hardy arrived in AOF with advanced degrees and scholarly publications in history, geography, and religious studies. During his African service he published work on African history and geography, French colonial history, and the sociology of colonial administration. Clozel and Van Vollenhoven praised Hardy’s erudition and commitment to colonial education. 62 While serving in AOF, this cohort exemplified and elaborated a new logic of native administration. When they later obtained influential metropolitan positions, they sought more explicitly to reconceptualize colonial government. In 1926 Hardy was appointed director of the École Coloniale in Paris, which he transformed into one of the reform movement’s chief organs. Much of Hardy’s writings focused on the importance of knowing the physical and cultural milieu

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of the overseas territories, exploring the ethnic psychology of natives, improving colonial education, and maintaining political legitimacy in a new historical context. If Hardy was a trained academic, Labouret, following Delafosse’s example, was a pragmatic linguist-ethnologist whose scholarly expertise was inseparable from his administrative objectives. When he entered the colonial service, Labouret spoke English, German, and Portuguese and had studied African languages at Langues Orientales. He served an uncharacteristic fourteen years in the same region. This atypical continuity allowed him to study the languages and social organization of the populations he administered. Supervisors identified a relationship between his political success and his extensive local knowledge. 63 In 1926 Labouret was named director of political affairs for the Ministry of Colonies, which claimed to need his administrative and ethnological expertise. 64 He also succeeded Delafosse, who had died that year, as professor of Sudanese languages at the École des Langues Orientales. By 1929 Labouret was also an instructor at the École Coloniale. There his courses on African culture influenced a generation of students. 65 Labouret’s monographs were as important to academic ethnology as they were to the new governmental rationality. 66 Labouret was the reform movement’s pragmatist. He advocated paternalist native policy informed by objective social science. In contrast, Delavignette was its sentimentalist. His paternalism was based on the subjective experiences of administrators and Africans. Compared to Labouret’s tenure, Delavignette’s time in the field had been brief and flawed despite his minor success. According to one evaluation, he possessed “a mind that is, above all, speculative, having a tendency to neglect practical questions” and “maybe a bit too distant from the realities required by the job of an administrator.” Another warned that “his state of health condemns him, despite his courage and his devotion, to avoid the difficult, tiring activity required by long tours. As a consequence, he would render better service in an office than in the bush.” 67 In later writings Delavignette would nevertheless romanticize the local commandant, the African village, and a benevolent native policy. By 1930, poor health and family responsibilities led Delavignette to accept a position in Paris at the Agence Économique, a government information bureau charged with attracting investors to AOF and raising its public profile. The agency praised him as “an able and natural writer” of colonial propaganda whose “administrative competence” was complemented by his “literary value.” While there, he wrote realist novels such as Toum (1926) and Les paysans noirs (which won the Grand Prize for Colonial Literature in 1931) about West African administration and village life. The agency selected him to write

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the official book on AOF for the 1931 Colonial Exposition. One supervisor declared that “Delavignette is today, without a doubt, one of our best colonial propagandists.” 68 That an administrator-turned-Parisian-writer was so highly regarded by bureaucrats indicates the government’s changing priorities. Metropolitan officials believed that securing political authority and shaping public opinion were interdependent activities. In 1936, Delavignette became an assistant to Marius Moutet, the Popular Front minister of colonies. The following year he was named director of the École Coloniale (by then named École Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer). Delavignette continued to write semiautobiographical novels and nonfiction books on colonial Africa. He, along with Labouret and Hardy, also contributed frequent articles to metropolitan and colonial periodicals that criticized misguided colonial policies and promoted ethnologically informed native policies focused on economic development, social improvement, and cultural preservation. Following Delafosse’s example, all three reformers used their experiences in West Africa as a foundation for subsequent scholarship, policy making, teaching, and journalism. They were the vanguard of a reform movement that exploited and extended an existing information economy through which colonial discourses circulated publicly.

Colonial Publicity The intersecting sources of colonial ideas that proliferated in metropolitan France after World War I has been well documented. 69 But it is important to emphasize that the colonial publicity circuit did not simply broadcast ideological justifications for French rule. It provided self-reflexive media through which practical intellectuals could explore the implications of the new political logic that they were formulating. Interwar reformers developed a hybrid genre of political writing exemplified by the administrative treatise. These works combined political theory, bureaucratic sociology, indigenous ethnology, and policy analysis. At once descriptive and prescriptive, the texts served as pragmatic primers for field administrators even as they criticized current policies. Meant to be persuasive, they addressed public officials and public opinion simultaneously. Several of these texts were serialized in colonial-themed periodicals. 70 A range of media outlets were available to these Africanist writers. Two periodicals became especially bound to the reform movement. L’Afrique Française (1891–1960) was the monthly bulletin of the Comité de l’Afrique Française. 71

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These hybrid organizations, associated with but not part of the state, brought together businessmen and bureaucrats who promoted policies favorable to colonial capitalism. Yet recognizing that economic development would entail ethnological inquiry, they also publicized scholarship. L’Afrique Française was directed at government specialists as well as a general readership. It was both an unofficial mouthpiece for the administration in Africa and a forum for debates about colonial government. After World War I, its focus shifted from an earlier emphasis on missions of discovery to administration and development. Although L’Afrique Française was not controlled by the reformers, they published there frequently, and it reported regularly on their policy initiatives in AOF. Between the wars, this periodical thus helped disseminate the new colonial rationality. If L’Afrique Française was redirected by and toward colonial humanism, Outre-Mer was directly identified with the reform movement. Georges Hardy created this journal in 1929, which he edited and published under the auspices of the École Coloniale. Outre-Mer promoted “the study of current principles, general doctrines, methods, and procedures of colonialism” and addressed “questions of organization and government.” The aim was to shift away from “pure doctrine” and “colonial metaphysics” in order to “maintain close contact with realities . . . with the life and soul of colonial populations” through attention to “the needs and aspirations of the native” and “the ethnic and psychological study of pupil-societies” in the service of a “moral rapprochement between metropoles and colonies.” 72 Outre-Mer thus identified paternalist colonial authority with administrative ethnology, welfarist policies, and political partnership. These were precepts of the new colonial rationality that the journal would explore in a remarkable range of articles published by the journal on administration, ethnography, and comparative colonialism. L’Afrique Française and Outre-Mer became important outlets for a vision of ethnologically informed administrative science and scientific administration. They were relays in a colonial publicity circuit that included other periodicals, associated publishing houses that specialized in colonial writing, learned societies, and international policy conferences. 73 These constituted the infrastructure for an empirewide administrative public sphere that assembled present and former administrators, politicians, businessmen, scholars, and journalists. Many figures shifted between these roles regularly. This information economy was associated with the colonial state but neither contained within nor controlled by it. As I show in chapter 6, it was also paired with a parallel black public sphere in metropolitan France. This colonial publicity network

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helped generate and circulate the new colonial rationality even as it was a product of it.

The École Coloniale As the professional itineraries of Delafosse, Hardy, Labouret, and Delavignette suggest, the École Coloniale functioned as another crucial relay within colonial humanism’s administrative-scientific complex. 74 Created in 1887 as part of the Third Republic’s attempt to professionalize and rationalize the colonial service, this school became responsible for training administrators destined for Indochina, Africa, and Madagascar. Before 1914, when it emphasized legal studies, the school only formed a minority of officials, and its students were of lower quality than those entering other branches of the French civil service. Its status gradually improved after the war, especially after its reorganization by Georges Hardy. 75 In addition to raising its competitive profile, Hardy emphasized pragmatic management skills so that graduates could “address administrative, financial, economic, and social questions with the same ease and mastery.” 76 He broadened the legal and technical curriculum by teaching new courses on “the duties of colonial administration” and “applied colonial psychology.” 77 Under his tenure, the school increasingly emphasized knowledge of local regions, cultures, and languages as crucial for colonial government. In 1929 he created a chair in General Ethnography for Labouret. 78 The latter taught courses on African culture, history, and languages as well as one directly on colonial ethnology. Labouret extended the school’s new emphasis on pragmatic knowledge when he brought students with him on study missions to Senegal, Guinea, and Cameroon in 1932 and 1934. He described these field trips as “sociology applied to colonialism” whose goal was “to observe local collectivities practically, to compare them, and to establish a balance sheet of what they lack in order to provide it to them.” 79 In 1932 Ernest Roume told assembled students that their primary objective was “detailed study of the history and geography of our colonies, the habits [moeurs], customs, [and] languages of their populations,” 80 Current administrators were invited to speak on “colonial sociology,” and colonized elites on their native cultures. 81 Students were encouraged to expand their ethnological training through additional classes at the Institut d’Ethnologie, Langues Orientales, and the Institut de Géographie with which the École Coloniale often shared faculty. 82

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High-ranking bureaucrats, younger administrators, and influential scholars were affiliated with the school. 83 Its teachers were linked to different branches of the colonial service, colonial interest groups, the press, scholarly societies, academic journals, and metropolitan universities. Administrators migrated back and forth between the colonies and its classrooms, just as graduating students often returned later as instructors. Standing at the center of these diverse empirewide networks, the interwar école became a central node of the broader reform movement. Reformist ideas were further circulated through its journal Outre-Mer. By connecting diverse figures and features of this movement to one another, the école helped generalize the new colonial rationality. When Delavignette became the director in 1937, he maintained its commitment to administrative sociology, local knowledge of native societies, and practical colonial experience. He informed provincial lycées preparing students for entrance exams that the école would provide “an education in applied administrative science, on the one hand, and a knowledge of geography combined with history, ethnology, sociology, and law, on the other.” Seeking to attract as well as produce broadly educated students, the école expected that those entering would have studied sociology (Durkeim, Hubert, Mauss, Lévy-Bruhl, Simiand, Halbwachs, Febvre, Bloch, Frazer), political economy (liberalism, Marxism, Saint Simonism, and the Physiocrats), and literature (Hugo, Balzac, Taine). 84 As important for the école was the sense of mission, the “discipline and duty,” that its students were supposed to possess. Delavignette reminded them that they were preparing to “offer [themselves]” to the “trials of service” and should be motivated not by “a traveler’s curiosity” or “a desire for adventure and exotic escape” but by a “colonial vocation.” 85 The école was vocational insofar as it trained students for a career and attempted to foster within them a sincere calling for national public service. Its graduates were supposed to be the vanguard of a new type of colonial government. In a 1937 commencement address, Delavignette synthesized lessons from Durkheimian sociology, Maussian ethnology, and postliberal welfarism. The “colonial task of our time,” he explained, requires “exploration that no longer has to do with territories but that extends to societies. . . . we are responsible for gathering diverse peoples with a spirit that is attentive to their customs, their religions, their modes of work, and their progress, to guide them to a fraternal organization that will be as fertile for them as for us.” 86 He reminded students that “there is no technical problem that is not also a human problem and . . . no human problem is insoluble for a colonial ruler . . . who discovers the spirit and import of indigenous customs.” 87 Delavignette thus envisioned

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a scientifically informed administration that combined social government and cultural humanism.

Colonial Ethnology The École Coloniale served as an important site of institutional mediation between science and government. It contributed to the development of colonial ethnology, a hybrid administrative science. The école maintained a close relationship with the Institut d’Ethnologie, which was itself a node in the reformist network. It was not until this academic institution was created in 1925 that professional certification became possible for ethnologists within the French university system. Marcel Mauss, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Paul Rivet, from their respective locations in comparative sociology, philosophy, and biological anthropology, founded a scientific institute that from its inception was linked to colonial concerns. 88 According to Lévy-Bruhl, the first objective of the new Institut d’Ethnologie was to train not only professional ethnologists but “those living or destined to live in the colonies,” including “future administrators, colonial doctors, and missionaries.” He argued that because native populations constituted the empire’s most valuable natural resource, economic development (mise en valeur) would require specialists to study local languages and religions. He proposed that the Institut d’Ethnologie train cadres of a formal colonial anthropological service modeled after the one that Britain had created in the Gold Coast. 89 The new institute was financially supported by the ministries of Colonies and Public Education. Mauss hoped that it would train younger academic fieldworkers to document and preserve the indigenous cultures he feared were disappearing after decades of French intervention. 90 Lévy-Bruhl explained that the institute would sponsor ethnographic study missions, with the collaboration of colonial governors, or would entrust such missions to qualified colonial officials. These teams were “to collect, classify, and study all sorts of documents and objects concerning past and present civilizations that are in danger of quickly disappearing or being removed by foreign ethnographers . . . instead of being conserved in colonial and metropolitan museums.” 91 The most celebrated and influential of these was, of course, the Mission Ethnographique et Linguistique Dakar-Djibouti (1931–33), when Marcel Griaule led a team of researchers across sub-Saharan Africa to study linguistic forms, transcribe oral

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testimonies, produce an archive of maps and photographs, and collect material culture. 92 Scholarly monographs that were generated from these trips, by figures such as Griaule and the missionary-ethnographer Maurice Leenhardt, were published by the institute. 93 These scientific missions enabled Paul Rivet, between 1928 and 1937, to transform the old Musée d’Ethnographie into the modern Musée de l’Homme, which became the repository of ethnographic objects systematically collected by the research teams. The reorganization was funded by the Ministry of Colonies, and the new museum became formally affiliated with the Institut d’Ethnologie. 94 By displaying objects in cultural contexts, the new museum sought to substitute ethnographic understanding for aesthetic appreciation. Separate exhibition halls were devoted to geocultural regions “according to the rules of modern museology.” Rivet used the interwar idiom of development to describe the museum’s will to “develop [mettre en valeur] all its incalculable riches and to render it worthy of our country’s admirable colonial effort.” 95 The museum’s wish to represent comprehensively and classify indigenous societies corresponded to the ethnographic principles outlined by Marcel Mauss in the seminar on method at the Institut d’Ethnologie that he taught from 1926 to 1939. He promoted a precise total ethnography, or “social physiology,” to be conducted over an extended period of time in order to encompass technology, aesthetics, economy, law, morality, and religion. 96 For Mauss, ethnology and imperialism were entwined insofar as “the field of our studies is limited to those societies that people the French colonies and others of the same stage [of development].” His objective—“reproducing native society” through observation—required teams of fieldworkers using multiple methods, with the help of the actors most informed about and living closest to natives: missionaries, settlers, and local administrators. But Mauss not only wanted science to use these colonial figures; he hoped it would help them. His seminar was titled Descriptive Ethnographic Instructions for the Use of Voyagers, Administrators, and Missionaries, and it was addressed it to “colonials without professional training.” Mauss acknowledged that colonial administrators had already contributed to the science of ethnology even as he called on scholars to aid colonial rule by studying indigenous populations more systematically. 97 Lévy-Bruhl also addressed his work to colonial officials. Michel Leiris, who studied with Mauss in the 1930s, recalls a brochure announcing the institute in which Lévy-Bruhl explained that ethnology would enable “more rational and human modes of colonization.” 98 In a note to his English-reading public, LévyBruhl relates that many “among those whose official functions or vocations brings them into constant relations with primitives,” including “administrators

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and missionaries who share their everyday life,” wrote to tell him that his books had helped them to “comprehend much that had appeared both unintelligible and ridiculous in the way natives reason, and also in their customs, and that their relations with them are accordingly facilitated and improved.” 99 Building on Durkheim’s project, Lévy-Bruhl sought “to determine which are the most general laws governing collective representations . . . in the most undeveloped peoples known to us.” He criticized “the English school of anthropology” (Frazer and Tylor) for presuming that Western reason was universal. Refusing to treat primitive thought as a logical attempt to produce rational explanations of the world, Lévy-Bruhl insisted that there were distinct and irreconcilable modes of thinking: “A definite type of society, with its own institutions and customs, will therefore necessarily have its own mentality” and “the external world they perceive differs from that which we apprehend.” But despite this apparently pluralistic conception of socially determined mentalities, Lévy-Bruhl identifies only two categories into which the diversity of societies can be reduced: primitive and civilized. He maintained that all primitive societies share a common form of “prelogical” thought (mythical and synthetic rather than analytic) wherein things have mystical properties and persons apprehend them in an unmediated fashion through relationships of subjective “participation.” 100 Lévy-Bruhl thus used principles borrowed from comparative sociology to critique an individualist analysis of cultural forms and a universalist understanding of human consciousness. But he then ignored the relativistic implications of such a position by postulating the existence of a total and socially compulsive “primitive mentality” that irrevocably separates primitive from civilized societies. He thus replaced the universalism of British evolutionary thinkers, which only understood other societies as inadequately developed versions of their own, with the particularism of his own evolutionary dichotomy between primitive and civilized mentalities. Mauss too was preoccupied with the Durkheimian question of collective representations. 101 Whereas Lévy-Bruhl created a rigid distinction between mystical primitive and rational civilized mentalities, Mauss historicized modes of thinking and insisted on their socially determined character. His work thus moved beyond the dichotomy between the British anthropological universalism that Lévy-Bruhl rejected and the philosophical particularism that LévyBruhl produced as an alternative, both of which were evolutionary positions. For Mauss, the most important unit of ethnological analysis was “society,” defined as “a social group, generally named by itself and by others . . . ordinarily living in a determined place, having a language, a constitution, and often a

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tradition that is its own.” 102 He believed that every society possessed its own forms of consciousness, categories of thought, and principles of classification. 103 Rather than restrict collective representations to non-Western societies and reduce them to a general primitive mentality, however, Mauss identified them as a central feature of all societies. Instead of making modern, rational, European society a norm against which to measure the evolutionary stage of other societies, he sought to make the West one among many. He thus attempted to show the sociohistorically specific character of seemingly universal practices (of the body, classification, exchange) and categories (such as the self, the person, the individual). 104 Mauss challenged the universalist idea (which he called an occidental fantasy) that there exists one civilization to which all the peoples of the world must increasingly aspire or conform, as well as the particularist idea that any one nation’s civilization could be the singular civilization to which others, unworthy of the name, would be incapable or unfit to assimilate. 105 Yet evolutionary hierarchies reappear in Mauss’s discussion of the nation, which he defines as “a materially and morally integrated society, with a stable, permanent central power, with defined borders, a relative moral, mental, and cultural unity of inhabitants who consciously adhere to the State and its laws.” 106 This normative nation, in which “the notion of rights and duties of the citizen and the rights and duties of the patrie oppose and complement one another,” conspicuously resembles the French Third Republic. 107 Note Mauss’s claim that in such nations there exists no “intermediary between the nation and the citizen, that all types of sub-groups disappear, that the unlimited powers [toute-puissance] of the individual in the society and of the society on the individual exercise themselves unchecked and without a hitch.” According to Mauss, “there can be no nation without a certain integration of society; that is to say that it must abolish all segmentation by clans, tribes, royalties, and feudal domains.” He explains that “the title of nation . . . only applies to a small number of historically known societies. . . . Presently living human societies are far from all being of the same nature and rank in their evolution. To consider them as equals is an injustice with regard to those among them for whom civilization and a sense of law are the most fully developed.” 108 Mauss thus uses the nation as a mechanism of hierarchical distinction the separates primitive societies in which power is mystified and social relations are collectivist from modern societies in which power is rationalized and social relations are individuated. 109 Mauss envisioned a world composed of separate but equal societies, each an integrated totality with its own categories, norms, and practices. However, he qualified this cultural relativism with an evolutionism that contrasted kinship societies defined by custom and collectivity with national civilizations regulated

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by law and individualism. He implied that there existed a historical dynamic which led peoples from one developmental stage to the next. Native policy in AOF during this time was organized around this very understanding of indigenous societies as both culturally fixed and socially flexible. For Mauss, ethnology and policy were mutually informing. His concern with reciprocity and social harmony in so-called archaic societies is commonly read as a response to World War I. In The Gift he sought to identify primordial social practices that would ensure peace for his own fragmented society. As he maintains, “the clan, the tribe, and nation have learnt—just as in the future the classes and nations and individuals will learn—how to oppose one another without slaughter and to give without sacrificing themselves to others. That is one of the secrets of their . . . solidarity.” But such formulations may also be read as expressing the new political rationality then consolidating in both the metropole and the colonies. Mauss proclaims the “dawn and realization of . . . corporate law . . . and group morality,” as increasingly “the State, municipalities, public assistance establishments, management and wage-earners are all associated” through social legislation even as the state looks after individuals. 110 Criticizing the way that the human being in the modern West had become an “economic animal” and a “calculating machine,” Mauss insisted that a public order organized around “social insurance, solicitude in mutuality or cooperation” would be preferable to either feudal paternalism or capitalist income. 111 If we accept that Durkheimian sociology was a theoretical formulation of the late nineteenth-century solidarism, then we can also recognize Mauss’s ethnology as a theoretical formulation of early twentieth-century welfarism. 112 Mauss insisted on a strict division between social science and public policy, yet he also counseled sociologists to remain interested in the practical applications their work. He maintained that “the ultimate problem for sociology” is to determine how “the science of societies” can “effectively contribute” to “the art of directing a society, the action of administration, le commandement.” 113 Mauss could have been describing metropolitan and colonial welfarism when he wrote that “the art of politics should not be independent of sociology, and sociology should not be disinterested in politics.” 114 He called on scholars to fulfill their social duty to “help direct public opinion, indeed government” by venturing into that domain “halfway between action and science, in the region of practical rationality” through such seemingly neutral practices as “impartial surveys” and “the simple scientific recording of facts.” 115 Each element of the new colonial rationality—the interpersonal cohort, the information circuit, and the institutional nodes—operated in precisely such an intermediary domain of practical rationality. In their writings and hybrid careers, interwar

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reformers transcended the opposition between disinterested science and instrumental action not so much by finding a middle ground between them as by exploiting their intersection. 116 Within French West Africa, the scientific-administrative complex was promoted most vigorously by Governor-General Jules Brévié (1930–36). A graduate of the École Coloniale, Brévié participated in the occupation and organization of Haut-Sénégal-Niger, addressed economic production in Guinea after the war, and in 1920 joined the Office of Political Affairs in Dakar. He then served as governor of Niger before becoming governor-general of AOF, where he would supervise colonial humanist initiatives. 117 During the early 1930s, Brévié’s policy experiments in AOF and reformers’ metropolitan proposals were mutually reinforcing. In the next chapter, I discuss how the governorgeneral grounded the emergent political rationality in concrete projects. Here I want only to indicate that Brévié joined the other reformers in making colonial ethnology—a fusion of practical science and scientific administration—a crucial feature of what was seen as a new art and science of colonial government. After having served the governing project at all levels, with experience in economic as well as political administration, Brévié concluded that detailed knowledge of local populations was essential for a successful native policy. He had collaborated with Delafosse on the research for Haut-Sénégal-Niger. In turn, Delafosse wrote the preface for Brévié’s own contribution to African ethnology. His “essay on colonial political psychology” valorized indigenous African religious practices over an imported Islam. Brévié argued that colonial policy should work to preserve African civilizations whose essentially collectivist character he insisted on throughout a text in which he cites Lévy-Bruhl approvingly. 118 By joining ethnology and policy recommendations, this monograph anticipated Brévié’s later administrative concerns. It contributed to the new Africanist research as well as to reformist theories of administration. During the interwar period, Brévié published programmatic essays in which he outlined a vision of colonial government that grounded political authority in economic development and social management. Immediately after becoming governor-general, he reiterated Sarraut’s postwar claim that a new era of colonialism had begun: “the page of exploration and conquest is finished. . . . Today, the page of economic mise en valeur and human development is generously open before us.” 119 He informed his administrators that “the essential factor in the economic development of the country” will be “our constant concern . . . to remain in close, permanent contact with our administrés, to follow the transformations of their mentality.” 120 For Brévié, political authority and economic prosperity would

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depend on joining comprehensive knowledge of native societies to continuous contact with indigenous populations. Privileging persuasion over coercion, Brévié and the reformers invested themselves in the idea of government by administration. “The art of administering [villages],” Delavignette wrote in his reform treatise, “is the opposite of a tyranny,” requires “no deployments of spectacular force,” and simply consists of “recognizing [natives’] rights and serving their interests.” Labouret invoked the example of Lyautey, who had simplified the “art of commanding” to four precepts: “knowing, know-how, knowing how to make, and making known.” This art of administration would entail a relational form of government; a commandant would have to “understand those whom he addresses and make himself perfectly understood by them.” 121 As Brévié instructed his colonial governors, “it is not in offices and through intermediaries that we exercise our control over the indigenous milieu . . . it is by making ourselves seen and heard, by tirelessly circulating . . . always in movement . . . constant, thoughtful, and always attentive.” 122 The crucial instrument of this administrative art was “the tour,” which, according to Delavignette, was “a method for knowing the country and collaborating with it . . . a method of administration. . . . it is the essential activity of authority. It is through the tournée that the commandant practices the art of native policy that links the colonial administration to the regions.” 123 Through field tours, colonial officials were supposed to engage indigenous society in order to learn about natives’ needs and care for their interests. These were neither simply public displays of colonial force nor mechanical exercises in data collection. Tours were a means of exercising power by inviting natives to speak “the truth” about their lives. 124 Brévié defined this new mission: “To be in a state of perpetual perception and analysis of natives’ individual and collective sentiments . . . to define calmly and exactly the smallest trouble that can have an effect on the native milieu. . . . It is not sufficient to be strong and just; we must also know how to bring, in our relations with natives, untiring kindness, concern at all times, and well informed indulgence.” 125 The tour placed administrators in a relationship with the administered, whose economic, social, and cultural lives could thereby be surveyed. The art of administration both required and produced scientific knowledge of native society. Brévié warned against improvised government activity, observing that “colonization is becoming a question of method, of calculation, of predictions and, we should say, of science. It remains without a doubt and first of all a political and psychological art, but one that must be guided and clarified by exact scientific data.” 126 Hardy likewise argued that “colonial policy should

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first of all . . . be scientific” and based on “the systematic and scrupulous establishment of fact . . . data acquired with the methodological rigor of the natural sciences.” 127 Given that native policy would differ according to milieu, however, this new science of administration had to be adjusted to social context. As Delavignette suggested, its “methods are experimental” and depend on local conditions. 128 In Brévié’s formulation, “science in the service of colonization always leads to man, to the population, to the native milieu. Whether it is a matter of agronomy, medicine, or biology, this limit must be recognized. The great colonial science is still definitively a science of man.” 129 Administration would have to be informed by a social and human science. Ethnology at this time was the ascendant human science. 130 In chapter 4, I discuss the ethnographic surveys of customary law that Brévié commissioned in the early thirties. Additionally, he instructed the administration to organize a West African historical archive composed of documents related to the colonial conquest and to traditions that seemed to be disappearing. Brévié hoped to promote “a methodical research program” focused on inquiries into colonial history and African culture. 131 He further pursued this objective by lobbying for the creation of an official scientific institute in AOF devoted to geographic, ethnographic, and historical research. This independent institute would cooperate with the federation’s technical services as well as with metropolitan scientific organizations. By generating publications, it would also raise the French public’s knowledge of Africa. After years of planning, Brévié’s vision was eventually realized in 1938 as the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire in Dakar. 132 Brévié explicitly stated that “the government of natives . . . requires a veritable science of ethnology, a knowledge of comparative colonization . . . a colonial political science.” The governor-general maintained that “colonization needs scholars, impartial and disinterested researchers with broad vision, outside of the urgency and fire of action.” However, he warned that “science must be subordinated to action, submitted to urgency, to the facts that command. . . . without losing any of its disinterested and objective character, this science must apply itself to concrete, living problems, plunged into action.” 133 Henceforth, scientific administration would have to be informed by an applied ethnology of native milieux. 134 Delafosse had earlier implored all administrators responsible for native policy to become “nativologists” [indigènologues] engaged in the objective study of natives’ “mentality . . . needs . . . desires, what they are, what they want to be, and what they can be.” 135 Hardy called for a new “ethnic psychology” that should focus on “a clearly determined and

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situated mentality—for example, that of the Bambara or the Annamites,” in order “to determine, in effect, not only what natives think, but how they think.” 136 This preoccupation with knowing native society was precisely the focus of the International Congress on Native Society in 1931, which attempted to relate social science, administrative theory, and colonial policy. Participants included metropolitan bureaucrats, field administrators, missionaries, and ethnologists as well as Paul Hazoumé. Its objective was to study “native society in itself and not only as a function of European action” in order to recognize “the properly human value of the native.” 137 Such language signaled the interwar reorientation of governing strategy as policymakers internalized the lessons of Mauss and Delafosse by treating native societies as dynamic integral entities with their own structures and histories. The very category “native society”—an object of knowledge and field of intervention—was integral to interwar colonial rationality. Conference presentations focused on policies regarding African labor, and social and family conditions. Many advocated protecting local cultures and mentalities. Delavignette’s intervention argued that the “native mentality . . . is not a stagnant thing” but something that “varies by country and by race.” He warned the administration that in order to avoid a colonial crisis, it must establish ethnological research centers: “there will be urgent peril if we do not act. . . . The great public works, the great products, the great intentions of Greater France, all definitively depend on knowledge of native mentalities.” 138 Important as it would be for administrators to understand native consciousness, reformers also believed that effective native policy required them to understand local sociopolitical institutions: kinship structures, family practices, rules of political succession, customary law, religious groupings, property regimes, and agricultural systems. Labouret’s writing was oriented more toward understanding such objective social structures than subjective native mentalities. In writing and teaching, he elaborated a pragmatic native policy founded on ethnological competence, cultural protection, and social welfare. 139 He argued that native policy “requires an exhaustive study of the society and a skillful adjustment of our methods to the framework of that society. . . . The enterprise is not only administrative, it is scientific and cannot be improvised.” 140 In an article titled “Ethnologie coloniale,” he wrote that administration would depend on “the exact understanding of natives’ languages, moeurs, institutions, manners of living, acting, reacting, and thinking” and explained that administrators must be “linguists, ethnologists, and above all psychologists.” Labouret set forth concrete proposals for the practice of colonial ethnology, including the production of “a network of good regional monographs” by competent local administrators, missionaries, and settlers based on careful

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observation over a long period of time. 141 He warned against relying on the accounts of cultural mediators (servants, youth, native police and soldiers, interpreters) and counseled researchers to learn local languages. 142 Labouret produced an elaborate Plan for Regional Monographs, which provided administrators with “all the elements necessary to understand and guide populations . . . under their authority.” This was a comprehensive and detailed document that categorized a given society in terms of its geography, history, populations, material technologies, languages, forms of knowledge, aesthetics, social organization, family practices, kinship systems, and economic, political, juridical, and religious institutions. The plan indicated precisely what kind of information should be gathered in each of these domains and the types of questions to be asked of different social actors. 143 Several years earlier Outre-Mer had published Labouret’s translation of “Recommendations for the Study of the Family,” written by the British International Institute of African Languages and Civilizations. This guide instructed fieldworkers on how to map and describe village organization, habitations, lineages, the division of labor, everyday habits, and cultural beliefs. 144 Labouret’s own scholarship exemplified this synthesis of Maussian and Malinoskian varieties of ethnographic holism. His major monograph, Les tribus du rameau Lobi, is a totalizing representation of a timeless African society fixed by custom. His discussions of Lobi demographics, technology, aesthetics, social and economic organization, law, morality, and religion continually remark on the high degree of functional integration among such a seemingly decentralized and disorganized “tribe” with no formal governing structures or sociopolitical hierarchy apart from the family. 145 Labouret underscores the work’s scholarly legitimacy by assuring the reader that it is based on rigorous ethnological methods, including knowledge of the Lobi language, a long stay in the field, and knowledgeable informants. 146 Although he conducted research while a local administrator, he makes minimal reference to his colonial location or to the colonial context that inflected Lobi social practices. In a brief final section titled “Evolution,” Labouret calls for a “methodical purging” of native agitators. 147 Once purified, he suggests, indigenous society will naturally evolve as the administration builds roads, promotes market exchange, and organizes local political hierarchies. A new municipal spirit, growing economic intercourse, and the freer movement of subjects across larger regions, according to Labouret, would then effectively ensure social order and contribute to indigenous evolution. After almost five hundred pages of decontextualized ethnography that describes an unchanging social formation, the

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monograph thus concludes with a vision of comprehensive social transformation driven by a program of economic and administrative intervention. In another monograph, Les manding et leur langue, Labouret focuses on the centrality of the family to this process of social evolution in French Sudan. He criticizes previous scholarship for focusing on political and military history while neglecting “the transformation of the family,” which he argues is “the principal element upon which progress in African territories should and must rest.” Accordingly, his account addresses the influence that colonial intervention has had on the authority of the chef de famille. Labouret explains that according to Manding custom, the male head of the household had been charged with managing collective property and executing group justice in order to ensure social solidarity and protect the common good. He characterizes Manding marriages as a form of “communism” based on contracts between two families. 148 Labouret then recounts how in one generation of French rule this collective family economy was being displaced by “an already powerful urban economy.” Colonial “peace and security” allowed for the greater imperial circulation of Africans. A new class of Sudanese migrant laborers traveling to Togo, Gold Coast, Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal returned to Manding villages, where they demonstrated their independence by refusing to obey traditional family heads. This “seasonal proletariat,” according to Labouret, attended school, stimulated social envy, and had sufficient personal savings to pay for marriage ceremonies without needing chiefs to grant them collective property. With the support of colonial administrators, who restricted the authority of traditional chiefs, as well as colonial courts, which recognized individual rights of selfdetermination contrary to custom, marriage became a contract between individuals. Labouret concludes that “the kinship collectivity upon which we have counted until now is rapidly disintegrating; another group is succeeding it, weaker but more accessible, more flexible and easily educated: the nuclear household . . . the conjugal family.” 149 It is not clear whether Labouret fears or embraces this transformation. Regardless, he presents the family as a central index and site of these changes. He identifies social disintegration as an effect of colonial intervention and treats this process as an object of ethnological inquiry with pragmatic implications. Labouret refers to this monograph as a “manual” that synthesizes courses he taught at the École Coloniale and the École des Langues Orientales: “intended for students about to leave for West Africa, it is designed to be used as instrument for work in the field.” 150

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Both monographs exemplify the intimate relationship between colonial ethnology, governing strategy, and political authority. Each work also expresses a tension between static and evolutionary understandings of native society. Interwar colonial ethnology tended to fix African masses within their social group by maintaining that they were subsumed by their cultures, existing in a state of pure collectivity, where myth reigned over reason and the group wholly dominated the individual. Yet colonial ethnologists, whether administrators or academics, were also preoccupied with the problem of social transformation caused by French intervention. They believed that indigenous social categories such as clan, collectivity, communal property, and custom were transmuting respectively into nuclear families, individuality, private property, and law. French native policy in AOF, as I show in the next chapter, sought both to prevent and promote these developments. 151 Scholars have remarked that this generation of administrator-ethnographers was especially interested in individuality, collectivity, and the family. 152 But such scholarly preoccupations must be accounted for in relation to the political field in which they were produced. Colonial ethnology privileged such issues precisely because collectivist structures, especially the family, were understood by the colonial state to be indices and catalysts for the social transformations that government policies feared and encouraged. Ethnologists’ (contradictory) characterizations of African social relations and (contradictory) native policies were intrinsically related to, and did not simply influence, one another. 153 This imperial scientific-administrative complex included scholars, teachers, and administrators, inside and outside of government, in the metropole and overseas, through which practical science and scientific administration constituted one another, whether or not intentionally. 154 Interwar administrators wrote fieldwork monographs that were formative for metropolitan science, while new native policies concerned with protecting yet improving indigenous social institutions incorporated the methods and insights of professional academics. Government policies were informed by and produced ethnographic categories just as ethnological science was informed by and produced administrative categories. 155 It is important to remember that for those involved there was nothing extraordinary about the reciprocal relationship between science and government. Far from occluding the role of ethnology in administration, interwar reformers idealized it. 156 The point is neither to dismiss academic ethnology as tainted by colonial history nor to accuse politicians of cynically manipulating science. Such criticisms, which often focus on individual motives and raise questions of influence, ultimately protect an ideal of disinterested science. 157 Instead,

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by examining the intrinsic connections between science and administration in AOF, we can recognize both as sedimented forms of practical rationality that existed on a single continuum. 158 Colonial ethnology was at once an important relay in the circuit of political rationality and one of its most distilled products. The cohort of interwar reformers worked to synthesize and reconfigure existing political technologies. They composed a network linking the various institutions—a network that reconceptualized the imperial order and reoriented colonial politics. Members of the network included business groups, universities, research and training centers, museums and exhibitions, scientific organizations, colonial interest groups, scholarly publications, publishing houses, policy conferences, and general periodicals too numerous to list here. These were the nodal points of a structured and structuring colonial rationality—at once scientific and administrative, public and private, metropolitan and colonial—that generated categories and strategies for analysis and policy across all of these domains. As with postliberal welfarism, this new colonial rationality was defined by the gradual linking up of disparate elements, a decentralized and hybrid public– private character, and the dialectic between science and administration. Both promoted economic planning, social management, population improvement, and pastoral surveillance. Each was an effect of the long-term reconfiguration of French state–economy–society relations. But what happened when, in West Africa, welfare humanism encountered the new ethnological humanism? The following two chapters explore interwar colonial humanism as a doubled and contradictory political rationality and form of government.

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A Doubled and Contradictory Form of Government

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Postwar native policies in French West Africa were elaborated under the signs of both Durkheimian sociology and Maussian ethnology. They were guided by colonial humanism, a new political rationality continuous with metropolitan statism, productivism, populationism, and welfarism. Colonial humanism’s scientific–administrative complex served three interdependent objectives: economic development, social welfare, and political order. Yet this postliberal project, conditioned by the specific requirements of colonial government, was combined with an ethnological understanding of indigenous society as a distinct, organic, and dynamic totality. This chapter analyzes the conjunction of technocracy and ethnology in relation to African sociopolitical dynamics in order to understand colonial humanism as a doubled and contradictory form of government.

Beyond the Analytic of Failure I use the term colonial humanism to refer to the interwar reform movement, its underlying political rationality, and the corresponding form of government

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that developed in AOF after World War I. Although interwar reformers did not identify themselves as belonging to a movement named colonial humanism, they referred frequently to the human, humane, and humanizing dimensions of their administrative project. I borrow this analytic term from French colonial historiography. Girardet, for example, refers to the interwar attempt by individual reformers to inaugurate a new “colonial humanism” as an “illusory dream” that administrative paralysis prevented from becoming an “effective reality.” 1 This opposition between illusion and reality, along with a preemptive judgment about policymakers’ failure to implement humanist plans and deliver on benevolent promises, has persisted in the historiography. 2 This implementation argument focuses either on sincere administrators who encountered bureaucratic resistance or hypocritical administrators whose empty rhetoric was meant to mystify or legitimize an unchanged colonial violence. Such conclusions of failure are conditioned by two tendencies: first, to evaluate reformism in terms of the good will or bad faith of individuals, and second, to correlate what colonial officials said (humanist ideology) with what they did (authoritarian practices). Conversely, because “success” is reduced to whether reformers’ rhetoric was realized, scholars often conclude that colonial states never really improved colonized populations as they claimed to be doing. But this truism should be a point of departure, not arrival. Colonial humanism was more than a dissimulating ideology designed to justify French rule. It was a form, a strategy, and a method of rule. Grasping it as such is precluded if colonial discourses are presumed to be ontologically distinct from, and only historically significant in relation to, successfully implemented projects. 3 In postwar AOF, the reform movement and the new native policies shared an underlying political logic that was elaborated through interpersonal, informational, and institutional networks. This colonial rationality was sedimented along a continuum of writings, plans, and policies that were mutually reinforcing. Colonial humanism mediated discourses and practices, ideas and institutions. Rather than trying to determine whether colonial officials meant what they said, we should relate the categories they used to the political field in relation to which they are intelligible. Of course we need to recognize the difference between what was said and what was done. But we must also take the saying seriously in a way that does not reduce it to mere rhetoric to be compared with purportedly real practices. After World War I, there was a wide-ranging movement to reconceptualize colonial government that inflected politics in AOF at every level. Something really shifted and it must be understood in its own right.

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Colonial humanism was real even if many of its initiatives were never realized. Unfortunately, historians are often more concerned with announcing that reformism failed than with sufficiently exploring the thing itself or specifying the terms in which we might evaluate its relative failure or success. Why presume that reformers’ stated objectives should align with the real work performed by colonial humanism, whether that work was successful or not? Perhaps native welfare was less a necessary end or outcome of policy than a pragmatic means or method of governing Africans? Or maybe colonial humanism’s effectiveness depended on an endlessly deferred promise and was related to the seeming failure of its own programmatic claims? I am not proposing that we simply reverse the verdict and declare colonial humanism a success. My point is that before any determination could be made, we would first have to specify the objectives, instruments, and targets of this form of government. We would have to explore the political implications of even its unintended consequences. Only then could we fashion the metric by which we would evaluate it. 4 Taking colonial humanism seriously does not mean accepting reformers’ claims to be agents of progress. 5 Nor does it mean that colonial coercion had been abandoned by caring administrators. The point is that care became a political instrument for the colonial state. Humanism here does not refer to reformers’ benevolent attitudes toward natives but to how their concern with native welfare indexed a new way of ruling and racializing native populations. We have more to learn from analyzing contradictions immanent within colonial humanism as a political logic and strategy than from simply identifying a contradiction between state promises and real-world outcomes. Colonial historiography that is preoccupied with rhetoric versus reality often proceeds within what I would call an analytic of failure. 6 The goal of research pursued under this implicit rubric is usually to uncover a defining contradiction between ideology and implementation. “Failure” is treated as the condition and horizon of knowledge about colonial history. This scholarly tendency reaches important but by now unsurprising conclusions: colonial power was divided, its projects did not always work out as promised or planned, and such outcomes were often influenced by colonial peoples’ active interventions. These points are well taken. But are we supposed therefore to conclude from inevitable instances of disorder and dysfunction that colonialism was fundamentally ineffective or even fictive? The analytic of failure derives from innovative attempts to revise accounts of imperialism as an inexorable, homogenizing, and monolithic force spreading from a European center and incorporating the rest of the world in a one-sided

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fashion. This scholarship rightly shifted our attention to indigenous agency, negotiated encounters, contradictory projects, and unintended outcomes. 7 But when such insights become an axiomatic analytic reflex, what began as a medium of criticism risks devolving into a scholastic end in itself that may actually depoliticize history. A quasi-metaphysical insistence that colonial power was incoherent and dysfunctional often obscures its systemic features and persistent structural effects. Overreaction to the genuine danger of reductive explanation risks leaving us with descriptive history that insists on contingency or chaos. But we should not have to choose between nomothetic and idiographic alternatives. My analysis is guided by the conviction that it is possible to identify structural features of colonial formations and their corresponding socioeconomic, political, and cultural logics while also attending to their contradictory and historically specific features. Attempting to avoid the twin pitfalls of functionalism and poststructuralism, I do not treat the colonial state as a unified rational machine capable of endless self-reproduction, nor do I read it as an aggregate of episodic gestures leading ultimately to an incoherent political failure. Instead, I explore the colonial state’s structural form and underlying rationality while also recognizing the way in which both are intrinsically contradictory and therefore contain dynamic possibilities for immanent critique and transformation. 8 In contrast to their prewar military predecessors, interwar colonial reformers understood themselves as liberal humanists who affirmed Africans’ abstract humanity. They hoped to make a more rational colonial rule less violent, arbitrary, and corrupt. In contrast to their post–World War II technocratic successors, these administrators understood themselves to be general humanists responsible for understanding and managing the totality of natives’ social lives. They endorsed a postliberal welfare humanism concerned with promoting populations and developing human capital. 9 Metropolitan welfarism, as we saw, corresponded to socially embedded forms of power that circulated through networks of hybrid public–private agencies. It also depended on a negotiated consensus among a paternalist state, big business, and organized labor. But in AOF the economy was based as much on agricultural commerce and kinship relations as it was on industrial production and commodity relations. Its indigenous population was dispersed largely through rural villages rather than centralized in cities. This was a colonial society possessing few autonomous civic institutions and with an attenuated public sphere. It was governed not by a deliberative constitutional state but by a coercive administrative one that depended on a permanent racialized distinction between rulers and the ruled. The latter were largely denied civil, political, and

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even many basic human rights. Neither social legislation nor social insurance protected the population. What then could colonial welfarism mean? 10 Some scholars have argued that dispersed, socially embedded, and normalizing forms of modern power could not easily operate in colonial contexts. 11 Others have argued that colonial societies were especially fertile terrain for the spread of administrative forms of power because they were unconstrained by parliamentary oversight, public opinion, or the need for popular consensus. Small numbers of Europeans attempting to control enormous territories and populations were also compelled to refine new forms of epistemic and cultural power. Colonies have thus been treated as generative sites where many characteristically modern political technologies were first developed. 12 French West Africa presented both a fertile field for the spread of welfarist state practices and an obstacle to their development. Metropolitan political technologies were deployed in the colonies under different conditions, even as different techniques were employed there to promote welfarist objectives. Chatterjee addresses this play of continuity and discontinuity between metropolitan and colonial states when he argues that colonial racism became increasingly pronounced to the very extent that “the logic of a modern regime of power” was instituted. 13 Through imperialism, modern state practices and institutional racism were mutually implicated within a political order that was unconditionally colonial (illiberal, authoritarian) yet incontestably modern (rationalizing, normalizing). The peculiar form of welfarism embodied by colonial humanism should be understood as such an instance of colonial modernity. As a state project, it promoted the triple objectives of economic development, social welfare, and political order. Ideally, each would be a condition and consequence of the others. But unlike European welfarism, this colonial rationality was internally divided. The administration in AOF was concerned with regulating the indigenous population as abstract human capital while also recognizing the irreducible specificity of native society in its organic unity and cultural difference. Interwar reformers subscribed to an ethnologically informed cultural humanism that affirmed a differentialist conception of humanity. In this schema, the universal characteristic of all human beings is their membership in and determination by particular societies, cultures, and communities. This preoccupation with the alterity of native society meant that each of colonial humanism’s interdependent objectives was driven by a dual imperative to protect and to transform native society. This was a form of government that was simultaneously rationalizing and racializing, modernizing and primitivizing, universalizing and particularizing.

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This integrated framework of analysis allows us to identify French doctrines of colonial assimilation and association as one-sided reifications of a doubled colonial rationality within which both tendencies remained interconnected. Neither was prior to the other, more real than the other, or a justification for the other. When scholars acknowledge that assimilation and association were entangled in practice, they often describe rather than account for their coexistence. Guided by the distinction between plans and implementation, they conclude either that assimilation remained an ideal that was never applied in practice or conversely that association was a new ideology that masked real assimilating practices. 14 Interwar colonial humanism cannot then be restricted to policies promoting association, whether understood as an official recognition of native alterity or a pragmatic need to cooperate with indigenous auxiliaries. It was a governing project that integrated liberal, welfarist, and ethnological varieties of humanism. Within colonial humanism, political and economic rationalities were “structurally coupled” and “strategically coordinated.” 15 Its campaigns for human, social, and economic development were interdependent, and each attempted to protect and transcend the integrity of indigenous society. During the 1920s and 1930s, the logic and project of colonial humanism progressively inflected native administration in West Africa at all levels. Of course, governing objectives and local conditions varied across the federation. Economic, social, and political dimensions of colonial humanism often conflicted with one another. Disjunctions among plans, policies, and realizations existed. Different visions of reform competed with one another. The overall project evolved over time. Wherever possible I try to note rather than discount these variations. If they are not always thematized, however, it is because, for the purposes of this account, their similarities are more historically salient than their differences. I hope that by shifting away from a micrological treatment of ideas, individuals, and short-term events to a more macrohistorical treatment of structures, strategy, and rationality, novel features, connections, and dynamics of colonial government may be illuminated. The fact that colonial humanism was unevenly institutionalized makes it no less deserving of historical inquiry.

The New Logic of Colonial Development One of the most notable “failures” of post–World War I colonial policy was the legislative project presented in April 1921 to the Chamber of Deputies by Albert

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Sarraut, the new minister of colonies. 16 Although never implemented, this comprehensive plan defined the terms in which colonial development would be pursued until World War II. It proposed using German war reparations to fund a new colonial credit system guaranteed by the metropolitan state as well as a fifteen-year cycle of public works (transportation, communication, irrigation, water supplies, hospitals, schools). Disregarding the 1900 law mandating that each colony be financially self-sufficient, Sarraut envisioned this project as a long-term government-directed development program. His plan linked contemporary ideas about capitalist rationalization to an integrated vision of France as an imperial nation-state. The plan envisioned colonial production organized around functionally specialized nodes of regional economic growth guided by technocratic administrators. It also understood productivity to depend on a stable population able to reproduce itself. The plan therefore included welfarist measures, related to public health, hygiene, and education, that would improve living and working conditions. Sarraut underscored France’s “duty . . . to preserve the populations that we govern,” writing that “the quality and quantity of native races must be developed.” 17 At the same time, he believed that sociopolitical unrest would be minimized if liberal reforms accorded indigenous elites a greater role in local administration. 18 Such a policy of state-coordinated rational development, Sarraut believed, would serve a single imperial entity within which the growth of the French national economy depended on the vitality of a productive colonial economy. Sarraut’s plan, however, subsumed this Greater French variant of statistwelfare capitalism to the neomercantilist framework of the existing imperial economy. 19 The threatening prospect of economic competition for metropolitan firms precluded Sarraut from making provisions for colonial industrialization or allowing for the creation of balanced regional economies. We can recognize this tension between innovation and acquiescence without having to question Sarraut’s commitment to modernization. His plan expressed a peculiar colonial modernity that was oriented simultaneously toward capitalist development and overseas dependence, imperial integration and colonial exceptionalism, liberal humanism and racial paternalism. Postwar policymakers would struggle to balance these competing requirements. Inconsistent German payments and a 1921 economic downturn depleted the revenues that would have funded Sarraut’s plan. With the collapse of the franc and a drop in metropolitan demand for colonial products, parliamentary priorities shifted and the proposal was never even brought to a vote. Yet this plan captured and shaped a new logic of colonial development that had been in formation since the war.

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The empire under the Third Republic was organized around mercantilist principles of complementary noncompetitive economies and relations of exclusive commercial exchange. Colonies were treated primarily as economically dependent reservoirs of productive resources (natural as well as human) useful for French industries and consumer markets to combat metropolitan underconsumption. 20 Nowhere was this neomercantilist commitment to colonial autarchy more entrenched than in West Africa. Since the 1880s, Europeans there had undermined regional economic circuits dominated by Africans and created trade monopolies controlled by large import-export houses. 21 Before World War I, AOF was one of the most economically backward sectors of the French empire. Its trade with the metropole comprised a negligible percentage of colonial commerce. Economic exploitation was limited by low population density, large distances between regions, and inadequate infrastructure. The Government General began to construct roads and railways that would link conquered hinterlands to established coastal ports in order to create outlets for tropical products. These public works projects encountered the chronic labor shortages that also challenged private European mining, logging, and agricultural enterprises. The colonial state needed to fashion a stable labor supply from a population of dispersed and relatively self-sufficient African cultivators embedded within local sociopolitical hierarchies. 22 Mutual distrust characterized prewar relations between European business concerns (accused of abusing African producers) and French administrators (accused of protecting Africans from the free market) in AOF. These tensions were exacerbated during World War I when the state restricted colonial trade, requisitioned merchant ships, and recruited commercial agents for military service. But the precepts of colonial political economy began to shift as the wartime crisis called for greater coordination among the metropolitan state, the administration in Africa, European traders, and African producers. Various campaigns, not always successful, were organized to recruit Africans into the French military. The French government also called on AOF to contribute to the national defense by exporting oils to metropolitan industries and cereals to metropolitan consumers. Many wanted to apply state intervention, rational planning, and public–private cooperation to colonial economies in order to stimulate overseas productivity. 23 Initiatives along these lines were formally outlined in a 1917 economic conference organized by the Ministry of Colonies, which assembled businessmen, administrators, and politicians who hoped the empire could revitalize the national economy. Predictably, rather than make provisions for African

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industrialization they reaffirmed neomercantilist imperialism. Yet they recommended that the colonial state actively promote growth by guaranteeing prices for African products, creating agricultural research centers, and organizing an extension system. In their view, economic decisions should no longer be left in the hands of colonial capitalists, and the administration’s responsibilities should no longer be restricted to building local infrastructure. They also recommended that colonial development be linked to sociopolitical initiatives to expand agricultural credit, health care, public hygiene, education, and representative assemblies. 24 Joost Van Vollenhoven, appointed governor-general to AOF in 1917, introduced policies that were informed by this conference’s rationalizing statist approach to colonial development. He presented his administrators with production quotas and timelines for la mise en valeur. The administration entered into an unprecedented commercial consortium with European trading houses in order to purchase African exports at prices guaranteed by the state. Local administrators were charged with educating native producers about improved methods of cultivation. These initiatives were unevenly instituted, and they often had a negative impact on Africans’ quality of life. The administration allowed trading houses to undercompensate farmers. Local officials often coerced peasants to cultivate export crops. 25 Nevertheless, Van Vollenhoven’s policies signaled that a new logic of development was taking root in the federation. World War I marked an ambiguous turning point in West African political economy. Jean Suret-Canale has characterized postwar AOF in terms of “monopolies, mercantilism, parasitism, and stagnation.” 26 He argues that a regressive and anachronistic form of protectionist commercial capitalism perpetuated African dependence and that productivity only rose because of administrative coercion in the form of forced labor and taxes. Yet he also contends that in response to international competition, metropolitan investments in the colonies intensified after the war. French banks used holding companies to take control of family trading houses in AOF, which were then consolidated into large international enterprises. Monocultural hinterlands were more closely integrated with commercial ports to form productive axes of an integrated imperial economy, as Sarraut had envisioned. 27 In other words, if interwar imperialism remained neomercantilist, it could not be dissociated from a process of capitalist modernization. 28 Whether or not postwar economic policies were fully implemented, regardless of whether they helped or harmed ordinary Africans, they were formulated according to a postliberal logic of development. Policymakers accounted for West Africa’s

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location in a global economy. They drew on contemporary discourses of scientific management, technocratic planning, and social welfarism. Instead of seeking only to intensify extraction and exploitation, the new objective was to create a coherent and dynamic colonial economy that would become integral to the national economy. This economic strategy was articulated in a 1921 report by Henri Cosnier, a French senator who was trained as an agronomist and had served in the North African administration. In 1918, Cosnier had been sent on an official mission to AOF to determine how to increase colonial exports to the French metropolitan market. His report denounced the trade economy as archaic and called for longterm economic planning. It then outlined a development plan that combined metropolitan funding, an activist colonial state, and agricultural education for African cultivators. Cosnier proposed creating a network of scientific laboratories, experimental stations, and model farms and an extension service. An Office of Agricultural Production would deploy specialized technicians and native field agents to study and supervise local cultivation. He also recognized that economic productivity would require health care and education initiatives. 29 Cosnier wanted to modernize the technical and social bases of indigenous agriculture. Yet he warned that if colonial education distanced young Africans from their natal communities, they would flee the countryside, no longer respect traditional authority figures, and fail to find employment. He outlined a vicious cycle of declining agricultural production, social disorder, and political rebellion that would unfold. In sum, Cosnier’s universalizing commitment to techno-scientific planning was joined to a particularizing recognition that local African conditions, both natural and social, must be understood and accommodated. His report appeared the same year as Sarraut’s legislative proposal, whose developmentalist sensibility it shares. When Jules Carde became governor-general in 1923, his policies synthesized and extended postwar ideas about colonial development. Carde had been an assistant to Van Vollenhoven during the war and was appointed to AOF by Sarraut. In his first formal address as governor-general, he argued that la mise en valeur must be a function of “the native himself,” whom he referred to as a “factor of production.” 30 Carde thereby signaled that subsequent economic policies would target not only local products but producers. In the early 1920s, colonial economic reports had been mere statistical overviews of commercial imports and exports that made no reference to production methods. 31 By 1929 the annual economic report identified “a precise relationship between production in AOF and the means employed to increase yields.” 32 Under Carde, colonial productivity would require attention to how, not just what, Africans

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cultivated, to indigenous conditions and native capacities. Underlying his economic initiatives was a concern with developing human potential, improving the population, and ensuring social reproduction. These were understood to be conditions as well as consequences of development. In order to increase agricultural productivity, Carde’s administration recognized that it would have to “improve the quality and quantity of labor” by providing indigenous cultivators with adequate technical training, equipment, nutrition, health care, and monetary compensation. 33 Carde directed local administrators to maintain “immediate and constant contact with the native producer,” providing him with “patient and repeated explanations” about the importance of modern farming methods. He explained that they could not “incite” Africans to increase agricultural production without the “amelioration of living conditions.” In Carde’s scheme, cash-crop cultivation and cultivators’ well-being were each a function of the other. Furthermore, it indicated that both should be pursued through persuasion rather than coercion. 34 This welfarist approach to economic development would also have to be adapted to West Africa’s particular sociocultural milieu. The colonial state recognized that independent peasants cultivating family farms were more productive than workers recruited by the administration for European plantations. Officials concluded that low population density and African communalism made it almost impossible to create a class of reliable indigenous wage-laborers. State-directed development policies would have to build on “the family form of cultural organization” as well as “the native’s attachment to the soil and its profits . . . black peoples’ love of the earth.” 35 Carde’s hybrid approach to colonial development, therefore, sought to apply modernizing methods (farmer education, financial credit, and technical supervision) to an independent peasantry engaged in a family mode of production. This indirect method of controlling African agriculture meant that the administration would have to incite, induce, and persuade independent African peasants to produce export crops. Fieldworkers would need to be concerned not only with agronomy but with sociology and ethnology. Carde advocated “the transformation of secular customs and the indigenous mentality” in order to create parcels of “individual property,” which would stimulate productivity by giving cultivators “a personal interest” in the land. 36 Yet he called for colonial education to be adapted to local conditions, emphasizing that farmers should never be alienated from their fields, families, or communities. Carde’s economic strategy paid as much attention to specifying African society as to modernizing African production.

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The Government General called this system “statist intensive agriculture.” It was envisioned as a “flexible . . . living organism” that entailed cooperation among credit agencies, technical advisors, local commandants, and associations of indigenous producers. The administration also promoted “industrial collaboration” between African farmers who provided property and labor and European entrepreneurs who provided “science . . . equipment . . . organization and discipline.” 37 As with metropolitan productivism, partnership— between the administration and the population, European and African modes of production, public and private enterprises—became the keyword of colonial developmentalism. Under Carde the agronomy service in AOF was reorganized. Technical studies, experimental stations, model farms, and extension agents functioned to promote intensive agriculture among the indigenous peasantry. African productivity was promoted through improved seed varieties, draft animals, plows, manure, and chemical fertilizers. Local administrators were teamed with agricultural technicians, who would use “methods of surveillance” to instruct farmers and popularize innovations. 38 Carde also employed social measures (health care, public hygiene, education, and labor regulations) to incite agricultural production. 39 In 1924 he pledged “to create able-bodied men, to regenerate a race.” 40 Carde’s economic initiatives in the 1920s were designed to create a vigorous workforce that would be persuaded to produce export crops and dissuaded from political criticism. They combined elements of techno-scientific modernization, social welfarism, populationism, cultural preservation, and a politics of persuasion. The new logic of development animated Carde’s 1924 program to increase cotton production. 41 After World War I, planners had revived the Third Republican fantasy of transforming West Africa into a new Egypt that would provide an inexpensive supply of cotton to the metropolitan textile industry. They also believed that large-scale irrigated cotton production in French Sudan would stimulate national reconstruction. Richard Roberts demonstrates that a weak colonial state failed to induce indigenous farmers to meet Carde’s production goals or to prevent them from diverting large percentages of their harvest away from European merchants. Nevertheless, Roberts’s research indicates that these policies helped institutionalize a statist approach to development based on public–private collaboration. Carde followed Sarraut in offering to recruit African labor for private irrigation schemes along the Niger River. He also cooperated with the Colonial Cotton Association, a semi-official development organization created by French industrialists to augment the quantity

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and quality of Sudanese cotton produced by independent peasants on family farms. Technically, cotton productivity would be improved through new ports, roads, packing factories, experimentation centers, and extension services. When a weak international commodities market undermined production incentives, state intervention eliminated the risks usually assumed by farmers and merchants by fixing an official minimum price for cotton and promising to purchase any surpluses. Transactions between African sellers and European buyers were supervised by the state through mandatory cotton fairs designed to orient local production toward commercial exports. 42 A welfarist instrument of Carde’s development strategy was provided by sociétés indigènes de prévoyance (SIPs). These “native foresight societies” were introduced by the colonial state in 1910 and spread throughout AOF during the 1920s. Membership, which required annual dues, was compulsory for indigenous farmers. Supervised by local administrators, these mutual aid societies were meant to inculcate supposedly improvident Africans with rational economic habits such as saving, banking, and planning for the future. Local SIPs established reserve granaries of seeds and food as insurance against famine, sickness, and accidents. They also made loans and advanced seeds, fertilizer, and equipment to members in order to encourage the production and marketing of cash crops. 43 SIPs were neither simply benevolent organizations serving African improvement, as the administration claimed, nor naked tools of economic exploitation serving the needs of capital, as later critics accused. 44 They were governmental organisms through which economic productivity, social improvement, and political peace were pursued simultaneously. The administration used SIPs to protect cultivators from commercial exploitation by private trading companies. Yet their use also furthered merchants’ desire to commercialize local agriculture while at the same time orienting production toward exports and institutionalizing unfair terms of trade. 45 As Mann and Guyer demonstrate, these provident societies were proxies for the colonial government, which used them as vehicles for development initiatives (by advancing seed varieties, introducing agricultural techniques, and ensuring a healthy labor reserve) and instruments of social control (by using debt to intervene in cultivators’ decisions and using food reserves to preclude local unrest). 46 SIPs were public–private institutions that required a provisional accord among the colonial government, European capital, and indigenous producers under the banner of “agricultural development.” 47 They sought to transform indigenous agricultural practices even as they also had to adapt to them. SIPs applied advanced welfarist techniques of mutuality, insurance, and social security

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to African villages, the most elementary level of indigenous society. Because they were organized as (compulsory) cooperatives, SIPs ingeniously made rural Africans themselves responsible for their own interpellation into this new developmentalist order. Agricultural credit, through the Caisse d’Épargne de l’A.O.F. (established in 1920), functioned alongside SIPs as another instrument of economic development and social reform by placing unproductive indigenous capital into circulation while supposedly teaching Africans the virtues of property and prévoyance. 48 On the macro end of the development spectrum there was a parallel attempt to articulate European and African forms of production in the Office du Niger. This semiprivate bureau was created in 1932 by Governor-General Brévié after more than a decade of lobbying by colonial reformers, modernizing engineers, and business interests for a large-scale irrigation project in Sudan. 49 The parastatal office—“a public establishment endowed with a civil status and financial autonomy”—was invested with broad administrative powers and a remarkable degree of political autonomy. 50 The agency supervised technical, scientific, and organizational measures from dam construction to labor relocation. Africans were provided with equipment, and their agricultural practices were micromanaged. When few local farmers volunteered for the project, whole communities were compelled to resettle along the Niger, where living and working conditions were often miserable. Forced labor was typical, and desertions were common. The project, which was also plagued by mismanagement, financial impropriety, and faulty agronomy, never delivered the high yields of cotton and rice as planned. These failures were ultimately blamed on its authoritarian director. 51 More importantly, the Office du Niger embodied key aspects of interwar developmentalism. Within its jurisdiction, the project used resettlement villages to create a totally administered social world oriented toward elevating production and reforming Africans. It combined statist intervention, technocratic planning, scientific management, corporatism, public–private cooperation, and social engineering. Yet these currents of postliberal welfare capitalism assumed West African forms. As Monica van Buesekom demonstrates, resettlement villages were supposed to combine plantation production (intensive cultivation, private property, nuclear families, and European supervision) with family farms, which maintained traditional social solidarities, authority structures, and cultivators’ connection to the land. 52 Postwar development organs (e.g., the agricultural extension service, cotton fairs, SIPS, Office du Niger) linked capitalist modernization to indigenous relations of production. These governmental instruments mediated between

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European merchants and African producers, private initiatives and public power, social and economic projects, and persuasion and compulsion. Through them a multitude of actors and agencies were integrated into an imperial economic system that blended science, surveillance, and social management. Instead of focusing on contradictions between development plans and implementation failures, we need first to understand the logic motivating such projects. Then we can explore interrelated contradictions within development strategies themselves, within the structure of the colonial economy, and within the interwar sociopolitical conjuncture.

Crisis, Authority, Welfare

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Economic Downturn That the major interwar development projects were introduced on the eve of economic crises was not unrelated to their practical shortcomings. Sarraut presented his plan in the context of a national recession that deflated prices for tropical commodities and, within AOF, raised prices for metropolitan goods. With the flow of private capital to the empire weakened, metropolitan funding diminished and colonial budgets shrank. Despite the postwar interest in la mise en valeur and the emergence of a new logic of development, financial resources for large-scale projects disappeared. 53 When a larger depression unfolded in the 1930s, metropolitan loans to AOF for development projects were redirected to manage budget deficits. 54 In 1930 the administration reported that agricultural production in AOF rose appreciably just as world commodity markets began to crash. 55 Commercial interests lobbied the colonial state to intervene in the crisis through shortterm protective measures and long-term development policies. 56 When Brévié replaced Carde as governor-general that year, the global economic crisis converged with a local commercial slump. Brévié predicted that the commercial crisis would lead to a production crisis and perhaps a political crisis. He appealed to the metropolitan government for emergency funds to subsidize African producers rather than to protect colonial capitalists, whom he held partly responsible for the economic downturn. 57 In response, the French government extended large loans to the West African federation. But by 1932, prices of agricultural products were dropping, and the commercial value of harvests sunk even when cultivators had increased yields. Officials reported that as Africans’ purchasing power weakened, they were replacing export products with food crops. A devolutionary dynamic

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was set in motion: colonial commerce suffered, colonial consumer markets shrank, commercial houses began to fail, European capital was redirected away from the colonies, revenues for individual colonies declined, and public investment in colonial productivity diminished. Local living conditions declined accordingly. 58 Under pressure to generate exports despite declining revenues, local administrators combined liberal inducements to increase African productivity with more coercive measures. These included the forced cultivation of export crops, forced resettlements, controlled seasonal labor migrations, and higher taxes. 59 When combined with declining incomes, these repressive measures induced outmigration to neighboring British colonies. Local administrators then placed even greater fiscal and labor pressures on an already overburdened population. Elevated taxes often forced farmers to transform alimentary production into cash crops, which increased the risk of famine. This depression accentuated the most regressive economic policies in AOF at the very moment that calls to modernize French capitalism mounted and the presence of empire cushioned the effect of the crisis on the national economy. 60 Brévié sought to counterbalance this downward trend by managing the African economy more directly. He reduced rail tariffs and export duties and subsidized the annual labor migration to Senegal. Through other decrees the colonial state created food reserves, injected more funds from the Bank of West Africa into a new agricultural credit system, and used SIPs to purchase seeds. A five-year plan to intensify production was outlined for each colony, the Agricultural Service was reorganized, and the Office du Niger was created. Brévié also created a network of experimentation stations, agricultural schools, demonstration fields, farming competitions, field monitors, and agricultural cooperatives. Special emphasis was placed on intensive agriculture through the use of draft animals and plows. Farmers were encouraged to diversify their cash crops and to cultivate food crops. 61 These expensive initiatives, however, were introduced as commodity prices continued to drop and colonial budget deficits rose. The tension between development projects and their costs was raised by Giscard d’Estaing after a 1932 study mission to the federation. His report criticized the “financial anarchy” in AOF, which he linked to “parasitical” trading houses, regressive tariffs, rudimentary indigenous agriculture, and lack of local industry. His primary target was “the fundamental and essential contradiction” between the scope of development projects and the limited economic resources and viability of the regions to be developed. He attributed budget deficits to such poor planning rather than to the economic crisis. In response to these problems, D’Estaing

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instructed an interventionist state to fund a coherent economic policy that would rationalize and specialize colonial production. He proposed that agricultural improvement initiatives be limited only to potentially profitable zones in which an adequate labor force, transportation infrastructure, and soil fertility existed. He also recognized that because “human beings are still the essential wealth of a country,” development would require welfarist efforts to protect the indigenous population. And because this “wealth will be furnished by the native’s direct labor,” distinctly African conditions of production would also have to be accommodated. 62 D’Estaing’s report never challenged the neomercantilist framework of West Africa’s economy, but it outlined a postliberal vision in which state-managed colonial capitalism would be linked to social welfarism and indigenous agricultural practices. This ambitious yet restricted understanding of colonial development was reaffirmed two years later at the 1934 economic conference. Special commissions recommended policies to improve the quality and quantity of indigenous production in order to help France recover from the global depression at a moment of growing protectionism among capitalist states. In the spirit of Sarraut, participants argued that an imperial economy for “la France totale” would require a metropolitan government agency responsible for coordinating and funding colonial development programs. This conference paid more than usual attention to indigenous populations as consumers. Policies were proposed to stimulate local purchasing power. French industries were instructed to adapt their manufactures to African tastes. But ultimately this demand-side strategy was more concerned with preventing competition with metropolitan manufacturers than with promoting industrialization overseas. 63 Jacques Marseille has argued that the economic crisis of the 1930s forced French policymakers to choose between economic restructuring and national protectionism. He contends that the existence of an empire supported by declining metropolitan industries allowed France to defer overdue economic modernization. By the mid-thirties, Marseille argues, the principle of imperial autarchy (protected markets, commercial capitalism, and colonial dependency) triumphed. 64 Despite statist attempts to rationalize the colonial economy, development would still depend on export production and monopoly trade; provisions were made for neither balanced economies nor overseas industries. 65 Attempts to expand production within this framework functioned largely to exacerbate native impoverishment and erode French authority. Metropolitan authorities also feared that a more autonomous colonial economy could undermine French sovereignty over its African territories. Yet the very crisis that was fueling economic devolution in AOF was reinforcing the postwar belief that the metropolitan economy depended on colonial productivity. A contradiction

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existed between the need to promote and the need to prohibit capitalist modernization in French West Africa. 66 In short, interwar economic initiatives in AOF were undermined by structural contradictions as well as conjunctural crises. The administration’s objective was to create a virtuous circle of economic growth. 67 Policymakers believed that protected markets would guarantee adequate prices for tropical products, which would bolster Africans’ purchasing power, broaden their demand for industrial goods, provide incentives for them to produce export crops, make them more dependent on the money economy, and compel them to increase productivity. A robust and exclusive market for metropolitan manufactures would be created, which in turn would stimulate metropolitan industrial growth and finance market protections for colonial products. 68 Colonial humanism was a strategy for promoting this virtuous circle of imperial growth. Welfarist native policies were meant to persuade an independent African peasantry to participate in this system. They would also ensure the social reproduction of colonial cultivators and improve the quality of their labor. Economic development entailed protecting village social relations and improving indigenous living conditions. Yet during the 1920s and 1930s, this imperial virtuous circle turned vicious as declining productivity, incomes, and living conditions propelled one another. Welfarist polices shifted from creating a positive socioeconomic dynamic to compensating for a negative one that was driven partly by the administration’s self-undermining initiatives. Colonial humanism was at once a confident expression of postwar French hegemony in West Africa and an anxious response to its perceived fragility. When G. G. Brévié reported that advances in agricultural productivity were being reversed by the economic depression, he was as concerned about its effect on social order in AOF as he was with its impact on the imperial economy. Brévié predicted that declining living conditions would create a crisis of confidence in French rule. Warning that West Africans were becoming vulnerable to Communist propaganda, he predicted eruptions of popular discontent. 69

Sociopolitical Anxieties The 1930s depression amplified the administration’s fear of sociopolitical breakdown, but it was not the source of that fear. During the war, French authority in West Africa had already been challenged by episodes of mass resistance to military recruitment through riots or flight. 70 After the armistice, demobilized African soldiers who had lived abroad with fewer social restrictions were reluctant to resume their former village lives as exploited farmers

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subject to the authority of traditional chiefs and autocratic administrators. For local officials, these tirailleurs posed a chronic disciplinary problem. 71 Another source of agitation was presented by African immigrants in France, who became accustomed to greater social mobility and broader civil rights than in AOF. They were politicized by contact with subjects from other parts of the French empire, with members of the self-conscious black diaspora in Paris, as well as with French trade unionists and political parties. Administrators felt threatened by their periodicals and feared that those who returned would destabilize the colonial political order (see chap. 6). After the war, colonial authorities sought to control the circulation of potentially disruptive people and media within AOF. In 1918, Van Vollenhoven argued against legalizing professional syndicates in the federation because “natives newly returned from the metropole . . . after having had contact with our civilization, will inevitably bring a new spirit to the colonial proletariat whose form and manifestations are not yet known to us.” 72 Many administrators also believed that the global wave of labor insurrection and anticolonial nationalism that followed the Russian Revolution would contaminate colonial Africa. 73 During the 1920s, colonial officials feared that returning soldiers and overseas critics would provoke potentially disruptive sectors of the West African population. As indigenous family structures unraveled, deracinated peasants migrated to colonial cities whose economies could not absorb them. A nascent urban bourgeoisie composed of African merchants and civil servants staged tax revolts and demanded a greater role in municipal politics. A new generation of student elites who rejected the authority of traditional elders expected employment opportunities and political liberties commensurate with their education. Administrators recognized that rapid social change would have a systemic impact on colonial order. 74 After a police roundup of urban undesirables in 1922, the Government General reported that “Dakar, like all large ports, has become the receptacle of a mob of disreputable individuals with diverse origins and nationalities—dockworkers, unemployed houseboys, ex-convicts etc., who, especially during this business slump, seek income in the least respectable, often criminal, ways.” 75 This floating lumpen population was understood to be a product of colonial contact whose effects had to be reversed. Several months later, a decree against “vagabondage” was introduced in an attempt to control anarchic urban development. It punished Africans who could not prove that they possessed either a steady income or a fixed residence. The decree sought to counteract the “exodus of natives from the interior toward urban centers. Young people in particular leave their villages in order to escape from familial authority and find refuge

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in agglomerations where they enjoy a freedom of which they do not always make the best use . . . villages are deserted and farms abandoned.” This measure was designed to send these new urban “vagabonds . . . back to the familial collectivity and its salutary influence.” 76 Colonial reformers did not only want to return uprooted peasants to their natal villages. They wanted to manage rural social relations. Not long after the antivagabond decree was passed, in the context of widening political protest in Dahomey’s coastal cities, Governor Fourn toured that colony. He then reminded the commandant in Djougou that “without population growth, a country stagnates or regresses, and the funds we spend for economic development will have no result.” But Fourn was less concerned with expanding the quantity of abstract individuals in Dahomey than with promoting the quality of concrete collectivities: “you must therefore penetrate the native milieu, organize or reorganize it into strong, active, effective communities capable of defending themselves against physical and moral illness.” 77 He explained to another field administrator that his task was “the reconstitution of villages and ethnic groups.” 78 Native policies that linked population, development, and welfare initiatives simultaneously encouraged social evolution and community solidarity. Despite such measures, rural depopulation continued through the 1920s and surged during the economic crisis of the 1930s. Economic policies that uprooted workers from indigenous communities added to the ungovernable floating population. When forestry, agriculture, and public works projects in Côte d’Ivoire were abandoned during the depression, one report complained that the government was creating more “vagabondage” by leaving “a quantity of individuals unemployed who, instead of returning to their villages, prefer to take refuge in urban centers where the presence of the jobless does not fail to inspire apprehension.” In Abidjan, officials conceded that “a number of these rootless people still escape our control” and proposed “to fix this mobile part of the population . . . by providing them with parcels of land in the forest where they could plant cocoa and coffee.” 79 Note that the administrative strategy was to persuade them to return to the countryside and redirect their labor into agricultural production. In 1931, a famine spread through Niger. Officials acknowledged that their own development policies had contributed to the disaster by pressuring farmers to cultivate export products at the expense of food crops. A metropolitan inspector made the usual technical recommendations: agricultural diversification, more grain reserves, better infrastructure, and emergency aid camps, wells construction, irrigation networks, experimental stations, agricultural education,

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plow distribution, soil amelioration, better use of SIPs, and lower taxes for natives. But remarkably, he ascribed the disaster to administrative failure. Local officials were criticized for being disconnected from village life and for failing to either report or respond to the many signs of imminent famine. He recommended more frequent tournées, better bureaucratic communication, and less personnel turnover. 80 In response to this famine, Minister Sarraut declared that each governor was responsible for “assuring food security in [his] colony.” He explained, “I consider one of our most urgent [impérieux] duties to be . . . the protection of natives against the scourge of hunger which . . . reduces individuals’ power of resistance against diseases as much as their capacity to work and contributes to . . . the degeneration of the race.” 81 The famine demonstrated that economic development, population protection, and good governance were in fact interrelated. That same year Labouret warned that “the breakdown of indigenous collectivities is one of the consequences of racial contact and . . . is accelerating today at an impressive rate that risks being dangerous if it is not directed.” 82 The Government General received field reports from the most developed colonies in the federation that anxiously described the symptoms of a social crisis. According to the governor of Côte d’Ivoire, “through contact with our civilization, the younger generations evolve, but unfortunately . . . outside of their milieu . . . they quickly leave the family home and create an absolutely independent life. Family bonds are broken, social bonds loosen, a spirit of insubordination spreads: native society is fragmenting.” 83 Administrators began to fear the dissolution of the very kinship networks that they had previously regarded as an obstacle to their authority. In Senegal and Dahomey, officials acknowledged that colonial education was encouraging social fragmentation, which then undermined their political authority: “native society is being transformed . . . there are antagonisms, sometimes deep, between les évolués and traditionalists . . . young people no longer obey their chiefs. . . . A new spirit is spreading, especially among those graduating from our schools. . . . Many natives no longer have the quasisuperstitious respect for the European that they formerly had.” Notably, the official response to this looming sociopolitical crisis was interactive rather than repressive: “we must have more patience than before . . . it is becoming indispensable to instruct [natives] about our intentions and have [them] grasp the importance of our reforms.” Rather than criminalize tax evaders, administrators were told “to maintain close contact” with them in order to monitor “every indication of discontent that extremist organizations could be tempted to exploit.” 84

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In the context of this crisis, ten years after presenting his earlier development plan to the national legislature, Albert Sarraut was again minister of colonies. If Sarraut had earlier championed an imperial vision of Greater France, he now prophesized its possible demise. Arguing that the French empire was threatened by an overarching international contradiction, he wrote: “the colonial crisis has begun. . . . [Europe’s] future is inexorably tied to the mechanism that it created. . . . after having been the master, it is now the servant.” 85 This because the world war had fractured European unity, the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union had threatened Europe’s global hegemony, and colonized populations deserved to be compensated for their wartime loyalty. He warned that European power was founded on an imperial foundation that was steadily weakening. Because of the “incorporation of colonial life into national life,” France had become dependent on an empire that, if lost, would mean “breakdown, anemia, debility, and then the paralysis of its economic life.” 86 He thereby recognized that an integrated imperial nation-state was as much a source of vulnerability as of strength. A decade earlier Sarraut’s plan had codified the general hope that colonial development would regenerate the national economy. Now he expressed the widespread fear that development itself threatened to produce a crisis of colonial government: “the enterprise of civilization, in its very creations, forges the iron that will be turned against it. . . . what a strange paradox . . . that each of its benefits becomes a source of peril and entails its terrible opposite.” Sarraut explained that better health care had created a larger, less manageable population. Economic progress had created social disequilibrium, a native proletariat, and dangerous desires among indigenous consumers. Colonial education had created an underemployed and disenfranchised group of potential militants. 87 The minister recognized that French policies were self-undermining. Given this diagnosis of structural crisis, Sarraut’s paternalist insistence on reciprocal rights and duties between the administration and its colonial subjects was intended to preserve French authority, not justify it. Sarraut called for improving indigenous living and working conditions through legal protections, property rights, medical services, education, employment opportunities, and representative assemblies. These proposals were neither novel nor fully implemented, but they affirmed the trialectical relationship among economic development, social welfare, and political authority that informed interwar native policies. Sarraut’s 1931 vision of colonial modernity combined technocratic intervention with ethnographic conservation. Neither colonial capitalism nor political authority in West Africa required the social abstraction that accompanied proletarianization and state formation in modern Europe. Because commercial

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profits and state revenues depended primarily on peasant agriculture, indigenous relations of production had to be maintained. Because French political authority depended partly on preventing local social fragmentation, indigenous solidarities and hierarchies had to be protected. In AOF, a modernizing administration became preoccupied with maintaining the integrity of African village communities.

Colonial Humanism Carde and Brévié both subscribed to Sarraut’s integrated approach to colonial government. But if Carde’s administration had placed special emphasis on extending Sarraut’s ethno-developmentalism in AOF, Brévié’s was especially concerned with developing the implications of the minister’s ethno-welfarism for African societies. In this respect, Brévié was not only an agent of Sarraut but a descendant of Delafosse, his erstwhile mentor. 88 At a 1919 Anglo-French conference on the imperial economy organized by the Union Coloniale, Delafosse argued that political order and colonial authority depended on satisfying natives’ “needs” and “legitimate aspirations.” He added that “the material development of the [West African] colonies is strictly correlated with the social development of the indigenous population.” 89 Delafosse’s understanding of development and welfare was as informed by ethnography as it was by technocracy. He characterized “the patriarchal form of the family” as “the basis of all native West African social and even political institutions.” He then explained that “the principle of familial solidarity is a powerful lever whose existence can singularly facilitate the work that we want to realize.” He even claimed that African clans, secret societies, and age groups promoted “solidarity and mutual aid” that could be “channeled” to promote “social improvement.” 90 Delafosse thus sought to articulate indigenous institutions with welfarist objectives. His starting point was a relativist conception “of other societies, next to and outside of ours, each of which has, like ours, its own civilization, its own aspirations, its special needs” as well as “the right to conserve [them] according to the norm of their genius and temperament.” Arguing that all human beings are members of some type of organized and regulated social formation, he acknowledged “every society’s right to self-determination.” According to Delafosse, “human societies . . . cannot be eliminated from the surface of the globe simply by the will of another society. . . . we cannot reduce them to slavery or impose on them from a distance customs that they reject, that

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were not made to fit them, the forced adoption of which could kill them.” 91 Here was an antiassimilationist cultural universalism derived from Maussian ethnology. In order not to violate this ethic of cultural self-determination, Delafosse proposed a colonial policy that would protect and improve native society. He wrote, “we have contracted the obligation, first, not to destroy these societies, and second, to help them develop and prosper morally and materially.” His goal was “the conservation and reinforcement of these societies and of all their institutions that will contribute to the material, intellectual, and moral development of black societies.” As in 1919, he argued that colonial policy would succeed “only if we are careful to maintain [natives] in a continually growing state of vigor and activity.” 92 This concern with African social integrity was not only an ethical imperative; it was a governing strategy. Delafosse’s new native policy grounded social welfare in cultural difference. This vision of cultural humanism, which linked universality and particularity, would be pursued by interwar reformers. As governor-general, Brévié synthesized positions formulated by Sarraut, Delafosse, and Carde. He too promoted public works, health, and education. 93 Brévié accepted the “utilitarian point of view,” according to which “the Metropole has a direct interest in quickly increasing the number of births and the standard of health of colonial populations, from whom it demands soldiers, workers, products, and steadily rising purchasing power.” 94 Brévié reminded administrators that “the production of wealth is almost exclusively in native hands. Our economic development and their social progress . . . depend on the constant improvement of their productive faculties.” 95 Because these were “two interdependent aspects of the same problem,” he argued, “to work for the natives is to work for France.” 96 Brévié also announced that “we cannot possibly separate our political action from our social action.” 97 He instructed administrators to provide each colonial subject with “proof that the whole colonial enterprise works to make him happier.” 98 For Brévié, economic development, social welfare, and political legitimacy were interdependent. Whereas political stability in the countryside was bound up with social interventions, social stability in expanding colonial cities often entailed political interventions. In 1934, the Office for Colonial Security (Sureté Générale) warned the administration that “if a large city is necessary for commercial circulation, it is no less a center of attraction toward which the uprooted and idle are ineluctably drawn.” 99 In order to minimize the “economic, social, financial, and hygienic dangers” of colonial cities, Brévié proposed an urban development

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policy that would “clear [décongestionner] Dakar’s surplus floating population and limit the influx of undesirables into the city.” 100 Under the banners of public safety and public health, this colonial urbanism would “redirect to their home districts” those “natives whose presence, manifestly without utility for the satisfaction of local needs, constitutes a veritable danger for the city.” Accordingly, the Government General called for “new regulations that would in some way allow us, automatically and through purely administrative means, to obtain the desired results.” 101 In response, the administration made a series of regulatory recommendations. These included using the indigènat, antivagabond laws, and prohibitions against native circulation within and foreigners’ emigration to AOF. It proposed requiring African travelers to carry “sanitary passports.” Such measures would “turn away from the cities most of the young people seeking work or adventure.” 102 Undesirables could be further controlled through public health regulations (regarding home construction, the salubrity of dwellings, and stagnant water), zoning, and aesthetic codes, and by segregating European and native neighborhoods. These methods would help “eliminate from Dakar . . . numerous natives who, due to their customs [moeurs], their lifestyle . . . have not adequately adopted European habits [habitudes] and whose presence constitutes a permanent danger to public health.” 103 Here postliberal techniques (surveillance, regulation, policing) would allow administrators to manage threatening populations while circumventing the colonial legal system. Colonial cities were believed to be necessary for economic growth but detrimental to social welfare and political order. This tension expressed a deeper structural contradiction. The colonial state worked to protect African village life as a precondition for economic development. But it also identified traditional society as an obstacle to development, which would require rational, autonomous, consuming individuals organized into nuclear families and possessing private property. In AOF, colonial capitalism and French authority required officials simultaneously to promote social evolution and to protect social structures. A 1932 administrative report explained that by inculcating Africans with “the taste for work, order, and saving,” the government would “increase racial vigor,” “stimulate productive work,” and “demonstrate the advantages of collective effort, solidarity, mutuality [and] the general interest.” Yet the “autochthon” was also identified as “an incapable minor, with a very different mentality than ours, profoundly attached to his customs, whose evolution must unfold without unnecessary haste within the framework of his own civilization, by respecting his traditional institutions.” 104

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The Dual Imperative of Colonial Government Collectivity and Individuality Interwar reformers sought both to produce and prohibit individuality among Africans. Brévié maintained that colonial subjects lived within “primitive collectivities” that stifled individualism. 105 Yet he also warned that the administration “should absolutely conserve” native societies or watch them “rapidly disintegrate into the dust of anarchic individualities over which we have no authority.” 106 Likewise, Henri Labouret invoked a “universal tendency toward individualism” to explain the unavoidable native social evolution initiated by French colonialism. 107 He believed that the political stability provided by colonial rule allowed Africans greater geographic and social mobility, which led them to discover personal freedom, pursue individual self-interest, and detach themselves from family bonds and the authority of customary chiefs. 108 Georges Hardy believed that because “Negro-African societies are essentially collectivist” and only recognize communal forms of property, they are “an obstacle to progress.” Yet he warned that any attempt to modify a people’s culturally specific relation to property be pursued “with extreme caution or risk provoking economic and social upheaval.” 109 At the 1931 conference on native society (chap. 3), Hardy argued that although French policies in West Africa attempted to respect customary social institutions, “we bring individualism with us, despite ourselves.” He believed that colonial wages had promoted an “instinct of individualism” among a group of new elites, who were freed from “traditional constraints,” married educated women, and formed monogamous households, which he called “an unprecedented form of native family.” Hardy advised that the transition to economic individualism must “be followed with attention,” given that “an abrupt rupture with the milieu, an emancipation that is too sudden and too complete, will lead to the formation of an uprooted proletariat” that would “quickly become an element of trouble, dangerous for everybody.” 110 The tension between collectivity and individuality was raised repeatedly during this conference. Presentations discussed balancing a need to protect indigenous customs from the malignant social transformations that were produced by the colonial encounter with the need to encourage other transformations necessary for African economic, social, and moral development. Colonial reformers identified an inexorable shift from collectivity to individuality that was both feared and desired. The shift could not be opposed yet had to be guided. African social evolution was understood to be a deliberate

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goal and unfortunate consequence of French policies. Administrators sought to promote socioeconomic individualism while prohibiting juridico-political individuality. They dreamed of colonial subjects who possessed rational selfinterest, consumerist desires, and a productivist ethos but who were nevertheless embedded in indigenous relations of production. These ideal Africans would respect local norms and remain obedient to traditional authority. Yet, unburdened by cultural misconceptions, they would also respond immediately to the colonial state’s administrative directives. These competing ethnological-administrative objectives led to a governmental preoccupation with the African family, which was seen to be the elemental unit of native society and matrix of traditional culture. Policymakers identified the family form as an institution guaranteeing social order, an index of social evolution, and an instrument of social engineering. Family dynamics were at the center of Delavignette’s 1931 novel Les paysans noirs. Based on Delavignette’s own field experience, the narrative dramatized a government program to turn a village community in Haute-Volta into self-contained households of property-owning individuals through the introduction of a peanut oil press. The protagonist, a local commandant, expresses the new colonial rationality when he announces to the villagers, “Our rule is your custom.” 111 This is a brilliantly ambiguous utterance that works in several registers: we will rule you according to your custom; through our rule you will be able to keep your customs; you will become accustomed to our rule; our norms will become your new customs. The message suggests the way colonial humanism sought to adapt its government to native life even as it worked to naturalize its domination among the indigenous population. The African family figures centrally in this story of economic development, customary practices, and colonial rule. Villagers are persuaded by the reformist administrator to accept the new machine because it will allow them to cultivate cash crops on their own family farms, so that they can make enough money to pay bride-prices and thereby enable their children to marry according to tradition. But after the harvest, we learn, the newly married couples modify indigenous customs by establishing independent households. 112 Delavignette thus traces the circular ideal of colonial humanism: modernizing reforms work to increase colonial revenues and protect native family institutions, but marriage practices themselves work in turn to modernize village society, which continues, nevertheless, to exist. Elsewhere, Delavignette elaborated on the idea that indigenous family and gender relations served as indices and instruments of the transition from collectivity to individuality. 113 He explained that African families typically responded

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to colonial development by becoming more “individualist.” Prosperity generated dowry money, and young couples liberated themselves from the constraints of custom to “create a new family, smaller, freer,” with “a critical spirit that would be dangerous and impossible to extinguish.” Delavignette described the emergence of a new “concentrated village,” which was “constituted by households that are dissociated from their original families and form a rudimentary cité.” 114 This was an idealized vision of culturally sensitive colonial republicanism: as Africans’ collective mentality gave way to individualism, primitive isolation would be superseded by modern forms of civic association, based on a new type of African family that was neither traditional nor European. 115 Throughout the interwar period, successive administrations believed that a colonial état civil would encourage bourgeois family practices as well as civic individualism among Africans. Reformers hoped that civil registries for native births, marriages, and deaths would become flexible instruments of ethnographic inquiry, social management, and political control. In 1915, the chef du service judiciaire in West Africa identified the welfarist function of the état civil: “to assure as perfectly as possible the parentage of every child born on our territory and to identify him in order to follow him during the entire course of his life, to know his life-cycle and to protect his public, private, and family interests.” He claimed that including Africans in the état civil would “facilitate surveillance” as well as be indispensable for creating military recruitment rolls, tax lists, and police records. 116 Governors-General Clozel and Carde directed local administrators to create separate registers for African civil declarations in order to prevent them from illegally using or abusing the French état civil. 117 In 1933, Brévié created an official état civil indigène in AOF, which attempted to rationalize the informal system that had been supervised by local bureaucrats since the war. 118 Following his predecessors, he promoted native registries as a way to prevent Africans from manipulating French colonial courts. 119 He argued that this new legislation would provide a “legal basis” for Africans’ civil declarations, which would now be regulated by native tribunals. 120 Sarraut supported Brévié’s état civil indigène on the grounds that it was “good administration” that would “enable the methodical classification of declarations and facilitate future research.” He envisioned the creation of a central alphabetized catalogue that could track every individual’s civil life and serve as the basis for “judicial decisions . . . the census, fiscal policy, emigration, the health service, military recruitment.” 121 A subsequent report on the état civil indigène trumpeted its “utility and benefits” for “the social life of populations, notably regarding the constitution of the

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family, the observation of demographic movements, the recruitment of native troops, the fixing and collecting of taxes, etc.” 122 Brévié’s new system reflected the duality that characterized his native policies. Local governors were told that this état civil indigène was a tool of “demographic documentation” designed to record village life as it existed. Yet Dakar reminded them that the état civil was “the only institution that could guarantee the identity of individuals and provide a written basis for the constitution of the family.” 123 Civil registration would also signal that Africans were “sufficiently emancipated from their ancestral customs.” 124 In other words, the collection of information was part of a documentary policy to protect native society at the same time that it sought to transform Africans into modern individuals organized into nuclear families. The état civil indigène was both collectivizing and individuating, differentiating and abstracting. If this system was used to supervise and reform colonial subjects, it also became a source of intense governmental anxiety. For years, field administrators complained that ordinary Africans refused to register their civil acts with colonial authorities. Many of them did not know about the system. Nor were there enough field agents to supervise it. 125 In other cases, cultural practices, such as polygamy and delayed baby naming, disinclined Africans to use the état civil. 126 Officials debated whether registration should remain voluntary, as Brévié insisted, or whether sanctions should be applied to those who ignored the process, as his agents often suggested. 127 The administration, however, was even more troubled by the way in which Africans did use the civil registries. Officials complained that natives were unaccustomed to bureaucratic procedures; they declared false information, listed multiple names for the same child, and borrowed European names. 128 They were also accused of making false declarations to colonial courts about family identity. Dakar regularly instructed agents of these tribunals to conduct field investigations to verify native declarations by making family visits, interviewing witnesses to births and deaths, requiring written proof for claims, and recording the custom by which couples were married. 129 Designed to rationalize surveillance, restrict citizenship, and control fraud, the état civil indigène offered Africans an opportunity to manipulate the colonial legal system. This institution, which documented the civil lives of colonial populations, was a source of ethnographic information. But it was disorganized, loosely regulated, and easily undermined. For it to function at all, administrators had to produce even more ethnography about family norms, marriage practices, kinship rules, and local genealogies. The administration’s attempts to document natives’ civil lives both presupposed and generated colonial ethnog-

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raphy. Additionally, they worked simultaneously to fix and to reconfigure indigenous family practices. 130 The état civil functioned alongside and in relation to another administrative instrument, the colonial census. In the absence of a centrally organized system to enumerate the federation’s subject population (as existed in colonial India), local administrators were responsible for collecting their own demographic data. A methodical and scientifically accurate census was a crucial instrument of rational techno-administration: labor and military recruitment, tax collection, and agricultural production quotas depended on it. Yet French officials conceded that they relied on outdated and inaccurate figures. They blamed African census takers, deceitful native chiefs, and chronic outmigration to neighboring British colonies. 131 Dakar’s campaign to register African family events and civic identities mirrored its parallel efforts to create a property registration system in AOF. In principle, private property was the counterpart to individualism, both of which were seen as interdependent catalysts of indigenous productivity. Soon after the federation was organized, French conquerors introduced legal measures to expropriate large amounts of African land and to monetize local property relations. A decree on October 3, 1904, declared that all “vacant” land in West Africa that was not held by legal title henceforth belonged to the French state. This measure effectively disqualified African property customs when the administration needed more land. The decree also prohibited, without government approval, the sale to individuals of property that was controlled by indigenous collectivities. This provision allowed the administration to insist on the sanctity of collective ownership when it wanted to prevent African collectivities from entering the property market independently in order to profit from commercial transactions. 132 A second decree on July 24, 1906, introduced the Torrens property registration system through which individual Africans could request legal titles to parcels of land over which they had exclusive rights. Once granted, these property titles were incontestable, conferred legal ownership, and were alienable. To all intents and purposes, the bureaucratic procedure through which parcels were registered and titles granted prevented the majority of African cultivators from becoming individual owners. It therefore worked indirectly to maintain customary land practices. 133 French property policy in AOF raised as many troubling issues as it addressed, however. Officials acknowledged that these decrees, with the help of subsequent court interpretations of them, could be used by the state to expropriate land controlled and used by Africans. This colonial property system was

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designed to stimulate local production through concessions to private firms and to attract metropolitan investment capital by stabilizing the property market through legal titles. Yet administrators feared that the confiscation and privatization of native land would undermine the integrity of indigenous social relations and generate political animosities among Africans. They also recognized that the registration system allowed Africans to engage in fraud (by claiming titles for other people’s land) and profitable land speculation (at the expense of the administration). Indigenous communities resented the government for seizing portions of their land without compensation. Individual Africans resented the government for refusing to grant titles to property that might later be useful to the state or granted as private concessions. 134 Rather than revolt, however, these parties took their grievances to colonial courts. Extended legal battles between Africans and the administration raised complex issues related to jurisdiction (whether collectivities as well as individuals could be legal subjects, whether cases should be heard in French or native courts). Legal decisions led to conflicts between colonial courts and the colonial government. Local property disputes divided African communities and families. Colonial officials were compelled to undertake detailed ethnological inquiries and hearings in order to understand customary land practices, verify natives’ property rights, and adjudicate between competing claims. Abuses, confusion, and conflict surrounding communal and private property were chronic sources of sociopolitical instability in AOF. 135 The property registration system and the état civil indigène were instruments of native policy that expressed the administration’s dual imperatives: to abstract Africans as private individuals and to differentiate them as collective beings, to transform and to preserve indigenous cultural practices, to produce and prohibit social evolution. These institutions generated self-undermining contradictions that intensified social instability and unwittingly empowered Africans against the colonial state. Civil and property registrations were designed to make African society more transparent to the administration in order to facilitate surveillance and control and to rationalize indigenous social relations. Yet these documentation efforts led administrators into obscure regions of African ethnology and customary law. Policies to promote individualism and private property depended, paradoxically, on a distinct system of customary courts.

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African collectivities functioned simultaneously to promote social evolution. The native justice system and the use of native chiefs were guided by the administration’s dual imperative to preserve and transform African society. Policies addressing customary law and African authorities, like those addressing civic identity and private property, required ethnographic knowledge of local social relations. Once again, administrative documentation (of native life as it existed) and intervention (to fashion native life as it ought to be) incited one another. In 1903, Governor-General Roume had organized the first colonial court system in AOF, based a principle that continued to guide policy through the 1930s: “native justice will apply local customs in so far as they are not contrary to the principles of French civilization.” 136 Subsequent decrees reorganizing the system (1912, 1924, and 1931) reaffirmed this dictum in civil and commercial cases, while stripping indigenous chiefs of effective judicial power. Local administrators were made responsible for dispensing justice through a network of regional native courts. They rarely spoke African languages but relied on native assessors and interpreters, who, it was feared, were controlled by local chiefs. Because no formal legal code existed, punishments for similar offenses would vary from court to court. French commandants were often themselves implicated in the cases they heard and were empowered to impose harsh sentences on convicted Africans. This was a personalized type of justice that tended to be arbitrary, inconsistent, and punitive. 137 Governors-General Ponty, Merlin, Carde, and Brévié each attempted to reform the native justice system by creating a hierarchy of tribunals and bodies charged with judicial oversight. Jurisdiction over French citizens and African subjects became more clearly differentiated. Fuller records and more frequent reporting of court decisions were required of lower tribunals. Provisions were made to employ more qualified native assessors from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Colonial inspectors were used for periodic evaluations. 138 These reforms sought to depersonalize and moderate native justice. Carde hoped that they would ameliorate the “social well-being of [indigenous] populations” and generate among them “stronger trust in our administration.” 139 Yet a 1932 inspector’s report on justice in Haute-Volta criticized the administration’s “defective” and “deplorable” practices as well as “ignorance of the general principles of native justice.” 140 It discovered procedural errors, falsified documentation, and the use of unqualified assessors. The inspector reported that customary laws were either manipulated or ignored in order to justify excessive punishments. Although his criticism was directed at recalcitrant individuals, the lack of judicial impartiality that he identified was systemic and overdetermined. For example, Carde sought to make colonial magistrates more

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professional and autonomous by creating a separate justice department in AOF. Yet he reminded the minister of colonies that “the administration of native justice . . . requires perfect collaboration between administrative and judicial powers.” 141 The chief prosecutor in AOF concurred. 142 He required supposedly independent officers of the justice system to inform colonial governors of all judicial matters that might have political implications or inflame public opinion. Invoking “the unity of administration and justice,” he explained that coordination was “necessary for good administration . . . and should not be undermined by the principle of separation of powers.” 143 It is debatable whether such inspections ever had a meaningful impact on subsequent policies. But this type of supervisory field inquiry was part of a general attempt to rationalize the justice system—hence the governor of HauteVolta’s praise for the inspector as an “informant . . . judge . . . consultant . . . and technical advisor” as well as his regret over the “professional incompetence” uncovered. 144 In colonial West Africa, however, the attempt to create a more rational, transparent, and professional bureaucratic system could not be realized, as it had been in modern Europe, by creating a common law grounded in abstract universal principles of jurisprudence. The dual justice system in AOF institutionalized separate legal codes for citizens and subjects within the same nation. Moreover, by recognizing natives’ rights to live according to their own customary laws, the government actually sanctioned the coexistence of numerous, if implicit, ethnic civil codes. As in the ancien régime, legal status became a function of one’s social category rather than of national membership or territorial residence. Yet the administration’s attempt to specify systems of customary law was not a premodern regression. It was an instance of colonial modernization that, like its European counterpart, was intended to deliver less arbitrary, more impartial justice to local populations according to procedural norms and scientific presuppositions. But rather than correspond to the supposedly transcultural and transhistorical axioms of liberal political economy and contract theory, native justice in West Africa would have to conform to the delimited ethnologies of countless African ethnic groups. 145 A more universally equitable, impartial, and scientifically adequate native justice system would paradoxically require legal judgments to be based on particular sociocultural customs. From the turn of the century, officials recognized that rational justice in the federation entailed ethnographic inquiry. In 1901 Governor Clozel of Côte d’Ivoire had ordered a survey of customary law and created a Commission of Native Customs to classify the data. 146 In 1905, Governor-General Roume circulated a new questionnaire designed to “facilitate the methodical and rational

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classification” of native customs for “the compilation of a general volume on customary law that will become the rule for native tribunals in civil matters.” 147 Clozel again took the lead as governor of Haut-Sénégal-Niger in 1909 and created his own questionnaire on civil and criminal customs. 148 When Carde reorganized the native justice system in 1924, he noted that “in French West Africa . . . there is no single local custom in civil matters. There are different customs according to a person’s—actually their family’s—race and social category.” Accordingly, he stressed colonial courts’ need for “native assessors more informed about the special customs of the colony’s diverse races.” 149 Brévié then extended this policy orientation, declaring that “the observance of custom, the source of native law, essentially remains the unshakeable rule.” 150 This pledge to “observe” customs implied that the administration would watch native society in order to learn about its customary practices and would respect these customs in its own administrative practices. Brévié explained that the dual justice system still required detailed knowledge of “native juridical customs and institutions, especially those concerning the family and property.” 151 Brévié built directly upon the administrative-scientific legacy of Clozel, Roume, Villamur, and Delafosse. Citing their scholarly efforts, he announced that “the moment has arrived to assemble these elements, to complete them, to generalize this research, to coordinate it, to proceed methodically toward a complete inventory of native juridical customs and institutions in the colonies of French West Africa.” 152 In conjunction with his 1931 decree on native justice, Brévié commissioned a survey of West African indigenous practices regarding labor, exchange, contracts, property, inheritance, family, marriage, and religion. He instructed experienced local administrators to carry out the enumeration and classification of customs in their own districts according to “a patient, prudent, and scrupulous method.” 153 Attached to this order was a detailed questionnaire enumerating all aspects of native civil affairs that could guide such inquiries. According to his plan, regional lists of customs would be compiled over two years and then synthesized into compendiums of native civil law (coutumiers) by commissions of experts in each colony. Eight years later, despite 123 responses from field agents, the project remained incomplete. A central Commission of Codification composed of French judges and colonial administrators had met in 1935, 1937, and 1939 but was unable to produce coherent coutumiers for the colonies. Twenty-eight submissions were published, but the authors warned that they were based on imperfect data and should not be used as definitive texts by native tribunals. They modestly hoped that this collection would motivate officials to produce a more complete

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one in the future. 154 Almost a decade of work thus concluded with the same call to action that had initiated it. One concrete result of Brévié’s survey was Léon Geismar’s collection of Senegalese civil customs (1933), which was less “a compendium for judges than a work of explanation and orientation for judges,” a simple “transcription of usages.” 155 Members of the commission blamed this disappointing outcome on legally imprecise and arbitrary data. They criticized the administration for creating inadequate surveys without a real methodology and for delegating this work to administrators with inadequate ethnographic and legal training. 156 But the government’s inability to produce coherent coutumiers was also due to tensions within the very attempt to codify customary law without creating fixed legal codes for natives. Colonial humanism’s dual imperative suffused interwar debates about legal codification. Reformers wanted to rationalize native justice by objectifying local cultural norms and social practices into unified and precisely defined codes that could guide legal judgments. They also argued that unless traditional laws were modified through codification, they would be incapable of addressing novel issues related to social changes provoked by French colonialism. 157 Yet reformers also feared that creating native legal codes would impose European norms on African societies and distort the customs that the administration had pledged to respect. 158 More importantly, these opponents of codification either believed that fixed codes could not be revised quickly enough to keep up with the rapid transformations taking place in native societies or that fixing codes would “immobilize native customs” and impede the social evolution that the administration was encouraging. 159 Carde sought to create a justice system that would respect native customs even while reflecting the inexorable transition in colonial Africa from collective to individual consciousness. 160 Inspector Sol referred to the “insoluble” and “impossible” tension between the ossified conceptions of local customs maintained by native assessors assigned by the courts and the ongoing evolution of customs under the influence of colonial contact, which the courts also had to take into account. 161 Brévié acknowledged that native legal codes could function both to block and to stimulate African social progress. 162 Codification would simultaneously fix and revise indigenous customs. 163 Brévié’s inability to create coutumiers for AOF, compounded by the contradictions surrounding codification, may be read as a policy failure. Yet the administration’s pledge to protect indigenous society by observing customary law also became an instrument of social regulation. Roume’s original 1905 circular indicated that although the native justice system would “respect customs,” it should also allow for their “progress . . . normalization . . . or improvement,”

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which could even be induced “with the cooperation of native tribunals themselves.” 164 A generation later, Geismar’s collection of Senegalese civil customs was used in precisely this manner. Designed to help colonial judges respect local practices, it also proposed juridical interventions that would prohibit forced and child marriages, limit bridewealth payments (so wives could not be “bought”), and legalize divorce by mutual consent. 165 He argued that such texts could help judges “prepare native opinion for decisions that . . . must be made to adapt the native to his new form of life.” 166 In 1933 the governor of Senegal told administrators they should use Geismar’s legal text to “guide jurisprudence in a direction that favors the healthy social development of your administrés,” in order to “lead judges, little by little, to espouse our point of view and orient their jurisprudence in a direction that is consistent with our general policy.” 167 This civil law manual thus began as descriptive, became prescriptive, and ended as an instrument of social change. 168 By supposedly allowing colonial subjects to live in their own communities, regulated by customary civil law, the administration sought to maintain the integrity of village society in West Africa. Yet the very practices of ethnographic documentation that were designed to differentiate village communities modified native customs and encouraged social transformations. In the case of native chiefs, French officials were even more explicit about using custom as an instrument of social management. Interwar policies on customary rulers in AOF, like those regarding native justice, linked discovery and creation, documentation and intervention, interdiction and promotion. Nineteenth-century French pacification campaigns targeted local forms of slavery and the tyrannical power of aristocratic African rulers, who were treated as antirepublican obstacles to French hegemony. But decades spent eliminating indigenous political institutions had only accelerated the dissolution of village life and encouraged sociopolitical disorder. 169 In 1909, GovernorGeneral Ponty mandated that indigenous groups must be ruled by one of their own members. Although this policy used the language of cultural recognition, it was meant to undermine existing regional political formations in AOF and institute more direct French authority over malleable local populations. 170 During World War I, a severe shortage of European personnel led Van Vollenhoven to issue directives on the recruitment, treatment, and control of local rulers, whom he identified as indispensable political auxiliaries. His strategy was to use legitimate chiefs (approved by the population and invested with moral and material authority) controlled by French officials as instruments of paternal government. He characterized Africans as children for whom

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distinctions between public and private, or between individual and family or group, were meaningless. 171 A pastoral type of administration based on close contact between the state and the population could therefore be grounded in a familial form of authority. Reversing Ponty’s logic, Van Vollenhoven believed that French sovereignty depended on buttressing, rather than dismantling, indigenous social forms. Postwar governors-general shared this “deep conviction that well-functioning chieftaincies are the cornerstone of our native policy.” 172 Their desire to invest greater authority in rural chiefs was not only based on a pragmatic calculation that it was more efficient and less costly to employ native auxiliaries. The rehabilitation of traditional chiefs was an element of the broader policy reorientation that sought to protect village communities in the interests of development, social management, and political order. Historians often emphasize the turn to native chiefs as signaling the doctrinal shift from assimilation to association. More important, for this argument, is the contradictory character of the administration’s policies toward native chiefs. Through these indigenous auxiliaries, postwar administrators acted out the vexed issue of African collectivity and individuality. Carde reminded administrators that “customary rule should be the most solid fulcrum of the lever with which we propose to raise [élever] the masses.” 173 Brévié pledged to extend greater authority to the “most intelligent and dignified of the existing chiefs who will be our intermediaries and our spokesmen.” 174 Carde and Brévié extended Van Vollenhoven’s original project to incorporate culturally legitimate, properly empowered, and politically subordinate African chiefs into the governing apparatus. Their program also responded to Van Vollenhoven’s call to prepare future generations of chiefly auxiliaries. Brévié in particular believed that rapid social evolution in the federation required African customary rulers to be modernized if they were to be protected. 175 Yet throughout the interwar period, the native chief system never functioned as planned. Commandants across Niger resisted carrying out Brévié’s directives to empower indigenous leaders and councils on the grounds that local populations were not yet sufficiently evolved to assume such political responsibilities. 176 From coastal Dahomey to the Sudanese hinterland, local administrators implicated themselves in local political conflicts and covertly manipulated the selection of customary leaders. 177 In Porto-Novo, officials were drawn into complex succession struggles, treated popular leaders like criminals, and allowed indigenous chiefs to become conduits of political unrest. 178 The administration was often unable to balance its desire to respect customary lineages and community decisions with its need to maintain public order.

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Native chiefs were poorly paid and were seen as unreliable collaborators. Typically they could not speak French and relied on interpreters with whom they were believed to be colluding (through marriage alliances) against colonial authorities. Some chiefs were distrusted by local populations for being French lackeys. Others, as in Haute-Volta, were punished, even imprisoned, by the administration for abusing excessively independent powers. Customary chiefs accused of corruption, extortion, and oppression were criticized for exploiting rural populations in ways that were inevitable, given their official mandate to recruit labor and collect taxes. 179 The very chiefs who had been elevated as insurance against social disorder were blamed for generating popular dissatisfaction with French rule. They were reduced to subordinate functionaries of the French bureaucracy without being accorded the salaries or supervision extended to actual African agents of the colonial service. 180 We may reasonably conclude that postwar French policies on customary rule were failures. But we must also recognize that such implementation problems were a function of the contradictory imperatives underlying policies that treated the chiefs simultaneously as auxiliaries and antagonists. These chiefs posed chronic problems for an administration that needed yet resented them. 181 The administration’s first dilemma was how to cultivate indigenous leaders who were legitimate but subordinate. African chiefs who were appointed by and blatantly served the colonial state quickly lost the local support that they needed in order to function as effective political intermediaries. Without material resources, their legitimacy also suffered. Yet any attempt by the administration to invest them with greater power or higher pay only increased the public perception that they were French functionaries. But if African chiefs had enjoyed genuine autonomy, authority, and popular support, as the administration desired, they could easily have challenged French power. 182 Brévié pledged to protect chiefly legitimacy by basing selection on a practical ethnography that documented local political practices, ruling lineages, and customs of chiefly succession. He instructed officials to grant these chiefs more power over local affairs. 183 In order to counteract the supposed tendency of chiefs to become local despots, he instructed administrators to provide them with inconspicuous financial compensation, to treat them with respect, and to honor them publicly for their good service. 184 He also reminded them that “without surveillance, the best among them could become corrupt.” 185 Brévié’s commitment to supporting culturally legitimate chiefs was counterbalanced by his need to control them. He explained that in naming local chiefs, “the principle is to diverge as little as possible from tradition.” But he also

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warned that “a chief who is hostile to us obviously must either submit or disappear.” 186 In the field, customary chiefs supported by the colonial state confronted political resistance from rural populations, as in the Ouyhigouya district of HauteVolta in 1933. 187 In addition to such chronic struggles, tensions between chiefs and évolués also sharpened during the 1930s. Brévié warned that “as a native elite develops and the mentality of our administrés becomes more like our own, the ancient conception of a chief invested with quasi-mystical power weakens.” In places such as Dahomey and Côte d’Ivoire, colonial subjects were seen to be evolving more quickly than their traditional leaders. 188 In 1935, this conflict became volatile when the administration in Cotonou prosecuted the editors of La Voix du Dahomey for their oppositional journalism. Coastal elites responded in part by attacking native chiefs for cooperating with the colonial state and receiving preferential legal treatment. In response, Dakar defined native chiefs as simply auxiliaries rather than government functionaries. They would henceforth be judged in native courts. 189 African chiefs thus became entangled in the governmental project to preserve and transform indigenous social relations. The administration had turned to traditional leaders to prevent rural communities from unraveling and to restrain the disorderly elements of a modernizing population. Paradoxically, chiefs could only protect village institutions if they modernized themselves. Brévié called on this “old aristocracy” to adapt to changing colonial conditions. 190 He told administrators, “we must convince all chiefs that they have a duty to keep up with circumstances . . . and precede the young on the path of progress, in order to maintain intact their prestige and moral influence.” 191 It was hoped that these elders could guide social evolution by “preventing and neutralizing” rural dissidents. 192 At the same time, native chiefs were also regarded as possessing a backward mentality that was antithetical to colonial development. The government believed that better-educated chiefs would be more sympathetic to French policies. Rehabilitating the nineteenth-century schools for the sons of chiefs, Brévié prepared a new generation for their “future social function” through instruction in administration, finances, accounting, the judiciary, and political economy, as well as moral and civil training. These youths were not only charged with guiding future colonial development; they would also share this “more modern mentality,” including the latest agricultural and administrative techniques, with their traditional fathers. In this way, older chiefs would “retain the attachment and respect of their subjects and constitute a solid armature for the native society of tomorrow.” 193 In order to avoid creating an educated but

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deracinated generation of leaders who were alienated from village life, the administration kept these future chiefs in the general school population. 194 This modernizing impulse led to a 1936 circular that allowed Africans who had obtained French citizenship to serve as native chiefs. 195 Administrators hoped that a new generation of educated and French-identified chiefs would promote colonial policies focused on social and economic development. The administration thus used customary institutions in contradictory ways: to retard and to accelerate social evolution, to check the disruptive power of modernizing elites, and to create a new generation of elite chiefs who would modernize traditional authorities. The dual concern of these policies was expressed clearly by a field agent who warned his superiors in Dakar that “certain chiefs, still too dominated by customary superstitions, lagged behind their subjects [administrés]; others, too modern, were overly invested with European powers and obtained . . . an authority that they abused.” 196 Native chiefs, in other words, had to be more modern but not too modern. Colonial humanism’s interest in customary authority was not about freezing tradition. Reforms were designed to modify indigenous institutions, which could then moderate disruptive social change and initiate needed social improvements. Brévié explicitly proposed that in those cases in which custom led a community to select chiefs from branches of the family not included in the new schools for future chiefs, the administration should transform those customs so that only children who had been trained in these French schools would be chosen. He reasoned that “certainly customs must be respected; but to a certain degree they must submit to the influence of morals and progress.” 197 Because chiefs were seen to be in close daily contact with their subjects, they would be used to “know and monitor” the “needs and interests” of populations whose rapid social evolution exceeded the administration’s power of surveillance. 198 Mirroring the native justice system, this policy simultaneously recognized a customary institution, transformed it, used it to transform other aspects of customary society, and protected it by modernizing it. I am not arguing that the administration claimed to respect customs while its real goal was to destroy them. Rather, I am suggesting that the very administrative practices used to know, respect, and protect native society were themselves transformative, just as those improving practices designed to promote social welfare fixed natives to cultures needing improvement. Customary institutions were not simply deformed into instruments of direct political repression. They were integrated into a broader welfarist project to monitor and manage native social relations, which was characterized by a dual imperative to preserve and transform them. The claim here is not that an ambivalent colonial state was

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unable to decide whether to transform Africans into bourgeois individuals or to confine them within their cultures. Colonial humanism was a form of government that was compelled to pursue both objectives simultaneously. – – – In AOF, interwar administrators sought to balance the demands of economic profitability and political stability in an era of rapid social change. Colonial humanism was at once an inducement to and a compensation for colonial development, a cause and consequence of the gathering crisis of French authority. The administration’s concern with population improvement, peasant productivity, social development, and native welfare was as much a variation as a violation of postliberal republicanism. Yet one lesson of postwar practical science, which became a precept of interwar scientific administration, was that Africans should be recognized as members of integral social formations. In AOF, therefore, postliberal policies entailed administering native societies as distinct and dynamic wholes. The governmental challenge was not only to maintain a racialized divide between rulers and ruled but to engage local populations simultaneously as abstract individuals and concrete collectivities. The dual imperative to transform and to preserve indigenous social relations inflected each of colonial humanism’s interdependent economic, social, and political projects. Initiatives to produce yet proscribe individuality, as well as to defend yet dissolve collectivity, were shaped by a doubled and contradictory political rationality. Despite appearances, World War I did not mark the shift from a universalist republican colonialism committed to assimilation to a racist conservative colonialism committed to association. Instead, it accelerated a long-term transition from the old civilizing mission in which social policies were often used to justify rule, into a new colonial humanism in which welfarism became a modality of rule, one that was modern and illiberal, republican and racist, universalizing and particularizing. By treating welfarist administration in AOF systemically, we can recognize that numerous initiatives in diverse domains were elements of a broader logic, method, and form of government. Instead of tabulating policy failures by fetishizing the contradiction between ideology and implementation, I have elaborated an intrinsic contradiction, at the core of colonial humanism, that was expressed across a variety of policies in discourses as well as practices. However, such continuities do not mean that colonial humanism ever became an official state project whose proposals were fully institutionalized. Its coherence as a political rationality neither prevented everyday dysfunction nor precluded

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policy debates at all levels of government. I have indicated some of the impasses into which attempts to promote development, individualism, and customary institutions repeatedly led. But these unintended consequences were not arbitrary. They were intelligible effects of colonial humanism’s dual administrative imperatives, features of a political rationality that was alternately effective and self-undermining. If colonial reforms were unevenly realized, their precepts, techniques, and objectives inflected innumerable government projects that circulated among Paris, Dakar, colonial capitals, and field posts. Interwar experiments linking development, welfare, and culturalism would also guide native policies in the decades leading up to decolonization, from Popular Front campaigns to post– World War II development programs funded by the state. 199

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0.0pt P The tension in French West Africa between the administration’s universalizing and particularizing imperatives was partly stabilized by a policy of temporal deferral that racialized and disenfranchised Africans within a republican framework. The doubled character of colonial humanism was not only selfundermining; it was also politically effective. We have seen that interwar imperialism was characterized by the closer articulation of metropolitan and colonial societies within the framework of an imperial nation-state. Within AOF, rapid social transformations and the movement to reorient colonial government incited one another. Both of these issues were condensed in postwar debates about the juridical status of its colonial populations. The existence of a growing class of African elites compelled the administration to address questions about the relationships among race, nationality, and citizenship that were raised by the colonial situation. By World War I, after decades of rationalizing civilian administration, educated Africans were no longer anomalous. Local elites were indispensable auxiliaries of the administration, proto-bourgeois anchors of political stability, and seemingly embodied evidence that its social project was working. Yet they also posed a potentially grave threat to colonial authority. Native policies could not ignore this new generation of indigenous actors. The administration’s

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dual imperative to modernize and primitivize Africans was again revealed in its attempt to promote social evolution and prohibit civil society. Colonial humanism simultaneously responded to and intensified the problem of elites.

Education and Elites In 1924, Carde introduced legislation to reorganize the colonial education system in AOF. 1 His objective was to decentralize training, diversify school curricula, and increase the types of schools (professional, agricultural, and technical) available to Africans. This plan was consistent with Carde’s broader strategy: on the one hand, to promote social stability and economic development by governing a given population rooted in a particular milieu, and on the other, to cultivate a small cadre of well-trained African auxiliaries. Carde wanted to create a school system flexible enough to adapt to West Africa’s “very diverse regions, climates, and races,” each of which was endowed with distinct “resources and aspirations.” He also believed that decentralized education, more attentive to regional requirements, would help the administration develop African human resources more rationally. The existing system was training more young people than the administration could absorb. As a result, “unemployed students returning to villages risk becoming déclassé, thereby rendering useless the money invested and instruction given to them.” As a corrective, the administration believed that elites would need African cultural training, just as villagers needed European technical training. Under the direction of Hardy, who was director of education in AOF, courses on colonial history and African culture were added to the urban school curriculum. 2 Through Albert Charton, the reformist educator who replaced Hardy, Brévié continued this campaign to Africanize colonial schools. 3 He subscribed to Carde’s belief, which he quoted approvingly, that “all native policy is a type of pedagogy.” 4 Brévié indicated that while colonial schools were one among many “instruments of our colonial project,” it was also the case that “our entire colonial project is educative. . . . The school engages our whole policy, and even our colonial philosophy.” Given the logic of colonial humanism, this would mean that education would also have to protect the integrity of African societies. Extending Carde’s concern with decentralized and adapted education, Brévié specified that his native policy was as committed to educating rural masses as it was urban évolués. He warned against only building elite schools

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that would create “new classes” quickly alienated from the rest of the colonial population. Popular education would focus on “preparing peasants, pastoralists, and artisans for the future,” thereby making “the school a symbol and example of a new life, happier and more expansive.” At the same time, these rural schools would help “native society evolve on its own terms, by respecting its customs.” 5 Brévié wanted to diversify the existing network of regional colonial schools that prepared gifted Africans to complete a uniform course of study based on the French national curriculum. He established a parallel system of what were called Rural Popular Schools. 6 In addition to teaching village students basic mathematics and French language, these schools were also supposed to instruct them about their own social world, providing them with practical skills appropriate for their rural lives. Brévié described this new type of school as “a farm and a workshop, a clinic and practical laboratory” concerned with “the improvement of native life on the ground.” 7 He explained that “the school is made for the village and by the village; it responds to its needs. . . . the programs will be simple, elementary, and frankly practical,” emphasizing “lessons on topics chosen according to native life” and the free use of “local idioms.” 8 He summarized that “in order for the native to go to school, the school must go to the native.” 9 Or, in Delavignette’s formulation, the rural popular school “is not a village school, but the village in the school.” 10 These popular schools had the paradoxical task of creating traditional Africans. But, as with other aspects of colonial humanism, the administration’s desire to adapt education to indigenous culture and capacities was coupled with a transformative imperative: “this education should support native morality, which has retained its power to balance and discipline, even while it will attempt to better instill France’s humanist project [oeuvre humaine] in Africa.” 11 These schools worked simultaneously to fix Africans to their local cultures and socialize them as French colonial subjects. Alongside of the rural schools, metropolitan-style French education continued to exist and expand in West Africa during these years. Despite his interest in adapted education, Brévié still identified colonial educators as “missionaries” whose goal was “the constitution of a native elite, whose greedy passion [élan] for . . . French culture is reassuring.” 12 Primary, normal, and secondary schools were to be the principal vehicles for cultivating a class of loyal African évolués to serve as improved agents of further colonial improvement. 13 If adapted schools were needed to protect village communities, higher education would ensure the production of qualified French-identified native auxiliaries: teachers, medical assistants, public health workers, agricultural instructors,

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veterinarians, census collectors, interpreters, accountants, office clerks, and the like. The administration created precisely the class of elites whose emergence the rural popular schools were designed to prevent. These “new natives” would serve as “interpreters with regard to the masses . . . the educators of backward races.” 14 Their instrumental importance for colonial humanism was affirmed in a 1932 memorandum: “it is with the support of these auxiliaries, drawn from the native milieu, that today we pursue the regeneration and development [mise en valeur] of the country. . . . It is with the collaboration of its elite that we instruct the mass, that we multiply the institutions of assistance and welfare [prévoyance], that we develop an economic infrastructure; we administer the colony by leaning on [this elite].” 15 Emergent African évolués were identified as a vanguard of economic and social development who would function as intermediaries between administrators and indigenous populations. Reformers called on the government to trust educated elites to play a greater role in local administration, especially given their privileged access to regional sociocultural knowledge. 16 But they recognized that educated Africans could also threaten the colonial order they had been formed to serve. In 1924, the challenge of colonial education was outlined by Léon Barety, a deputy in the National Assembly. He acknowledged that “it would be criminal to leave our native subjects in ignorance,” yet warned that education could also “create rebels, discontented, déclassé natives . . . [and] plant seeds of rancor in the people who prepare to revolt.” 17 Albert Sarraut warned that colonial education, which he strongly advocated, inevitably created “a dreadful dilemma”: to restrict education and risk popular protest or expand education and risk the consequences of elite unemployment. Sarraut sought to reconcile these parallel dangers by recommending that higher education only be available to “a strictly chosen elite” so that diplomas could be carefully correlated with the number of available administrative jobs. 18 For Sarraut, the “dreadful dilemma” posed by education and elites was fueling the crisis of authority that was unfolding during the 1930s. The postwar administration regarded educated elites with the same mixture of hope and fear that they expressed toward individuality and social evolution. Reformers struggled to address “evolved” Africans’ legitimate desires for education, jobs, political rights, and municipal autonomy without creating impossible expectations for a community whose underemployment and disenfranchisement were structurally overdetermined. But they feared that whether they provided or withheld higher education, they would produce a generation of ungovernable and “embittered déclassés” who often became

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“subversive influences” [mauvais bergers] on their countrymen. 19 The very auxiliaries of colonial order that the administration had worked so hard to produce became classified with other disruptive native groups, such as hostile villagers, tax resistors, demobilized African soldiers, Islamic dissidents, and Christian converts. 20 Dangerous manifestations of elite dissent in coastal Dahomey, the site of the great 1923 tax revolt, reappeared in a similar 1932 disturbance led by women. 21 The following year Governor de Coppet informed the administration that évolués in Dakar were beginning to “denounce, critique, and accuse the administration and chiefs” and refused to pay their taxes. 22 Officials criticized elites for publishing periodicals that “spread a spirit of rebellion among the population.” Yet when one administrator paraphrased their political demand, he clearly implied that it was legitimate: “We are the most intellectually gifted among the natives of French West Africa; our success in the colony’s most advanced schools is proof. However, no political liberties have been granted to us yet.” In 1934, de Coppet again advised Dakar to take seriously this desire “to be granted the status of citizen and to enjoy the same civic rights” accorded to Senegalese from the Four Communes. 23 But rather than address the issues raised by discontented elites, the colonial government sought to prevent the circulation of dangerous ideas. A surveillance network was supposed to identify “troublemakers” and intercept “antiFrench propaganda” before it entered the West African federation. 24 The administration pledged “to prosecute native journalists suspected of maintaining relations with metropolitan extremist groups, and who persist, despite every injunction, in provoking disorder.” 25 Officials seemed to believe that they were facing a problem caused by extraordinary and extraneous influences. Officials warned that disaffected populations were vulnerable to “nationalist propaganda.” 26 Delavignette, for example, cautioned that they were likely to become “feverish with African pride” and could promote a dangerous nativism: “beware of racism, among noirs as much as among whites. In Africa, it may turn noirs against French universalism.” 27 Yet administrative reports systematically minimized and misinterpreted the scope and content of elite dissent. Political disturbances were dismissed as isolated incidents. In Dahomey, officials blamed resistance on “professional agitators” spreading “revolutionary ideas” through “extremist propaganda” so as to provoke “social disintegration.” They singled out a “particular class” composed of educated natives and métis of Portuguese descent as “arrogant” and “animated by the desire to stand out and . . . lead the masses.” 28 In 1937 a group of évolués submitted a list of

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grievances in the name of “the native people of Côte d’Ivoire” to the minister of colonies. But the administration dismissed the group as “a handful of malcontents” and reported that “the most evolved and educated young people” remained politically compliant. 29 Another current of opinion blamed indigenous unrest on outside agitators, usually identified with Communism, rather than acknowledge the growth of Pan-Africanism and anticolonial nationalism. 30 Many in the administration believed that “nationalism, this unexpected form of internationalist propaganda,” was too sophisticated a doctrine to draw the attention of local natives. 31 Social unrest in West Africa intensified under the Popular Front when several metropolitan labor laws were extended to the federation. Local syndicates were immediately created, African branches of communist and socialist parties became active, and dockworkers, bakers, and electricians went on strike. But the administration’s response was to blame French people residing in the federation for “persuading natives to abandon their work.” 32 When administrators noticed “a minor resurgence of Pan-Negro and xenophobic movements in Senegal,” they blamed Nazi propaganda in the Arab press directed at Muslim natives (including an Arabic translation of Mein Kampf ) as well as the galvanizing effects of the war in Ethiopia, Islamic dissidents, and international anti-imperialism. Senegalese nationalist activity was reported to be safely confined to municipal electoral campaigns. Racial emancipation movements and militant trade unions were discounted, and évolués were described as only wanting better civil service jobs. 33 In coastal Côte d’Ivoire the growing tension between evolved youths and traditional leaders was blamed on Christian missionaries. Their work supposedly produced “deracinated natives with indecisive aspirations,” leading to “divisions . . . within families, dissent within society, and difficulties for the administration.” 34 A decade of growing discontent thus put the administration on guard against the very elite it had worked to form. 35 Brévié predicted that colonial education would create not only “staunchly loyal collaborators” but “embittered and uprooted . . . denigrators and enemies.” 36 Most dangerous, in his eyes, were educated Africans who could not find work in the colonial administration, on the one hand, but were alienated from their rural communities and their cultural norms, on the other. 37 Whether resisting customary authority in native villages or fomenting social disorder in growing cities, this group threatened the socalled colonial peace. The social evolution of colonial elites may have been seen to be a desirable and inevitable process, but it would also have to be supervised, guided, governed.

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Racism, Temporality, and Rights The administration’s concern with keeping évolués tied to village communities, in the name of cultural respect and social stability, became a way of fixing them to their Africanity, which was then defined as irreconcilable with French citizenship. Despite their concern with native welfare, reformers would only support granting full political rights to exceptional individuals rather than to the general African population. But this exclusion was consistent with the logic of colonial humanism, not evidence of its bad faith. Although administrative racism functioned to disenfranchise even educated Africans, it operated within a republican idiom. Colonial humanism was a historically specific racial formation that was self-consciously antiracist. 38 Sarraut declared: “the dignity and capacity of a human being is not measured . . . by skin color, but by the value of his individual conscience.” 39 Similarly, Delavignette invoked “the humanism that unites us” and declared “there is no difference between you and me except Black and White.” But he also asserted that in order “to restore [Africans] as human beings,” colonial policy should “save African civilizations.” As we have seen, colonial humanism was not simply a universalism. Its antiracism was grounded in an ethnologically informed cultural relativism that recognized Africans as members of different but legitimate societies. In this spirit, Delavignette asks rhetorically, “Fraternity in difference, is this so difficult to understand?” 40 Interwar reformers criticized policies that treated Africans either as permanent racial inferiors or as fundamentally the same as Europeans. Throughout his career, for example, Delafosse had contested biological conceptions of African racial inferiority. 41 But his affirmation, even valorization, of African particularity allowed him to oppose full French educations for native elites, their attempts to assimilate European cultural forms, and citizenship for colonial subjects. Delafosse’s antiracism ultimately worked to separate and fix natives within a confining cultural tradition largely constructed by French ethno-administrative practices. 42 Interwar reformers sought to articulate concrete particularity and abstract universality within a new cultural humanism. But underlying this synthesis were cultural racism and evolutionary humanism. Consider Sarraut’s claim that “as soon as [the native] shows himself capable . . . of rising toward a higher destiny, no text, no dogma will be able to refuse . . . his right to demand the benefits of this advancement.” But this promise included a temporal caveat: “[native] aspirations to the highest positions of authority will be satisfied in a certain future whose date is still indeterminate.” For Sarraut, this delay was

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because “differences, at times immense, separate the stages of evolution of different indigenous races. . . . We must, in each colony, adapt to the special character of the milieu, to the local needs, and to the mentalities of distinct races.” 43 Such differences were understood to be provisional but defining. If, according to Sarraut, colonized peoples would enjoy civil and political equality when they were capable, that time would always be not now. Like Mauss’s ethnology, colonial humanism’s antiracism depended on an implicit evolutionary logic in which cultural difference was seen as a matter of time. African society was not defined as inferior; it was simply late. Natives had a capacity for citizenship but were presently too different, insufficiently evolved, to exercise it. Carde had reminded field agents that “[natives] belong to a society several centuries behind ours.” 44 Brévié characterized colonial France as a nation, having “reached the age of adulthood,” that had developed a consciousness of “its duties regarding its colonies, the children that it had birthed.” 45 For Brévié, the very “justification for colonization” was “entirely in this protective gesture of a civilization at its apogee that reaches out to immature societies [les sociétés mineurs] and leads them by the hand along the road of progress.” 46 But administrators had to reconcile this inherited vision of the civilizing mission with its commitment to respect indigenous customs. It did so by advocating guided social development that did not violate African culture, which would always be relatively backward. Although the administration ranked African cultures according to their supposed degree of social evolution, it also insisted in all cases on the native’s “true form” as “an incapable minor whom we must educate, without being in a foolish hurry, by allowing him to evolve within the framework of his own customary institutions.” 47 Brévié believed that the premature extension of rights was not only culturally disrespectful but that it would produce social “upheavals” and “whirlwinds.” 48 Colonial humanism’s commitment to protect indigenous societies presupposed and promoted this evolutionary delay. African social evolution was seen as a desirable ideal but an immediate danger. As Brévié explained, “the tutor soon tries to interest the pupil in practical matters” and “places him in an apprenticeship until one day he will be emancipated. . . . But primitive peoples require a long apprenticeship for liberty.” 49 Administrators were refigured as paternal tutors conducting their charges toward a political equality that would be indefinitely deferred. This principle of deferred development helps us to understand why the dominant interwar figures for the colonial relationship were those of parent– child or teacher–student. In the Western liberal tradition, there exists a seemingly natural and ethically legitimate difference in capacity, rights, and power

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between parents and children or teachers and pupils. But because parenting and pedagogy always promise that the child will eventually evolve beyond this structure of inequality into adulthood, the relationship does not appear to be unjust. Within these paternal idioms, where inferiority is conditional rather than ontological, the relation of domination is either occluded or accepted. Using these same tropes, humanist administrators invoked African political immaturity to ground a similar form of unremarkable inequality. In this schema, administrators would combine pastoral modes of care characteristic of a parent, a teacher, and even a governess. If after World War I, the stereotype of Africans as big children partly superseded that of dangerous savages, this did not indicate a softening of colonial racism. Rather, it expressed an institutional process that racialized them in a specific way: as different but improving; destined to become autonomous individuals but currently too immature to exercise political rights responsibly. Reformers may have promoted the idea of “fraternity in difference,” but by undertaking simultaneously to transform natives into bourgeois individuals and to fix them within their groups, their policies maintained Africans in a provisional yet perpetual hierarchy of difference. The racializing effects of colonial humanism’s dual imperative had concrete political consequences. The logic of temporal deferral provided prominent reformers with an argument against extending citizenship to Africans. Sarraut’s commitment to colonial education was founded on his nonracist belief in “the dignity and capacity of human beings.” Yet rather than advocate political universality for colonial subjects, he warned against the “error and danger of the massive extension of the rights of French citizens to a still passive multitude.” 50 Sarraut’s humanist conception of Greater France was built on two suppositions. First, the colonies are inhabited by subjects (to be administered) not objects (to be coerced). Indigenous populations could no longer be treated as raw material whose land could be directly expropriated, labor forced, and obedience compelled. He maintained that natives were human beings who deserved to be treated and governed as such. Their social development and welfare were necessary preconditions and consequences of French authority. But Sarraut’s second presupposition was that these colonies are inhabited by subjects not citizens. Granting French citizenship rights to native masses, he argued, would be “an error as pernicious to our protégés as to France itself,” an “abdication of sovereignty” by “the protector state,” an unethical and impractical “act of tyranny.” 51 He argued that colonial subjects would be unwilling to abandon their own civil customs for the French civil code. Because these politically immature people were easily influenced by traditional sorcerers and modern

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agitators, they would be incapable of exercising electoral rights responsibly. Colonial citizenship, he concluded, would lead to social devolution as ancient forms of servitude resurfaced to undermine liberal colonial policies. Interwar reformers concurred. Hardy endorsed the majority opinion that opposed mass naturalization for “populations who have barely left childhood.” He only supported citizenship for “exceptional individuals” who proved themselves qualified by virtue of education, character, and public service. “Naturalization,” he argued, should be “an enticement and reward” that might eventually lead to “the fusion of tutor-societies and pupil-societies.” 52 Also raising the specter of political immaturity, Labouret predicted that if the administration granted voting rights to Africans as a concession to social unrest, elections would be manipulated for private interests. 53 He later warned that mass citizenship would put the control of the nation in the hands of 70 million “men of color” who would enjoy an electoral majority over 42 million “Frenchmen.” Labouret claimed that ordinary Africans wanted only respectful treatment, a fair judiciary, and lower taxes, not political rights. 54 Reformers used colonial humanism’s discourse of cultural respect to oppose African citizenship. Insisting that “only the similar can be assimilated,” Labouret argued that Africans could not simply “be pulled out of their milieu by virtue of a legislative act and forced into the framework of our sentiments, thoughts, and institutions, which are the sum of Western experiences and white progress for millennia.” 55 He referred to French electoral practices as “complicated modalities” that “could not be transposed impudently to savannas and tropical forests.” 56 On the one hand, he indicated that colonial populations could only become French citizens if they disavowed their own cultural membership. On the other, he explained that such disavowal was not only practically impossible but a violation of the administration’s ethic to respect native customs. Brévié too invoked cultural relativism against allowing “backward” African populations to administer themselves without “colonial supervision.” He called it “premature” to introduce European political institutions to people who “retain a deep attachment to their customary institutions and do not easily adapt to innovations that are far too removed from their atavistic conceptions.” 57 Metropolitan legal scholars outlined the dilemmas posed by either extending or denying French citizenship to culturally distinct peoples. Arthur Girault predicted that complications would arise if naturalized natives were to possess a different juridical status than their fellow family members. Yet he also believed that plans to allow colonial citizens to retain their customary civil status were unworkable. 58 His colleague Henri Solus agreed that this duality would pose

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a legal anomaly. Practically, colonial governments would then find it difficult to determine whether a given individual should be treated as French or native in civil registries and the courts, especially in cases concerning contracts and property. Conceptually, Solus believed that subjecting natives to French public law and customary civil law was “excessive and unreasonable,” given that “each of them corresponds to profoundly different civilizations and social organizations.” In a challenge to universalist jurisprudence, he argued that it was a mistake “to seriously ignore the relationship that ties the law to the milieu in which it is destined to act.” 59 Colonial humanism, we will see, presumed and produced this tension between customary relations and French citizenship. In 1932, Brévié acknowledged the dilemma that government policy created for those elite exceptions who were eligible to become citizens. “Exemplary individuals” were given “access to la cité française.” But French citizenship required “the total and definitive renunciation of customary moeurs, institutions, and rules.” Brévié conceded that because many évolués were unwilling to pay this price, they “remain in an intermediary position, inferior to citizens, superior to their countrymen.” 60 If reformers used political immaturity and cultural difference to oppose colonial citizenship, they also recognized the perils of ignoring elite demands for wider rights. Sarraut repeatedly warned that French authority would be undermined as long as natives’ legitimate sociopolitical desires were frustrated. 61 In the early 1930s, as economic, social, and political crises unfolded in AOF, Labouret raised concerns about educated youth who were unable to find jobs commensurate with their skills. They would be compelled to return to villages where “they no longer want to live” with people “whom they despise.” Members of this “disappointed, unhappy, hostile” group would then become “professional agitators, fomenters of trouble.” 62 He proposed responding to this dilemma by granting political rights slowly to natives over a long period of time at a pace commensurate with their social development in order to avoid “consequences as fatal for the Protector as for the Protégé.” This temporal deferral would be open-ended: “without contesting the possibility of granting more and more extensive political rights to natives in a still relatively distant future, we are permitted to think that the time has not yet arrived to envision this solution.” 63 The colonial government’s ability to retain educated auxiliaries was being eroded by competing pressures to reward and restrict elites. Sarraut had warned that French authority required native policies capable of navigating a course between “according everything” and “refusing everything.” 64 For interwar reformers, temporal deferral in combination with a political logic that

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identified French citizenship as antithetical to African culture was a means to this end.

Citizenship without Culture Despite the consensus among policymakers against extending equal political rights to the general African population, there did exist an institutional mechanism by which individual exceptions could become French citizens. The fact that the administration discouraged and, in most cases, rejected requests for citizenship is to be expected. More notable, the very apparatus that enabled natives to transform their juridical status revealed and reinforced the opposition between culture and citizenship. Colonial humanism’s doubled political logic created a disabling double bind for African elites even as its contradictory provisions created openings for immanent critique and oppositional practices. All Africans who were born and continued to reside in one of the original Four Communes of Senegal were nominal French citizens. Legislation dating back to the Revolution, which, following conservative lapses, was renewed in 1848 and 1871, had granted these originaires the right to elect their own deputies to the National Assembly and access to the French justice system. But even such minimal citizenship rights were fragile. In the decades leading up to World War I, Senegalese coastal elites struggled against a hostile administration that used colonial courts and decrees to redefine the category of native. The administration reduced the composition of electoral rolls, restricted access to French tribunals, annulled the rights of originaires once they left the communes, and redirected originaires, when conscripted, from the French army into separate colonial regiments. 65 The periodic expansion and contraction of originaires’ rights indicate that citizenship in the communes was not so much a fixed status defined by law as a fluid site shaped by politics. Originaires’ standing as citizens was provisionally stabilized by legislation introduced into Parliament by Blaise Diagne, the first black deputy from Senegal. Two laws in 1915 and 1916 instituted compulsory military service in the French army for originaires and their descendants on the grounds that they were citizens with obligations to the state. 66 But this supposedly clarifying legislation introduced further legal peculiarities into colonial politics. It recognized originaires as citizens yet allowed them to retain their customary civil status, have their civil disputes adjudicated in separate Muslim courts, and remain exempt from the national code civil. 67 Republican citizenship was a supposedly unitary legal category designed only to recognize abstract individuals rather

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than concrete groups. Yet these laws differentiated citizenship internally along ethno-racial lines. Conversely, they divided unitary African social groups (ethnicities and families) by assigning their members to different legal categories, depending on their place of birth and residence. The administration in AOF opposed this legislation as an insidious attempt by an African politician to exploit France’s urgent need for soldiers during the national emergency. 68 Governor-General Angoulvant argued that by creating arbitrary legal designations in the manner of the ancien régime, the legislation violated French Revolutionary conceptions of human rights and republican equity. He predicted that the legislation would precipitate national annihilation because it allowed citizens to evade French civil law and ignore French culture. Angoulvant also argued that it violated the government’s promise to respect African customs, would fragment local social institutions, and would create new conflicts between this group of privileged colonial citizens and other African elites. 69 In fact, citizenship policies in AOF were politically unstable, legally incoherent, and sociologically arbitrary. They seemed to sharpen rather than resolve the tensions between educated elites and peasant masses, legal individuality and customary life, social evolution and cultural preservation. These tensions were both instrumental for and detrimental to colonial governance. In 1912, a system for granting citizenship status to exceptional individuals who met enumerated criteria had been created partly to rationalize and restrict the distribution of political rights in AOF. It also institutionalized the antithesis between African culture and French citizenship. Natives seeking citizenship would be required to formally renounce their customary personal status and “place themselves and their families under the authority of ” French civil and political laws. This stipulation implied that the rational and autonomous individuality expected of citizens depended on Africans’ ability to transcend their natal cultural selves. Yet the criteria for “advancement” to citizenship frankly indicated that such political maturity depended more on demonstrating (French) cultural competence and national loyalty than on performing one’s abstract humanity. Among other criteria, candidates for citizenship had to prove their devotion to France, read and write French, and have adopted French cultural habits. 70 Applicants presented their requests (which included birth certificate, proof of residence, and a declaration renouncing their customary civil status) to the local mayor or administrator, who passed them on for approval to the colony, the federation, and the ministry. Dossiers could easily be stalled, discarded, or rejected en route. 71 Of the few that reached Paris, most were not approved. 72 But rather than fixate on the fact that interwar citizenship was exclusive, we

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should explore the political logic according to which these exclusions operated. This logic was crystallized in two provisions of the 1912 decree. One required applicants to provide proof of their “good life and good cultural habits.” (The decree’s preamble made clear that “good” meant French.) The other specified that citizenship thereby granted would apply only to the individual candidate, although “a wife married under the authority of French law” as well as children from this marriage whose births were formally registered with the état civil would share this new legal status. 73 Intersecting questions of cultural affiliation, family form, and legal documentation would both sustain and undermine the colonial antimony between custom and citizenship. The majority of Africans applying for French citizenship were either military veterans or lower-level colonial functionaries (teachers, medical assistants, technical agents, office clerks, interpreters). Some were employees of European firms or independent merchants. In addition to demonstrating deference, loyalty, and devotion to French authority, applicants had to adopt the “conduct, morality, and social habits” associated with a properly European lifestyle. Dossiers were evaluated primarily on the degree to which natives had “detached” themselves from and rose above the indigenous cultural milieu. Many West Africans who otherwise met the basic criteria for citizenship were rejected because they remained “attached to native customs,” “conserved a native mentality,” lived “in the native style,” or had “undignified” private lives. Their lifestyle was identified through the lens of family circumstances. Polygamy, wives who could not speak French, and children who did not attend French schools were used as proof that Africans were unsuitable for citizenship. 74 In cases where applicants were granted citizenship, the “personal” character of the citizenship granted meant that their wives and children usually were prohibited from sharing this new status. Family citizenship was often denied even when African couples claimed to have been married under French law as the 1912 decree stipulated. Administrators argued that because the civil affairs of colonial subjects were officially regulated by customary law, it was technically impossible for Africans to be married under French law. Nor, by definition, could they register their marriages in the état civil because, until Brévié’s 1932 reform, this registry was reserved for citizens. In other words, the 1912 decree had outlined procedures that, according to official interpretation, could not be met under any circumstances. 75 We should not be astonished that the colonial state deployed legal semantics to restrict access to citizenship. More significantly, family practices became the focal point of a struggle over political rights, which are usually associated with the public sphere. The family form was seen as an index of cultural affiliation

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and a candidate’s relative suitability for citizenship. Customary practices were evidence of political immaturity, regardless of the applicant’s educational background, social standing, or service to the colonial project. The “good life and good morals” criteria were vague enough to warrant regular rejections of citizenship requests on cultural grounds. Insofar as the colonial state made women, family, and culture equivalent to one another, gender was turned into the wedge that separated indigenous culture from French citizenship In the eyes of administrators, African women were even more firmly fixed than native men to an autochthonous mentality. Officials believed that unassimilated wives rearing unschooled children in a customary manner would degrade citizenship rights, which they could not exercise responsibly. Policymakers also feared that granting citizenship to family members would undermine the indigenous social order with which women and children were identified. These convictions led the administration to risk the inevitable conflicts that would arise when divided families, whose members possessed different legal statuses, would have to adjudicate shared civil affairs in separate courts regulated by distinct legal codes. The administration recognized that if an African woman was allowed to obtain citizenship through marriage, all of her subsequent children automatically would be French citizens, whether or not they were assimilated, without having to fulfill the normal requirements for “advancement.” 76 In this unacceptable variant of republican motherhood, the colonial state would lose control over political enfranchisement. But policymakers realized that this danger was unavoidable. Once a husband was granted French citizenship, it would be perfectly legal for him to (re)marry according to French civil law, register the marriage in the French état civil, and even go to court to have the paternity of his children recognized. 77 His entire family including future children would become citizens regardless of how “evolved” they were seen to be. 78 After more than a decade of debate in Paris and West Africa over family citizenship, the administration tightened control over the citizenship process. Directed by Sarraut, Brévié introduced new legislation in 1932 that allowed wives and children automatically to share the new legal status of adult African men who became citizens. 79 But now the cultural criteria for citizenship were extended to the entire family. If an applicant could not demonstrate that his wives and children “approached [French] civilization through education, lifestyle, and social customs,” neither he nor they could become citizens. 80 Brévié instructed colonial governors that in addition to determining if a candidate met the basic criteria for citizenship, administrators would now have to visit his home to verify that “he and his family, by their manner of living, have clearly

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raised themselves above their native milieu; that, in his social relations, he has sufficiently detached himself from customary institutions in order to renounce them; that, in his mentality, his inclinations, and his conduct, he is worthy of the privilege that he requests.” 81 Such investigations were meant to prevent unassimilated women, children, and future progeny, as well as men tainted by proximity to them, from diluting the citizenship pool. Since the 1912 decree, the government had established a chain of equivalence linking lifestyle, family form, and cultural affiliation. But the life–family– culture series had functioned primarily as an instrument of administrative discretion in evaluating requests rather than as an object of systematic inquiry. The 1932 citizenship decree now required local administrators to investigate a candidate’s household before issuing an official Certificate of Good Life and Morals. 82 Local commandants would evaluate the candidate’s home life in terms of an implicit understanding of the difference between African and European domestic norms and practices. 83 The verification of life–family–culture thus linked ethnographic inquiry to colonial sociology. It led the colonial state both to describe native life and to produce “the native” as a sociolegal category. Colonial citizenship thus allowed scientific administration and practical science to work on and through one another. In 1936, Galandou Diouf, the Senegalese deputy who replaced Diagne in Paris, proposed a law that would automatically grant citizenship to African veterans who had served France in World War I. This legislation would allow these colonial citizens, like the originaires, to retain their customary legal status and be exempt from the French civil code. Diouf argued that an African’s traditional religious identity was irrelevant to the possession of citizenship rights, in the same way that a Frenchman’s identity as a Protestant, Catholic, “Israelite,” or “free thinker” was irrelevant. In a direct challenge to colonial orthodoxy, he asked provocatively, “am I not myself a French citizen and a Muslim and between these two categories, to which I am equally attached, is there the slightest incompatibility?” 84 Governor-General de Coppet provided a lengthy refutation to Diouf ’s rhetorical question. He maintained that “for primitive or Islamic peoples, traditional laws and customs, concerning the organization of the family, polygamous marriage, divorce, successions etc. are closely tied to religious beliefs. As a result, for the native, the renunciation of his [customary civil] status is practically equivalent to abjuring his religious concepts.” Warning of the “inextricable juridical situations” that would arise within families of colonial citizens in which some individuals had renounced their customary status and others had retained it, de Coppet insisted that traditional culture was incompatible with citizenship. 85

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Derived from the dual imperative to universalize and particularize colonial subjects, citizenship policies in AOF produced individuality at the expense of collectivity and protected the customary by restricting legal equality. The very administrative mechanism that selected exceptional Africans to become citizens reinforced the opposition between citizenship and indigenous culture. Gender relations, condensed within native families, became the index and axis of this distinction.

Nationality without Citizenship Colonial citizenship policies opposed native custom to French law by linking universal republican precepts (autonomy, rationality, individuality) to a particular cultural competence (French language, education, and habitus) rather than to one’s abstract humanity. We might therefore expect policies that defined African culture as incompatible with French citizenship to have been motivated by xenophobic ethno-nationalism. On the contrary, however, recognizing that nationality was as much a legal as a cultural category, the French state accepted African culture as compatible with French nationality. Although government discourse referred informally to the naturalization of Africans, exceptional natives could only officially advance to, access, attain, or assume the capacity (qualité) of French citizenship. These obtuse formulations derived from the fact that colonial subjects were not foreign nationals who could be naturalized; they could not solicit a French nationality that they already legally possessed. The colonial justice department stated unequivocally that “according to the general principles of international public law, natives of French colonies acquired French nationality by the fact that their country was annexed to France.” 86 Their nationality status was clarified in extended administrative discussions about the legal implications of colonial marriages. 87 Administrators and jurists were compelled to distinguish between European and non-European citizens, nationals, subjects, and foreigners when they coupled with each other to create a bewildering range of challenging cases. In each instance, the marriage’s effect on the nationality and citizenship status of both parties, as well as on their children (from the present and previous unions), had to be determined. Consider the case of a West African woman who had received citizenship along with her father, a government interpreter, in 1914. When she later wanted to marry a fellow Dahomean who was not a citizen, officials debated whether the French civil code would require her to surrender her citizenship rights (and thereby assume the legal status of her husband) or retain them (since her

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marriage to another French person would not confer a new nationality on her). Notably, both arguments acknowledged that as a colonial subject, she already possessed French nationality. 88 Here we can see one way in which gender– family issues revealed and shaped colonial legal rationality. Of course the French nationality possessed by all natives was as truncated as colonial citizenship was restrictive and unstable. The governor of Dahomey implied, contra colonial policy, that genuine nationality should derive from ethnicity. He reminded the governor-general that there was an unstated but understood difference between “a Frenchwoman properly defined by blood” and “a native woman naturalized as French.” 89 The director of justice acknowledged that because natives were nationals who retained their customary status and did not possess the “plenitude of rights” recognized by metropolitan law, they were “French, but incompletely French.” 90 P. Jacomet, a lawyer on the Conseil Supérieur des Colonies, similarly reported that natives were “semiFrench” [des Français mi-partie]. They were nationals who did not posses le droit de la cité française; France was their only patrie, yet they were not subject to its civil laws. 91 Mindful of the need to address the growing political expectations of disenfranchised African elites who were neither originaires nor naturalized natives, the administration sought to develop formulas for semi-citizenship that would correspond to this semi-nationality. If full civil and political equality for indigenous elites could only be envisioned in an indefinite, endlessly deferred future, reformers proposed alternative modes through which they could exercise limited political rights in the colonial present. Sarraut believed that a small elite should be carefully selected from the general population to help administer the colonial project. These talented and loyal subjects would have access to higher education, to better public service jobs, and to seats on local advisory councils. In 1923 he recommended that this elite be formally granted a range of political rights that would distinguish its members from the un-evolved masses but that would be restricted to life within a native polity (cité indigène). Only a fraction of the most qualified and loyal members of this elite, he argued, should be eligible to join the cité française as full citizens. 92 Several years later, government officials in Paris debated whether to introduce new colonial legislation that would institutionalize Sarraut’s suggestion. A group of legal scholars, lawyers, and administrators was commissioned by the government to clarify the rights possessed by members of the different categories of colonial subjects throughout the French empire. 93 Its report outlined the curious legal status of “nonnaturalized natives”—those who were French

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nationals by birth, lived according to customary law and colonial legislation rather than the French civil code, and were not citizens. The report acknowledged that in an empire different types of nationals would inevitably coexist. But it insisted that “there can only be one category of citizen. The droit de cité is singular” because “the French person, born in France, of French parents, whose ancestors have always lived on the land [sol] that their fathers cultivated [patria] is not of the same nature as the subject who is born and fixed in a newly annexed country, even if this country is an integral part of the national territory.” Nevertheless the report urged the government to address the aspirations of colonized youths by cautiously increasing the number of desirable administrative posts available to educated elites, expanding their representation on local advisory councils, permitting them to practice the liberal professions, and allowing them to seek training in metropolitan institutions. It concluded with a dark warning: “once introduced into the house with rights equal to those of the masters, presumptuous and demanding, they will soon want to be the masters.” 94 The proper juridical status for elites posed a persistent problem for the interwar administration. As an official from the ministry summarized, “due to a lack of political maturity among our administrés who find it difficult to adapt to our mentality, their naturalization appears more and more to be a dangerous measure that can only be taken in exceptional cases.” However, he recognized that “because a certain number of our subjects or protégés have acquired a degree of culture, they have created a situation that makes the normal status reserved for natives of their category [i.e., noncitizens] particularly painful to them.” He acknowledged that a new government policy would have to address this dilemma. 95 The reform then being debated had been presented to the legislative committee by Bernard Lavergne on June 15, 1927. Extending Sarraut’s earlier recommendation, this proposed decree would introduce a new legal category into the empire. Occupying an intermediary position between subjects and citizens, these Indigènes d’Elite would retain their customary civil status but be exempt from the indigènat, allowed to participate in local elections, eligible to attend French grandes écoles, and have access to better administrative positions. 96 This status was designed to address elites’ legitimate demands for expanded political rights in the present and serve as a gateway to future French citizenship. But it was also meant to defuse and diffuse their desire for full citizenship, whose criteria could now be made even more restrictive since native elites would already have been legally elevated above the African masses. 97 This measure would provide symbolic recognition, not political equality. It was an attempt to create

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a prototype for semi-citizenship that would use temporal deferral to resolve the dreadful dilemma posed by elites. Lavergne’s proposal, however, provoked spirited opposition in Paris and Dakar. The metropolitan committee debated whether formal legal recognition would stimulate rather than assuage elites’ immediate desire for full French citizenship and their tendency to engage in political dissent. 98 On the advice of colonial governors, Carde argued that the kind of elite that this proposal sought to create already existed in the more developed regions and cities of AOF. He predicted that a formal legal designation would make this new elite immediately feel like inferior “second-zone citizens” in comparison to originaires and fully naturalized natives. “Jealousies, rivalries, and bitterness” would surround this separate “caste, envied by the masses, jealous of its prerogatives,” yet “envious of the caste above it, tormented by a desire to expand constantly its privileges, animated by collective sentiments that would escape our control.” 99 This alarmist argument was apparently convincing. Lavergne’s proposal was never adopted. Instead, Brévié inherited Carde’s informal approach to rewarding yet restricting African elites. Brévié too believed that any attempt to grant a special juridical status to évolués would create dangerous rivalries within colonial society. Elite achievement, he argued, was already recognized through exemptions from the indigènat, access to desirable public service jobs, and the right to participate in local assemblies. 100 His policies extended such informal markers of semi-citizenship for exceptional native nationals. Since the war, reformers had placed great faith in advisory councils, local assemblies, and limited forms of municipal autonomy. 101 By the early 1930s, an assortment of such organisms existed at every geopolitical level of AOF. 102 Whether their members were elected or appointed with either symbolic or substantive power, these bodies were governmental institutions in two senses. They were agencies through which Africans participated in colonial governance and instruments through which the administration indirectly governed powerful or ambitious indigenous actors. These councils claimed to train politically immature Africans for an indeterminate future citizenship yet confirmed their status as nonnaturalized natives. They formed part of the technical infrastructure of temporal deferral by reducing elites to permanent political apprentices. If councils and assemblies were supposed to provide natives with a political education, they were also meant to contain their political aspirations. The administration’s attempt to manage elites informally through a semicitizenship without legal categorization only reproduced the dreadful dilemma that Sarraut had outlined. Whether the administration attempted to protect

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political order and social cohesion by limiting elites’ political rights or by extending them, it generated indigenous criticism and produced the opposite of the policy’s intended effect. The interwar period was marked by chronic debate over the juridical status of different categories of natives, nationals, and citizens, especially as they intersected with custom, conjugality, and paternity. A combination of administrative improvisation and bureaucratic specification led to the proliferation of sociolegal categories, which multiplied as persons from various groups married and reproduced. 103 Novel cases and unforeseen consequences outpaced the administration’s capacity to anticipate, adjudicate, and contain them. The colonial state’s attempt to classify and supervise African legal status seemed only to call forth a heightened need for more of the same. Local administrators sought to balance imperatives to respect and to restrict native elites through ad hoc responses to immediate cases regarding access to tribunals and civil registries, the authenticity of legal declarations and documents, participation in local elections, exemptions (from the indigènat and military and labor obligations), and eligibility (for council seats, chieftaincies, and schools). This regulatory complexity highlighted policy contradictions, inconsistencies, and loopholes. Native encounters with the state apparatus around these issues were often marked by confusion, deception, and resistance. The administration was especially concerned with the many ways in which Africans could obtain citizenship for themselves or their families through bureaucratic transactions that circumvented the official naturalization process. One route was through fraud. Native citizens could extend citizenship to other peoples’ children by claiming them as their own through the use of false inscriptions in the état civil or false legal declarations for children without birth certificates. 104 The administration also denounced as fraudulent the spreading habit, among illegitimate métis children, of using legal declarations to claim the European family names of their presumed fathers. 105 Even practices that did not break the law were criticized by the administration as a manipulation of the system. New citizens, according to French law, could marry nonevolved native women and turn them and their children into citizens. Similarly, newly naturalized men who had already married according to custom, whose families were “traditional,” could turn their children into citizens through formal legal declarations. 106 Conversely, daughters who had been granted citizenship along with their fathers could confer citizenship on their subsequent children by virtue of marriage, as could widows and divorcées. 107 The Government General complained about the dangers of a 1928 decree that extended the principle of jus solis to foreign nationals in AOF, because it meant that children of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants would become citizens

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regardless of their cultural disposition. 108 Brévié dismissed demands for citizenship from children of Africans who had been naturalized before 1932, even if they met the new criteria for family citizenship. Problems also arose for children who were already married when their fathers obtained citizenship under the new system. Adult male children were automatically naturalized but their wives were not. In such cases, civil affairs within the same family would henceforth be regulated by different legal codes. 109 As predicted, confusion and conflict were generated when members of the same family or community who were subject to different legal codes debated which tribunals had jurisdiction over their civil affairs. Juridical ambiguities allowed West Africans to challenge each other as well as the state through colonial courts and councils. They became skilled in the use of administrative media such as letters, declarations, memoranda, and legal briefs. Petty civil disputes that were born of policy contradictions could escalate into political conflicts with the colonial state. 110 A growing number of Africans resented the arbitrary, irrational, and limited distribution of citizenship rights. Because the regulatory system was so overburdened, seemingly mundane legal definitions and procedures could generate highly charged indigenous responses. The boundaries as defined by the administration between masses and elites, chiefs and évolués, subjects and citizens, custom and law, the civil and the political began to break down. Facing such volatility, the same colonial officials who had encouraged African civic individualism also passed decrees prohibiting associations and a free press, in order to prevent the formation of a colonial civil society. As with other indicators of sociopolitical modernity in AOF, civil society was the site of competing government objectives.

Civic Training without Civil Society In 1933, an administrator outlined the process of “rapid evolution” in coastal Côte d’Ivoire as communal property diminished and individuals were supposedly liberated from customary inheritances. Growing prosperity, improved transportation, and more frequent social intercourse among formerly hostile “races” appeared to create common interests among natives who developed “a preliminary idea of the public sphere.” 111 Côte d’Ivoire officials later remarked favorably on the proliferation among young évolués of civic associations— organized around sports, mutual aid, art, literature, and friendship—that expressed “loyalty and devotion to the common fatherland.” 112 On one level, then, officials in AOF indulged in a republican fantasy of colonial evolution.

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Emancipated African individuals would voluntarily come together in the public space to create novel associations organized around shared personal interests rather than group compulsions. These developments, which supposedly reinforced elite identification with France, were to be encouraged. Yet, since the war, the colonial state had introduced a stream of measures designed to preclude the growth of either independent civic associations or organs of public opinion. In 1918, Van Vollenhoven successfully contested an initiative to legalize trade unions in the federation. While agreeing in principle that the colonial workers had a right to organize themselves, he explained that he had “a duty to declare that the time is not yet opportune to apply [the law of March 21, 1884] to AOF.” 113 Two years later, Brévié, then a political advisor in Dakar, warned that legalizing trade unions in West Africa would undermine the colonial economy by sanctioning “the implacable attitude” of native workers who “use and abuse the strike.” He too invoked African immaturity as grounds for deferral: “Without contesting the principle of the law, it is obvious that the mentality of our colonial labor force is not yet mature enough” to benefit from a law designed “for groups of workers capable of discussing their individual and collective interests with discernment.” 114 Brévié also prepared a report that opposed applying to AOF the 1901 metropolitan law legalizing voluntary nonprofit associations. He was especially troubled by the prospect of unified, autonomous, and disciplined Muslim brotherhoods and animist secret societies that would undermine French political authority. Brévié identified such voluntary associations as dangerous precisely because they reinforced natives’ collectivist character: “all of the populations in AOF . . . demonstrate a great propensity to form associations and any legal regime that encourages this tendency could have incalculable consequences on the future evolution of the country.” 115 It would seem that Africans were at once under- and overqualified for collective activities. Either way, they were named not yet ready to participate responsibly in civic associations. This fear of indigenous civil society led the postwar administration to introduce regulations that restricted social and intellectual circulation in AOF. They were meant to prevent colonial subjects from independently organizing themselves into unsanctioned, unsupervised, and ungovernable corporations, to protect them from radical foreign influences, and to preclude them from forming a vital public sphere. In a 1928 decree establishing an Office of Emigration and Immigration in each colony, Carde created a formal apparatus for policing native mobility. It prohibited Africans from traveling outside their colony of origin without first obtaining a permit, an official identity card (including the bearer’s photograph,

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fingerprints, race, and kinship lineage), and for those traveling to Europe, proof that they could support themselves once there. 116 This measure was largely motivated by the need to control the movement of Africans to the metropole because the rate of colonial emigration to continental France continued to increase even after the wartime demand for labor there had decreased. It promised “to reduce the growing number of natives who embark on an adventure with no resources, completely ignorant of the many difficulties that await them abroad. These deracinated [natives] soon find themselves without work or home, at the mercy of the worst temptations of poverty. Those who do not wind up in the hospital or in prison, decide, out of desperation, to request an [expensive] repatriation.” 117 This restrictive regulation was therefore coded a prévoyant welfare measure. Officials observed that this decree allowed “the security service in each colony to coordinate information furnished by commandants de cercle on delinquents and even on certain suspicious travelers and to a certain degree track their movements.” 118 The identity cards introduced in 1928 served as the model for the “sanitary passports” used to restrict urban immigration in AOF (chap. 4). In 1930, the governor of Dahomey required all Africans traveling within that colony to carry similar identity cards. 119 In 1939, special passbooks were created for natives working on ships and as domestic servants, “categories of workers who have long escaped our administrative surveillance.” 120 Already-existing inscription procedures, such as those required by the état civil and citizenship requests, aided these efforts to regulate circulation. 121 Harsher penalties for the “social wound” of vagabondage were applied to itinerant populations throughout AOF. 122 The colonial state was equally interested in policing the movement of outsiders into the federation. In 1932, Brévié restricted French and foreign immigration to AOF. All foreigners were required to carry identity cards and register their addresses with local authorities. They were also excluded from a number of professions related to transport, entertainment, radio communications, publishing, book or newspaper selling, writing, or arms dealing. 123 As even this partial list indicates, the colonial government wanted to minimize the potential influence of foreign political agitators, ideologies, and technologies on what was seen to be a vulnerable and disaffected native population. From the administration’s perspective, the free circulation of disruptive people and dangerous ideas incited one another. The colonial state exercised extensive censorship powers over any published materials, images, posters, or emblems “liable to undermine respect for French authority.” A series of decrees in the 1920s allowed the Government General almost unlimited power to censor

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the local African press, foreign press, and non-French-language publications arriving from the metropole. Authorities could seize and destroy any among a regularly updated list of prohibited publications. French-language publications had to be admitted into the colony, but anyone selling or distributing subversive materials could be punished. Carde instructed the police, customs officials, and postal agents, in the name of public order, to use their surveillance powers to identify the recipients of “xenophobic or anti-French revolutionary propaganda,” to disrupt contraband distribution networks, and to monitor the local French-language press. 124 Several years later Brévié expanded this censorship apparatus by creating in each colony special commissions to examine and approve all films and phonographic albums imported from outside or produced inside AOF. 125 The administration’s growing focus on surveillance, identification, emigration-immigration restriction, and censorship was directly linked to the fact that a new generation of deracinated natives (labor migrants, urban dwellers, educated elites) was in fact forming civic associations, formulating public opinion, and fomenting political dissent. Of course these were precisely the indices of political maturity that Africans were supposedly not yet capable of creating. 126 It was to be expected, therefore, that the government campaign against colonial civil society often worked to strengthen the very resentment and solidarities that it hoped to forestall. 127 Official efforts to classify and control indigenous elites generated more regulatory ambiguity and provoked new transgressions, which in turn required stricter policing measures and yet more dissent. AOF was not a totally administered society, nor was it in a chronically ungovernable state of insurrection. Rather, a dialectic of surveillance and subversion developed in which policies to restrict rights or circumscribe civil society only sharpened social tensions, incited transgressions, and called for even more regulation. But the inevitable gap between the state’s intentions and such unintended consequences was not simply a sign of incompetent implementation or of irrepressible African agency. At a deeper level, this dysfunctional dynamic was generated by a contradictory colonial rationality that generated recurrent structural impasses or double binds for the administration.

Colonial Humanism’s Double Bind It would be a mistake to discount the political effectiveness of colonial humanism’s competing imperatives to produce and prohibit individuality, to protect

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and transform indigenous collectivities, to promote and police social evolution, to reward and restrict educated elites. Although the colonial state bifurcated the African population into masses (needing cultural protection) and elites (needing social improvement), each group was the target of both governing imperatives. Village society was supposed to be the valued repository of African culture. It nevertheless became a site of intervention and an object of transformation. Alternatively, educated elites were supposed to be those exceptional natives who had become autonomous individuals. Yet they were identified as incipient individuals who were never yet ready to assume full citizenship rights because of the irreducible residue of African culture that they supposedly could not transcend. Preserving African societies meant fixing colonial subjects to separate cultures that disqualified them from political entitlements. Promoting bourgeois individualism (as well as private property, nuclear families, and semi-citizenship) meant separating colonial subjects from local lifeworlds, nonEuropean identifications, and communal political engagements. Our goal should not be to uncover a contradiction either between colonial humanism’s universalist claim to respect Africans as equal individuals and its “real” racializing practices, or between its particularist claim to respect African society as a cultural equal and its “real” assimilating practices. Colonial humanism enabled a (cultural) racism that was simultaneously universalizing and particularizing. 128 The mechanism of temporal deferral allowed this form of racism to operate within rather than against a republican framework. By replacing biological inferiority with political immaturity, colonial reformers were able to include Africans within the French nation but exclude them from the French polity. They supported colonial citizenship in principle but opposed it in the present. Natives were constituted as perpetual political minors. In AOF, republican precepts articulated with colonial imperatives to produce paradoxical governing formulas—individualism without individuality, collectivity without collectivism, citizenship without culture, nationality without citizenship, civic training without civil society—which placed Africans in a disabling double bind. On the one hand, preservationist native policies that supposedly allowed Africans to live according to customary civil law also deferred their membership in universal humanity and thereby obstructed their full legal integration into a republican polity organized around abstract individuality. According to this logic, politically immature collectivism precluded them from exercising a citizenship in the present. Insofar as conspicuous signs of Africanity disqualified natives from political enfranchisement, reformers used culture against French citizenship. On the other hand, because Africans were also classified as French nationals preparing for a citizenship to come, their path to

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cultural or political autonomy based on the principle of self-determination was obstructed. Any corporate or separatist identification with the African community on their behalf would violate the republican precept of unmediated national unity. Citizenship was only accorded to individual exceptions who were sufficiently detached from local lifeworlds and were unlikely to wed their political rights to an ethno-cultural project. By thus dividing the indigenous population and accelerating village fragmentation, reformers used citizenship against African culture. Colonial citizenship was the site at which the policies of colonial humanism intersected with the project of Greater France to reveal the imperial nationstate’s underlying tensions. Colonial education also provoked a new generation of African students to reflect on their untenable position within a system that required and prohibited their cultural assimilation, that emphasized and marginalized their African history and culture. 129 Conditions in AOF led reformers as well as their African collaborators and critics to rethink the relationship between citizenship and nationality, legality and ethnicity, communities and political life, popular sovereignty and population administration. These historical actors sought to formulate new juridico-political categories that would be adequate to France’s disjointed imperial polity. Labouret anticipated later political struggles and proposals when in 1929 he wrote, “it would be vain to pretend that the evolution of a given [colonial] society will not translate, sooner or later, into either fusion with the protector state or the emancipation of the people under its tutelage.” 130 Between 1935 and 1939 he outlined a plan to guarantee the nation’s imperial future, reasoning that “if we do not better address the aspirations and needs of our protégés, their discontent will be exploited against us . . . and a violent separation can be imagined.” Believing counterintuitively that political disjunction would be the best way to keep the empire “singular and indivisible,” Labouret envisioned “an enlarged French community” organized around a system of “progressive federalism.” 131 A new type of “imperial citizenship” in AOF would grant African elites precisely guaranteed rights equivalent to those of French citizens but that would only be valid within the colonies. 132 This may be read as yet another unimplemented plan for semi-citizenship designed by a reformer to appease yet circumscribe indigenous political demands. Yet Labouret was also attempting to redefine the very notion of citizenship for a disjunctive imperial polity. By this time a new generation of expatriate Africans was exploiting the relative freedom of metropolitan civil society in order to create an alternative black public sphere. They too sought to reconfigure Greater France geographically and conceptually as a nonracist transnational

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federation that would accommodate them as “Negro-African” citizens of the imperial nation-state. The administration’s ambiguous categories, contradictory logic, and paradoxical governing formulas created openings for immanent critique and possibilities for political dissent. Africans were not simply excluded from the French republic; they were assigned a specific sociolegal position within the imperial nation-state as proto-individuals, semi-nationals, subject-citizens. Given that citizenship rights presupposed French cultural competence, Africans could not simply make political claims from the standpoint of abstract individuality. Nor, given that the customary was largely created by a modernizing colonial power, could they do so from the standpoint of authentic cultural difference. They confronted what Albert Memmi later called an “impossible situation.” 133 Challenging the double bind of colonial racism would require them to insist on and refute both political universalism and cultural particularism.

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Negritude I: Practicing Citizenship in Imperial Paris

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In French West Africa by the mid-1930s, the colonial state’s fraught attempt to protect and transform indigenous society had contributed to the type of sociopolitical disorganization that its policies were meant to forestall. An anxious administration struggled to restrict an increasingly vital colonial civil society with measures that often functioned to strengthen it. Politicized African elites disrupted state taxonomies upon which colonial order supposedly depended. Openings were created within which these elites could make demands that the logic of colonial humanism had supposedly precluded. Given the doubled character of interwar colonial government, however, the terms in which an anticolonial or antiracist project could be formulated were not straightforward. What kind of relationship to the normative categories of Western political modernity such as civil society, citizenship, humanism, and even reason itself could be cultivated by colonized populations whose own domination had been mediated by those very categories? On what grounds could racialized colonial subjects claim republican rights when their political exclusion was already sanctioned by the logic of republicanism? Alternatively, how could they celebrate their cultural autonomy when colonial racism already used science to valorize an authentic Africanity? Neither republicanism nor

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nativism were in themselves adequate responses to a system that was simultaneously universalizing and particularizing. An antiracism that attempted to attack only one of these terms from the standpoint of the other risked reproducing rather than resolving the colonial antinomy that it hoped to contest. The remainder of this book traces attempts to address this double bind by intellectuals of African descent living in metropolitan France. Their practical interventions revealed immanent contradictions, and their conceptual inquiries marked out paths for pragmatic action. The preceding account of interwar colonial rationality provides an indispensable grid of intelligibility for analyzing such anticolonial expressions and alliances. At the same time, a careful examination of these colonial critiques further illuminates the imperial structures, logics, and processes from which and to which they were addressed. In contrast to the restrictions placed on association and expression in AOF, metropolitan civil society allowed colonial elites a greater degree of political freedom. These displaced intellectuals and activists often became disconnected from the living cultures, everyday struggles, and ordinary people in whose name they acted. Yet this very distance allowed them a certain luxury of abstraction. They were often less focused on winning immediate material concessions than on grappling with deeper conceptual issues raised by their problematic location within an imperial nation-state. The intense cultural and political fermentation among expatriate colonial communities in 1920s and 1930s Paris was situated at the intersection of republican civil society and a semi-autonomous black public sphere. Despite their tenuous relationship to the French cité, these groups “practiced” citizenship in the heart of the imperial nation-state. Shifting attention from republican reformers in colonial West Africa to colonized critics in the republican metropole highlights the empirewide scale of the issues addressed by both groups. A consideration of colonized critics in metropolitan France also allows us to appreciate the cosmopolitan linkages enabled by the imperial order not only between Francophone Africans and Antilleans, but between these two groups and representatives of the broader African diaspora, other colonized populations, and the internationalist Left. I am concerned especially with the Negritude movement as it engaged the very issues raised by colonial humanism about the relationship between race, culture, nationality, and citizenship. This chapter presents a genealogy of Negritude as a cultural project that was synthesized from a variety of antecedent Panafrican associations and orientations in metropolitan France. 1 The contours of Negritude were shaped by its founders’ location within the matrix of metropolitan black cultural nationalism. Negritude was not simply a set of disembodied theories about colonialism and Africanity. It was a discursive formation and a

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Panafrican public produced by and through a historically specific network of individuals and institutions.

The Negritude Cohort Never a formal organization, Negritude was a cultural project that emerged through intense discussions and intimate friendships among a diasporic peer group whose members shared similar colonial backgrounds and metropolitan challenges, as well as an interest in Africa. 2 Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon-Gontran Damas were all products of colonial assimilation. Before leaving home to join the transnational group of colonial students and activists living in continental France in the 1930s, they were trained in overseas French schools to become members of the native elite in their home colonies. Senghor was born a Catholic colonial subject in 1906 and grew up in the SineSaloum region of rural Senegal. His father was a successful merchant and property owner involved in peanut exports. 3 Césaire, born in 1913, grew up in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, where his father was a government functionary who read French classics around the dinner table. His mother was a seamstress. Césaire’s grandfather had been a schoolteacher who traveled to France. 4 Damas, whose father was a public works employee, was raised in an assimilated bourgeois household by his father’s cousin, after his mother died in 1913, the year after he was born in Cayenne, Guiana. 5 French education was an important element of each of their early biographies. Senghor remembers being removed abruptly from what he subsequently idealized as a rural African “kingdom of childhood,” when he was seven. That year, 1913, his father sent him to live at the Catholic mission in Jaol. There he learned French and studied catechism before beginning primary school at the mission in neighboring Ngasobil, where he decided to become a priest and a professor. In 1923 he entered collège at the French and mostly white Libermann Seminary in Dakar. Here Senghor reports first confronting doctrines of African cultural inferiority. He remembers countering such racism with his own childhood memories of “a veritable, even beautiful” African civilization. Senghor resolved then that “the best way to prove the value of black culture was to steal the colonizers’ own weapons and be an even better student.” 6 He believed that teachers at the school blocked his future as a seminarian because he served as a spokesperson for student grievances. Senghor was redirected to a French secondary school in Dakar in 1926, where he received his baccalauréat in philosophy. That year he won every academic prize available, including one for

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outstanding student in the school, which was presented to him by GovernorGeneral Carde. Yet Senghor still needed the intervention of Aristide Prat, his classics teacher, to become the first African to receive a government scholarship for university study in the humanities in France. 7 In contrast, Césaire remembers childhood Martinique as a stultifying and overly assimilated milieu from which he wanted to escape. 8 At the Lycée Victor Shoelcher, Césaire befriended Damas, who had been sent to school in Martinique in 1924. One of their teachers, Louis Achille, belonged to a family that would figure prominently in the Parisian black public sphere. Damas moved to France in 1928 and graduated from the Collège de Meaux, where his classmates voted him the one who had best fulfilled his duties as student and comrade. 9 Césaire was eager to join him in the metropole, recalling that “although the thought of exile saddened most of my schoolmates, it filled me with joy. . . . I was not at ease in the Antillean world, a flavorless and inauthentic world.” 10 These three colonial students would form the hub of a social and political network in metropolitan France. Damas had a difficult transition when he moved to Paris in 1931 to continue his education. He lived in a rooming hotel and enrolled in the École des Langues Orientales to study Russian and Japanese as well as African languages. But feeling racially stigmatized and neglected by the institution, he dropped out of this program and continued his university studies in law and literature. In 1932, Damas also enrolled in courses at the Institut d’Ethnologie. 11 Senghor’s arrival in France, at the age of twenty-one, was also an alienating experience. In his often-repeated description, “I disembarked one morning in Paris in a cold rain and October sky. And everything was gray, even the famous monuments. What a deception!” 12 Initially he enrolled in the Sorbonne Faculty of Letters but was quickly overwhelmed by the difficulty of the classes. He transferred to the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand for an intensive program designed to prepare students to pass the entrance exams for the École Normale Supérieure. 13 When Césaire arrived in Paris in 1931 on a scholarship, he enrolled in the same program at Louis-le-Grand and met Senghor. 14 This lycée, which had long been a showpiece for French secular education within a republican meritocracy, often provided gifted students from provincial France with a means of entering the nation’s elite schools regardless of their class backgrounds. As such, it was an appropriate venue for exemplary colonial elites to embody the government’s efforts at cultural assimilation. 15 Senghor describes his years at Louis-le-Grand as “decisive” in that the school offered him a disciplined work environment, trained him in the methods of rationalist and objective analysis, and exposed him to France’s tradition of

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moral humanism. 16 Césaire was influenced by professors who taught him textual analysis and exposed him to Marx, Husserl, and Kierkegaard. 17 Despite Louis-le-Grand’s intensive preparatory classes, Senghor failed the E.N.S. entrance examination twice. He completed a degree in letters (French, Latin, and Greek) from the Sorbonne in 1931 and received a diplôme d’études supérieure the following year for his thesis “Exoticism in Baudelaire.” In 1935, Senghor became the first black African to obtain an agrégation, which he received in grammar. 18 That same year Césaire entered the E.N.S. 19 For the genesis of Negritude, Louis-le-Grand was perhaps less significant as an institution of academic training than as a destination of educational pilgrimage. But rather than promote a national consciousness among colonial elites, as Benedict Anderson suggests, it invited reflection on their membership in an imperial nation-state. 20 Senghor recalls the impact that his international classmates had on him, including Pham Duy Kiem from Indochina, Louis Thomas Achille from Martinique, and Georges Pompidou, the future president of France (through whom Senghor claims to have consumed French literature, including Barrès, Proust, Gide, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, learned about socialism, and visited the provinces). 21 Césaire met a number of African students while there, including Senghor and Ousmane Socé Diop. 22 Once in France, Césaire wanted to overcome his alienating childhood experience of cultural assimilation and claims that Senghor became the source of his information about Africa. 23 In the early 1930s they spent a great deal of time together, discussed the same books, and shaped each others’ thinking about culture and colonialism. 24 They both admired the example provided to them by Damas. Even before Damas befriended Senghor, he had met Soulèye Diagne, a Senegalese student with whom he discussed issues related to Africa and black identity. Together they “hung out with Antillean students and white artists and painters who were all interested in black values [valeurs noirs].” The two also attended “talks on the black world,” including one by René Maran, “exalting the virtues of the black race and reproaching women of color for wearing lipstick.” 25 Senghor identified Damas, an English-speaking “bohemian student” already interested in the Harlem Renaissance, as “the most nègre [of their group] because his ideas were the most rebellious, but mostly because of his life.” 26 Damas was the first among them to publish a collection of poetry, which many regarded as “a manifesto of Negritude” and earned him Senghor’s praise as “the first écrivain engagé” among them. 27 Senghor, Césaire, and Damas became the center of a vital conversation in the university milieu. Senghor referred to the three of them as “missionaries

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full of faith” who “sought to convince, beyond our student comrades, all the nègres of Africa and the diaspora of their Negritude.” 28 A childhood friend of Damas’s from Martinique who was métisse recalls that this trio of cultural missionaries made weekly visits to her Paris apartment for “palavers about Negritude.” They criticized her for identifying with her white ancestors and for her willingness to marry a white man. 29 A fellow colonial student from Madagascar recounts that this circle gathered in cafés neither to meet women nor to organize demonstrations but as “bearers of a message.” He remembered Senghor as “our elder, even more: our master thinker.” 30 Other African students in their group included François Deng, Birago Diop, and Ousmane Socé Diop. They met in Latin Quarter ethnic restaurants, cafés, and dance halls. They listened to rumbas at the Cabane Cubaine in Montmartre, which was the geographic center of African American cultural life in Paris. 31 Just like Harlem in the 1920s, Paris then was a city where people of African descent from a variety of classes and places converged and formed self-conscious communities. 32 A shared experience of racialization and access to a dynamic (French and colonial) cultural milieu contributed to the formation of Negritude. Imperial Paris was not an easy place to be colonial students, however. As one of their group explained, “We were the underprivileged of the Latin Quarter: modest and threadbare clothes, worn out shoes, often empty stomachs, shivering fingers chilled by the winter wind, throats parched by the severe summers.” 33 Such living conditions, presumably combined with the stress of being colonial exceptions in the racially marginalizing metropole, had social and psychological consequences. When Damas first arrived in Paris, he had not been able to obtain a university scholarship. While studying law, languages, and ethnology in three separate institutions, he had to work a variety of jobs that included day laborer, dishwasher, bartender, and dockworker. 34 Living at “a modest student hotel in the Latin Quarter,” Damas would work all night at the market in Les Halles. 35 This difficult regimen may explain why Damas had “the reputation of being a tormented soul, difficult to live with and difficult to tolerate.” 36 Senghor’s scholarship of 250 francs per month only amounted to half a typical student stipend. A friend reports that after paying his rent, Senghor could afford one meal a day, books he needed, and a monthly trip to the theater. 37 He wrote regular requests to the administration in Dakar for additional funds to continue taking classes. In these letters he discussed his personal financial crisis, chronic ill health, and a struggle with depression. 38 The colonial student life took its greatest emotional toll on Césaire. He describes the period during which he was studying for the E.N.S. exam as one defined by poor living conditions, bad eating habits, and his inability to

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manage a budget. “It was a pretty unbalanced life . . . I was sick. I suffered from headaches, stomach aches, and that’s when I lost perspective.” Césaire was newly married in 1935, and it is known that he had some kind of psychological breakdown the following year: “I quickly suffered a crisis, a physical ordeal and moral crisis: all of these classical studies seemed so far from life, so far from what I wanted to do. . . . The result: I was no longer capable of university work.” 39 Senghor confirmed his friend’s psychological malaise: “Césaire fell into an identity crisis that left him mad [and] led to his failing the agrégation in literature.” Senghor adds, “when I wrote somewhere that as victims of a ‘panicked despair’ we were bewildered, I was alluding to Césaire’s crisis, which I experienced partly along with him.” 40 Senghor maintains that they were “resisters” who lived “dangerously”: “we lived our writing morally, even physically and metaphysically till the edge of dementia.” 41 Senghor also had lyrical memories of Paris, however. The absence of a legal color bar meant that black students had access to metropolitan public life. 42 Senghor recounts his quest for “the spirit of Paris” through visits to theaters, museums, concert halls, and art galleries. 43 In addition to being a gateway to European culture, the university milieu allowed colonial students to make transnational alliances and cultivate a Panafrican consciousness. Senghor describes Paris as “the greatest museum of Negro-African art,” which “[revealed] the values of ancestral civilization” to “an entire generation of étudiants nègres.” 44 Advanced studies placed these students in direct contact with the very institutions and individuals who were elaborating the new rationality for colonial government. As a student of African cultures at Langues Orientales and the Institut d’Ethnologie, Damas read Delafosse, Mauss, Westermann, and Frobenius. 45 He also met Delavignette, who encouraged him to visit Africa. 46 In 1934 Rivet and Mauss sent Damas on an ethnographic and collection mission back to Guiana (see chap. 7). 47 After becoming a classics professor in 1936 at a lycée in Tours, Senghor began taking courses in African linguistics and ethnology in nearby Paris. 48 At the time, he was preparing two theses for a doctorat d’état: one on African linguistic forms and the other on oral poetry in Senegalese villages. At the Institut d’Ethnologie Senghor studied with Rivet, Mauss, and Marcel Cohen, and he took classes on African linguistics with Lilias Homburger at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. 49 Senghor recalled that he and Damas were among the very few nègre intellectuals to read the work of Delafosse, Hardy, Labouret, and Delavignette and to formally study the new ethnology. 50 He even claimed that the ideas of these French Africanists influenced him more than those in the more radical black newspapers circulating in Paris at the time. 51

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Damas, Senghor, and Césaire were especially influenced by the writings of Leo Frobenius, a contemporary German ethnologist whose work valorizing the history of African civilization and affirming the culturally integrated character of African societies paralleled the writings of Delafosse and Labouret. After reading a review of Frobenius’s History of African Civilization, Césaire bought a copy in 1936, which he then passed on to Senghor. 52 Senghor would later write that “Frobenius was like a sudden burst of thunder! . . . It is Leo Frobenius, more than anyone else, who clarified for us words such as emotion, art, myth, Eurafrica.” 53 This student cohort was thus directly connected to colonial ethnology and to colonial humanism. Negritude in the 1930s was not a self-consciously organized movement. It consisted primarily of “interminable discussions” among students who shared ideas, explored Paris, and began to write poetry. 54 They engaged contemporary currents of colonial thought, French culture, and black politics in order to fashion relationships to the colonial system in which they had been trained, to the French nation in which they now lived, and to the African societies to which they felt deeply connected. 55 Damas confesses “we did not have the slightest idea that our student preoccupations would give birth to what we now call the Negritude movement.” 56 He characterizes Negritude as “a spontaneous project . . . the reaction of a given category of individuals, in a given milieu, at a given moment in history.” 57 Over the course of their public lives, these “founders” would each develop different conceptions of racial consciousness and cultural nationalism, but they agree that at its inception Negritude was a rejection of assimilation, an identification with blackness, and a celebration of African civilization. Damas describes their commitment “to rehabilitate the black race . . . denounce the colonial system . . . and liquidate color prejudice.” 58 Césaire explains Negritude as “a resistance to the politics of assimilation . . . a struggle against alienation. . . . we asserted that our Negro heritage was worthy of respect.” 59 Senghor too emphasized their early focus on negation: “In the 1930s everything that was white . . . was rejected by us in the name of Negritude,” including “discursive reason, Christian morality . . . ‘scientific socialism,’ and white women.” 60 In this chapter and the two that follow, I complicate this retrospective, onesided construction of Negritude as a nativism. To this end, I first examine the ways in which already established colonized critics framed their relationship to republican politics, the national community, and their African heritage. Despite their heterogeneity, these often competing groups all performed and reflected on their anomalous status within French political culture. Whether explicitly or

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implicitly, they interrogated the contradictory axioms of interwar colonial rationality. Their marginal but vital black public sphere, more than any organs of limited self-government created by the French state, provided colonial students with an apprenticeship in colonial citizenship.

Practicing Citizenship Interwar Paris was a fundamentally imperial space that contained a growing population of colonial migrants from around the world. Among them was a small but diverse and dynamic community of Francophone Africans and Antilleans, including veterans, sailors, dockworkers, hotel and restaurant staff, domestic servants, entertainers, clerks, professionals, businessmen, students, and vagabonds. This Panafrican ensemble, composed of republicans, communists, and black nationalists, created a dense network of voluntary associations, including political groups, student organizations, mutual aid societies, workers’ cooperatives, trade unions, sports clubs, and literary groups. 61 These groups created a contested discursive field nourished by periodicals, manifestos, posters, essays, poetry readings, political meetings, public addresses, cultural salons, and popular entertainment. Gathering in restaurants, cafés, rooming houses, apartments, and student dormitories, these groups engaged each other in debate. They also intervened in discussions with other colonial communities, the Panafricanist movement, the internationalist Left, the metropolitan avant-garde, and, of course, the French (colonial) state. Senghor later commented that “Paris is small, at least for nègre intellectuals who always end up meeting.” 62 The modest size of the colonial immigrant community fostered frequent interactions within and among expatriate groups from Africa, the Antilles, Madagascar, Indochina, and the Maghreb. But it also allowed the French Sureté Générale to subject their everyday activities to constant surveillance. Between 1916 and 1919 a group of agencies was empowered to supervise colonial soldiers and workers recruited for national service during the war. In 1923, the Ministry of Colonies transferred their functions to a new Service de Controle et Assistance en France des Indigènes des Colonies (CAI). This office of “native surveillance and assistance” worked closely with the Ministry of the Interior, on one side, and the various colonial police forces, on the other, to monitor and undermine supposedly revolutionary activities among colonial immigrants. 63 The CAI recruited a network of police informants from within colonial communities to infiltrate their civic and political organizations. The constant

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fear of betrayal by their own members often divided already unstable immigrant associations. These ethnic spies assembled an elaborate archival record of the alternative black public sphere, including detailed accounts of members’ personal lives and of group meetings, and copies of publications. These agents may be understood as participant observers recruited by the state, whose voluminous field notes composed a holistic urban ethnography of intersecting immigrant political communities. 64 The CAI’s epistemophilic practices paralleled the colonial ethnology that was so integral to native policies in AOF. This security apparatus was a paradigmatic welfarist institution that combined scientific administration, social government, and knowledge production. 65 As such, the CAI was well suited to mediate metropolitan and colonial governmentality by infiltrating immigrant civil society and attempting to restrict the impact that this black public sphere might have on anticolonial politics throughout the empire. But despite their vigilance, French authorities failed to control clandestine African immigration to the metropole during the 1920s. 66 Paradoxically, the coherence (not unity) of the black immigrant community was facilitated not only by their participation in metropolitan civil society but by their marginalization within it. Civil society has been one of political modernity’s most durable concrete abstractions. In principle, the term refers to a legally protected space of individual freedom and voluntary association located between the state and the family. During the age of European democratic revolutions this category delimited a domain of popular sovereignty in which equal and autonomous individuals could define their interests, constitute a public, and demand self-government. Even if this vision, especially for socially marginal groups, was never more than a regulative idea or the utopian horizon of a democracy to come, it provided would-be citizens with a standpoint of critique and an idiom for emancipatory action. 67 But as welfarism developed in metropolitan France, civil society increasingly became the site and instrument of social government. Similarly, in interwar West Africa, colonial authorities insisted that natives were not yet mature enough to form a civil society that was supposedly antithetical to indigenous culture. The colonial state also criminalized the instances of a burgeoning civil society that it could not contain. Civil society marked and mediated colonized peoples’ political exclusion. For colonial subjects residing in metropolitan France, the agency charged with ensuring their welfare (the CAI) policed their sociocivic activities. Africans and Antilleans could not therefore uncritically affirm a civil society that had enabled their racialization and disenfranchisement. Yet if colonized critics wanted to exercise or claim a greater degree of political liberty, they could not abandon the notion of civil

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society entirely. This category, as Chakrabarty would say, was indispensable but inadequate. 68 Republican political culture allowed Africans and Antilleans to recuperate a critical version of civil society; they neither rejected it categorically as a ruse of domination nor celebrated it naively as a scene of ideal liberty. Anglo-American liberalism had always sought to maintain a rigid distinction between civil society as the space of individual freedom and the selflimiting state as the legal guarantor of that freedom. In contrast, French republicanism conceptualized the state as an extension rather than an adversary of the people or nation; civil and political society ideally mapped onto one another. 69 This fundamental unity was emphasized in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s definition of civil society as a “public person,” which “formerly took the name cité and at present takes the name republic or body politic, which is called state by its members. . . . As to the associates, they collectively take the name people; individually they are called citizens, insofar as participants in the sovereign authority, and subjects, insofar as they are subjected to the laws of the state.” 70 Here republican civil society is peopled by citizen-subjects defined by their right to participate in self-government (rather than abstract individuals with a right to remain untouched by state power). The republican tradition conceptualized civil society in terms of a classical idea of the cité: a community of citizens who were expected to practice civic virtue by participating in public life and devoting themselves to the common good. Sociability and citizenship presupposed each other; civil rights derived from civic practice. Such rights were a product of political association and participation, not the natural property of pre-political individuals. We may therefore conclude that it is more accurate to speak of republican civic rather than civil society—a space for citizens and citizenship, not one distinct from the state. We should also note that republicanism and citizenship were defined not only by institutions but by a mental attitude and a type of behavior that is informed, critical, and participatory. 71 From this perspective, the members of the community of colonial immigrants in France were exemplary civic republicans. Through their network of voluntary associations they created and influenced public opinion, demanded accountability from public power, and argued for colonial reform in the name of national republican values. Protesting, persuading, and sometimes voting, they claimed citizens’ rights and fulfilled citizens’ duties. These colonial critics “practiced” citizenship in the imperial metropolis. Here practice has two connotations: behaving according to the protocols of republican citizenship and preparing for a citizenship to come. In both registers they were “acting” like citizens, doing what citizens are supposed to do, but also performing, pretending

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to be that which they could never fully be, not yet doing the real thing. Exercising civic virtue without enjoying full civil rights, they were at once part of the French cité and apart from it. Republican civic society, in principle, was composed of mature citizensubjects bound by a law that they indirectly formulated. In contrast, the colonial state in AOF identified African elites as immature semi-citizens whose selfgovernment was permanently deferred. We may therefore understand these Panafrican migrants as precocious subject-citizens who, despite being racialized, performed their political maturity by exercising rights that they did not fully possess. Regardless of their formal legal status, these African and Antillean colonial subjects effectively were citizens insofar as they were located within French civil society, participated in its political public sphere, and practiced civic virtue. Conversely, even those who did possess nominal French citizenship were ultimately racialized colonial subjects who did not enjoy full rights, genuine equality, or an unmolested freedom of civil association. In the previous chapter, we saw how restricted colonial citizenship in AOF was. Similar limitations applied to the populations of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana. Since the Revolution, these “old” colonies had been subject to many of the same nationalizing practices that the republican state applied to the French regions. Revolutionary governments in 1794, 1848, and 1870 had recognized the supposedly assimilated populations of the Antilles as Frenchidentified nationals and granted them a citizenship that was then repeatedly annulled by successive antirepublican regimes. 72 Even after their citizenship status was stabilized under the Third Republic, Antilleans too remained subject-citizens (that is, they were prevented from fully participating in self-government) rather than citizen-subjects (for whom there would be no ontological distinction between rulers and ruled). On the one hand, they elected their own deputies to the national assembly, lived under the national code civil, enjoyed the protection of French metropolitan laws, and largely ran their own municipal governments. On the other hand, they lived in a racially organized colonial society with restrictive labor regulations and diminished social legislation under the authoritarian-administrative rule of nonelected French governors. Like Africans, Antilleans were semi-citizens despite their supposedly privileged position in the colonial hierarchy. Their political milieu was characterized by power struggles between popularly elected local politicians (mayors, local council members, and colonial deputies) and unaccountable Paris-appointed administrators. The limited character of colonial citizenship was thrown into sharp relief when Africans and Antilleans living in metropolitan France grappled with their

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problematic political status. M. Benga, an African lawyer living in Paris, called theirs a “paradoxical situation . . . humiliating for the native who is French, but a diminished Frenchman, even less respected than a foreigner.” 73 Although these subject-citizens were exemplary civic republicans, they occupied an ambiguous location within French civil society and its political public sphere. 74 Their metropolitan location offered them greater social and political freedom than they would have had in their home colonies. Nevertheless they were subject to constant surveillance, harassment, and censorship. 75 Even as they participated in republican political culture, these colonial migrants created an alternative black public sphere within that civil society to which they did not fully belong. 76 In an ideal republic, nationality and citizenship would entail one another. In the French colonies, as we have seen, nationality was dissociated from citizenship. But in the imperial metropolis, black colonial critics claimed membership in Greater France by trying, in various ways, to articulate citizenship with a distinct Negro-African (national) culture. To understand the approach to this challenge that would later be formulated in Negritude writings, we need first to survey a series of positions elaborated by the generation of displaced subjectcitizens that preceded and conditioned the Negritude movement.

Black Patriotism When Senghor arrived in Paris, his sponsor was Blaise Diagne, who embodied the establishment politics of an earlier group of West African elites committed to cultural assimilation and political equality. Although Diagne’s formidable institutional power threatened many in the colonial administration, he was regularly vilified by interwar black militants in Africa, France, and internationally for his identification with French interests and his opposition to African nationalism. 77 As a young student, Léopold Senghor regularly visited the home of this elder sponsor, who had arranged for Senghor’s colonial scholarship to be renewed after he failed the E.N.S entrance exam and helped him to obtain French citizenship in 1933. 78 Senghor also had a personal relationship with Diagne’s protégé and political opponent, Lamine Guèye. Guèye was active in Senegalese municipal politics, a colonial magistrate in Réunion, and founder of the Senegalese Socialist Party. He represented a younger group of Senegalese politicians who advocated political assimilation. 79 Senghor was among those African intellectuals in Paris who signed a 1934 letter supporting Guèye as a candidate for deputy in the election

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to fill the seat vacated after Diagne died. 80 In the mid-1930s, the Guèye household in Paris became a regular meeting place for young African and Antilleans, including Senghor, Damas, Birago Diop, and the Nardal sisters. 81 Diagne and Guèye introduced Senghor and his friends to a style of African politics that lobbied for more local influence and modest political reforms. But an Antillean member of their generation of colonial elites, René Maran, was more directly important for the development of Negritude. Born in Martinique of Guianese parents and educated in Bordeaux, Maran was a French-identified member of the Antillean elite, not a black nationalist. He served the colonial project as a midlevel administrator in French Equatorial Africa from 1910 to 1923. 82 But Maran also challenged the colonial establishment publicly by writing Batouala in 1921. This “véritable roman nègre,” as it was subtitled, was presented as an ethnographically informed, realist narrative of village life in Oubangui-Chari, the colony where Maran had served. It was the first novel by a black colonial subject to win the prestigious Prix Goncourt for literature. 83 Despite Batouala’s iconic status (it is often erroneously referred to as the first African novel), Maran’s legendary preface remains the primary reason the book became widely known. Published six years before Gide’s anticolonial Voyage au Congo (1927), this was the most prominent literary attack on the French civilizing mission ever addressed to the metropolitan public. Maran’s preface is written in the imperative voice of a man no longer able to sustain the contradictions of his dual status as colonial administrator and colonial subject. He explains, “I have spent six years translating what I had heard and describing what I had seen in Africa into [this novel]. In the course of these years I have not for a moment given in to the temptation to speak for myself.” 84 But the self for whom Maran finally speaks in this avowedly subjective preface expresses an unmoored subjectivity. 85 Maran begins by denouncing the bad faith that he sees as endemic in “the generous life of the colonies,” which “debases bit by bit. . . . Rare, even among the bureaucrats, are colonials who cultivate their minds. They don’t have the strength to resist the atmosphere. They get used to drinking alcohol” (Batouala, 13). Such excess, according to Maran, led to “the most abject cowardice” among administrators: “to advance in rank, they could not make waves. . . . they gave up all pride, they hesitated, procrastinated, lied. . . . They didn’t want to see. They wanted to hear nothing. They didn’t have the courage to speak. And as moral debility added itself to their intellectual anemia . . . they betrayed their country” (14). It is difficult not to read this passage also as Maran’s self-description of a colonized colonizer who was under enormous pressure not to “speak for himself.” Significant in this passage is the idea that

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the administrator’s self-protective complicity is not only morally bankrupt but a patriotic failure. Maran’s colonial critique is an affirmation, not a rejection, of the French patrie, which he claims as his own. The preface denounces colonial “abuse . . . embezzlement . . . [and] atrocities” that led to famine, illness, and social dislocation (12, 15–16). Maran seeks to reveal the contradiction between colonial inhumanity and the rhetorical ideal of French civilization in whose name it is justified. “Civilization, civilization, pride of the Europeans and the mass-grave for innocents. . . . You build your kingdom on corpses . . . you advance by lies. At your sight, gushing tears and screaming pain. You are the might that exceeds right. You are not a torch, but an inferno. Everything you touch, you consume” (11). According to this reformist critique, the problem is not French civilization as such but France’s uncivilized colonial practices; the goal is not less civilization but more. Maran never develops the idea that there may be an intrinsic relationship between civilized forms and colonial violence. Appealing to the tradition of literary protest in the public sphere, he calls on his “brothers in spirit, writers of France” to recognize that colonial domination is inconsistent with the authentic national tradition of legality, morality, and justice: “Let your voice be raised! You must help those who tell things as they are and not as one would want them to be. . . . To work then and no more waiting. France wants it so!” (12, 14). Maran thus challenges France to live up to its own democratic heritage and resist a degraded colonialism that “discredits the nation” (12). If Maran’s political standpoint of critique is the genuine French nation (understood as antithetical to colonial violence), his personal standpoint is that of a true French patriot. He refers to his “French brothers” and to France as “the country that has given me everything” (Batouala, 11). His discourse is animated by the moral outrage and political protest of an enlightened colonial administrator. Despite his claim to speak for himself, Maran assumes the ethnographic perspective of an observant social outsider: “this novel is wholly objective. It does not even attempt to explain: it notes. It does not show indignation: it records. . . . On moonlit evenings on my porch, stretched out in the chaise lounge on my veranda, I listened to the conversations of those poor people” (10, emphasis added). Rather than identify with African victims of colonial violence, he sympathizes with them. Maran strains to make clear that he is not writing from or about his own subjectivity. Because he protests colonial oppression from the perspective of a true Frenchman, not a colonized nègre, he reproduces the dominant racial schema that distinguished between savage Africans and evolved Antilleans. 86 But Maran’s identification remains ambivalent. He is a self-professed French patriot practicing civic republicanism. Yet he

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ultimately identifies “you, writers of France” as the agents of political reform. He speaks of neither we writers of France nor we French colonial subjects. After the publication of Batouala, the French state was considerably less ambivalent about Maran’s subject-position. His insubordination as a colonial bureaucrat was compounded by his insolence as a colonial subject, and he was pressured to resign from his administrative post in Chad in April 1923. 87 Despite Maran’s French citizenship, his extended residence in France, the years of colonial service, and recognition by the French literary elite, he too remained a subject-citizen. His rapid shift from colonial exemplar to political pariah bluntly indicated, even to him, the limits of civic practice without civil rights. Like the humanist reformers discussed in the previous chapter, Maran left his post in Africa to begin a second career as a public intellectual in the imperial metropole. On his return to Paris, Maran quickly became an emblematic figure in the black public sphere. He continued to practice citizenship but with fewer illusions about his access to republican civic freedoms. Maran delivered lectures on racial prejudice, granted interviews, wrote articles for Parisian papers, engaged in public debates on colonial policy, and participated in a number of anticolonial and antifascist political organizations. In addition to writing novels and poetry, he also contributed to a number of periodicals critical of French colonialism. 88 The articles that Maran wrote in Les Continents soon after arriving in Paris extended his critique of French colonial hypocrisy, especially given the moral debt that it owed its colonies after their support during the war, and warned of growing nationalist discontent across the empire. 89 Initially Maran was pleased with the impact this first novel and preface had had in raising metropolitan consciousness about colonial abuses and changing colonial policy in central Africa. 90 But he soon felt isolated and complained of feeling “always very tired . . . so disgusted with everything that there are times when I can no longer think at all . . . sign of a deep imbalance and a dreamlike melancholy.” His despair was exacerbated by financial difficulties: “Soon, if I want to survive, I will have to do vulgar journalism.” 91 More importantly, Maran began to relate the “growing sadness that devours me” to metropolitan racism: “I suffer not because they have something against my talent, but against my character and my color.” 92 He explained to an old friend, “the French believe that they have no color prejudice. . . . But in fact, if I sit down on a bus, my neighbor instantly changes places; children laugh inanely, their parents whisper and seem scandalized before a closely united couple who are, my wife and me, a white woman and a noir.” 93 After returning to Paris, Maran began to concede that racism for colonial subjects of African descent was inescapable. The narrator of his autobiograph-

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ical novel, Jean Veneuse, recognizes that even after thorough cultural assimilation, a black cannot be “a man just like others.” Despite “his intelligence and diligent work,” he is “but a nègre”: “In good faith I believed in this culture and led myself to love this new world. . . . What an error I made! . . . White people did not acknowledge me as one of their own, and black people almost disowned me.” Through Veneuse, Maran again denounces “the hostility of enlightenment and the lying hypocrites of civilization.” 94 But now he writes from the standpoint of a racialized colonial official whose personal experience proves that assimilation is impossible. Maran remained a politically moderate colonial reformer whose ideal was color-blind social and political equality. But by the mid-1920s, this erstwhile black patriot began to identify himself as a nègre. This is perhaps why Senghor famously identified Maran as the “precursor of Negritude . . . the first to express the ‘black soul’ through a style nègre, in the French language.” 95 More than the content of his reformist ideas or the style of his somewhat formal writing, Maran’s public stature and personal example as an engagé poet and race-conscious public intellectual were probably what impressed the Negritude cohort. To them, it must have been remarkable to hear a former colonial official and eminent literary figure declare himself a nègre. 96 By this time, Senghor, Césaire, and Damas visited Maran’s home regularly. 97 They also engaged in symbolically charged literary exchanges. Maran had sent an inscribed copy of his first poetry collection, La maison du bonheur (1909), to Senghor, writing mournfully: “I still felt the lofty desire to be an honor to my race. . . . I have since lost the best of my enthusiasm.” 98 In return, Senghor sent Maran a copy of Karim (1935), the novel written by his friend Ousmane Socé Diop. After Maran published a review of this novel, Socé Diop wrote him a grateful letter. 99 Maran later reviewed Damas’s Retour de Guyane (1938) in the Dépêche de Toulouse. Damas wrote back identifying himself with Maran as a fellow “écrivain nègre who wants to write about his race and his country.” He also thanked Maran for having welcomed him onto the team of racial activists. Césaire too rendered homage by sending Maran a copy of his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), which he inscribed: “To M. René Maran who was the first to raise the nègre to literary dignity, this is witness to my admiration and recognition.” 100 Maran served as more than a literary mentor for the young Negritude writers, however. He was an international figure who provided them access to a broader black literary and social milieu. Debates about Batouala had appeared in Marcus Garvey’s The Negro World in 1922. 101 W. E. B. DuBois and Alain Locke both wrote about Maran in their contributions to The New Negro. 102

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Conversely, Maran’s journal Les Continents introduced Francophone black intellectuals to Harlem Renaissance writing by Locke, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen. Maran placed these African Americans in contact with the group of Parisian blacks associated with La Revue du Monde Noir. 103 Mercer Cook described Maran “as a focal point for transatlantic contacts”; French, Antillean, African, and African American writers including Senghor gathered at his Friday night soirées on rue Bonaparte. 104 Maran did not only participate in the emergent black public sphere; he helped consolidate it. In the decade following publication of Batouala, his patriotic identification with the French nation and the demand for a more civilized colonialism were supplanted by a critique of endemic French racism and a transnational identification with nègres. He was precisely the kind of public intellectual the Negritude students would strive to become. Moreover, he placed them in contact with a Panafrican community that was even more committed than Maran to rehabilitating African identity.

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race or color.” Its stated goal was a “rationally conducted colonialism” focused on “the great principles of equality, public liberty and social justice that serve as the foundation of all modern democracies.” Emphasizing that La Dépêche Africaine was “not a nationalist project,” it called on all republicans “to point out and combat the injustices and errors which are still too often committed in the colonies, so that the true face of France can shine forth, generous, maternal, and just.” 105 Here the family metaphor was turned against the colonial discourse that had popularized it between the wars. The writers affiliated with La Dépêche Africaine formulated their arguments in a republican idiom inherited from 1789 and 1848. 106 By characterizing colonial government in French Africa as “a rule of arbitrary power,” they likened it to the ancien régime. They compared their call for colonial reform to the original movement to create a French republic. We might call the position they cultivated a critical republicanism. Like the generation of colonial elites before them, they identified with France and advocated political assimilation. But their demand was critical insofar as it argued that the French state systematically refused to recognize legal equality and political rights for colonial subjects. Instead of advocating advancement for exceptional individuals, they challenged France to extend republican institutions to all colonized peoples. The writers for La Dépêche Africaine articulated a reform program that included full citizenship for the mass of colonial subjects, the immediate application in the colonies of metropolitan laws, a fair judiciary, and the separation of powers. They were especially concerned with those rights of sociability and communication that characterize republican civic society (freedoms of the press, speech, assembly, and association). The periodical repeatedly challenged the idea that a modernizing colonialism could be founded on an authoritarian administration. 107 This was a universalist critique of colonial oppression as archaic from the standpoint of the modern, rational, humanist republicanism championed by French authorities. By vigorously debating public issues in discourse addressed to political power, La Dépêche Africaine practiced an exemplary civic republicanism. The journal claimed to be independent of political parties. Devoted to “the defense of native populations’ material and moral interests,” it addressed itself to metropolitan and colonial publics. 108 La Dépêche and its corresponding civic association were located simultaneously within French civil society, a colonial public sphere, and an alternative black public sphere. Like other forms of anticolonial expression, La Dépêche Africaine was infiltrated by the French Sureté Générale. Details of meetings, members, upcoming articles, and methods of

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distribution were carefully recorded by CAI spies and distributed to the Parisian police, the Ministry of Colonies, and governors of the respective colonies. Newspapers destined for the colonies were confiscated, and colonial subjects who wrote for, subscribed to, or sold the journal were then watched, harassed, and sometimes arrested. 109 Despite their moderate political proposals and their profession of republican faith, the public intellectuals affiliated with La Dépêche Africain remained vulnerable subject-citizens. Their critique of colonialism from the standpoint of republicanism focused on the contradiction between overseas autocracy and metropolitan democracy. But in the metropole they experienced the very undemocratic restrictions (on association and expression) that they denounced in the colonies. Their conceptual framework could not account for the fact that forms of heteronomy not only existed in the absence of republican institutions but were often enabled by them. If the paper’s republican self-understanding conditioned its general approach to racial identification, the reverse was true as well. La Dépêche Africaine promoted a specifically black republicanism that advocated political but not necessarily cultural assimilation. Its stated objective was “to serve as a link between nègres of Africa, Madagascar, the Antilles, and America, in order to establish a universal correspondence between men of color.” It pledged “to tighten and revivify their natural brotherhood,” to work toward “the evolution of their backward brothers, to permit the elite of the Negro race to bring its spiritual contribution to the common patrimony of humanity, and confound its detractors by affirming the . . . originality of its genius.” 110 In contrast to Maran’s preface, La Dépêche Africaine identified itself with a particular racial community. Although the journal did not thematize the issue of racial identity, it published notices of black cultural events in France and devoted an Englishlanguage page to “race pride” combining Garveyist and New Negro ideas. La Dépêche Africaine, however, would have to somehow balance this commitment to la race nègre with its republican disavowal of black nationalism. Its mostly Antillean writers did so by focusing on colonial abuses in French Africa rather than in their home colonies. By criticizing these abuses in the name of all colonized black peoples, they acknowledged that Africans and Antilleans had shared interests and were engaged in a common struggle. Yet feeling secure as privileged members of the so-called old colonies, they maintained a paternalistic relationship to their “backward brothers” in Africa, whose rights they defended and whose interests they defined. Like Maran, La Dépêche unintentionally reproduced the colonial racial hierarchy that correlated political

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rights with cultural assimilation and elevated Antilleans over Africans. But three events revealed the fragility of this distinction and forced the writers for La Dépêche Africaine to confront the fact that they too were subjects of administered colonies rather than citizens of the French nation. They were suddenly compelled to defend their own fragile rights and threatened interests. First, in March 1930, Daniel Cenac-Thaly, a teacher from Martinique, wrote to protest a proposal circulating in the Chamber of Deputies to consolidate the Antillean colonies into a single federation under the direction of a governorgeneral, along the model of the African federations. He argued that the people of the French Antilles wanted to participate more closely in French national life. 111 “We demand, in a word, the full exercise of our rights as citizens, and for our functionaries, the total benefits of republican status.” Just as it would be unthinkable for governors-general to rule metropolitan French departments, he argued, colonial citizens should not be administered like African subjects: “we are all, in the Antilles, citizens. All the important questions which concern us must be resolved by the national parliament not by colonial administrators.” Real republicans, he insisted, could not accept colonial “tyrants”: “it is pure and simple assimilation that we want, the independence of our magistrates, it is the support and control of metropolitan public opinion and not the pleasure of a viceroy and the intrigues of his courtiers.” 112 When the legislative proposal to turn the Antilles into a colonial federation was later defeated, Cenac-Thaly attributed its failure to the efforts of colonial citizens who practiced “republican morality” by criticizing the measure. 113 The second reorienting event occurred on June 6, 1930, when the French state created within the interior of Guiana a new autonomous territory named Inini that would have an independent budget, be under the direct authority of the governor, and be ruled by decree. 114 In September of that year, Gaston Monnerville, a prominent Guianese attorney in Paris who would soon become a parliamentary deputy, wrote to La Dépêche Africaine to protest this attempt to drain the colony of its natural resources and to avoid public accountability. 115 Monnerville explained that despite recent protests over the proposal to introduce a governor-general to the Antilles, despite the fact that Guiana had been a part of France for four centuries and possessed republican institutions for as long as the metropole had, it was being forced “to watch the amputation of its land for the benefit of the governor,” who had chosen to ignore the popularly elected “representative of real public opinion in the country, the conseil général.” 116 For Monnerville, this antirepublican disregard for an elected body was proof that the colonial governor possessed “an excess of authority” and governed Guiana

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“by ‘African’ methods.” He reminded readers that this colony was “one of the oldest flowers of the French nation,” whose people “are as French in spirit and in heart as the citizens of the metropole.” 117 The third challenge to Antillean self-understanding was outlined in the May 1931 issue of La Dépêche Africaine. The journal published the complete text of Gaston Monnerville’s closing argument on behalf of fourteen Guianese rioters on trial in Nantes for crimes committed during a public uprising in Cayenne in August 1928 after the suspicious death of Jean Galmot, a populist politician. 118 An advocate of the working class and adversary of the colonial administration, Galmot had twice received the majority vote in elections for the national assembly in 1924 and 1928. Each time, however, his victory was blocked; the local administration was accused of fixing the race and naming its own candidate as winner of the parliamentary seat. A first round of mass public demonstrations followed the 1928 election fraud, and more serious street riots followed Galmot’s death, allegedly by poisoning soon afterward. 119 As defense attorney for the accused, Monnerville argued that the trial should not focus on the fourteen rioters, whom he suggested were chosen arbitrarily from among thousands of others. Rather, he insisted that “it was France itself that is brought to justice.” It was up to the French people, he suggested, to judge “the anguishing question of respect for colonial populations’ rights and liberties.” French public opinion, he argued, must decide whether colonial politics would be republican, governed by popularly elected legislators, or authoritarian, governed by externally imposed tyrants. He asked rhetorically, “Is France no longer the land of liberty and justice?” 120 Monnerville reminded the jury that although the French prosecutor had denounced the rioters’ “uncivilized” behavior as being anti-French, nothing was more civilized and French than spontaneous struggle by oppressed groups for rights and liberties. He argued that by acquitting the accused, the jury would express the French people’s condemnation of pernicious colonial politics, thereby showing their Guianese brothers “the true face of France: generous and understanding France, idealist France, the France of Justice and Peace.” 121 In sum, Monnerville used the courts, a republican institution, to urge public opinion to confront the contradictions embodied by colonial citizens of the greater French nation. Each of the three events in 1930–31 reminded these writers that they too were subject-citizens. Like Maran, they confronted the fact that imperial policies often treated assimilated Antilleans no better than supposedly backward Africans, despite the colonial logic that valorized the former over the latter. Ultimately, by affirming republican universalism against colonial exclusions,

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La Dépêche Africaine did not recognize that racism was a feature not a failure of the republican system that they invoked. This periodical sought to hold the French state to its own violated rules of constitutional government. This was a historically intelligible but politically limited response to a colonial domination legitimized largely by those rules. Nevertheless, by identifying with republicanism and black cultural identity at the same time, the group around this journal uncoupled political and cultural assimilation. Their black republicanism would become one point of departure for Negritude’s later cultural politics.

Black Humanism The very first issue of La Dépêche Africaine included a precocious article by the young Martinican writer Jane Nardal, titled “L’internationalisme noir” (Black internationalism). In contrast to La Dépêche’s typical pieces, this intervention was more Panafrican than republican and focused on cultural renewal rather than political reforms. Nardal explained that historical conditions—the colonial mobilization for World War I, the new Africanist ethnology, the example of the American New Negro movement—were leading to “the birth of a new race spirit” in postwar France. Colonization itself was generating new bonds of racial solidarity among Antillean blacks, who felt “proud to be nègre” and were beginning to reclaim their African cultural origins. According to Nardal, this race consciousness did not entail a rejection of “white civilization.” It should lead Antilleans to embrace their status as “Afro-Latins” and use European knowledge to understand their past better and to serve as an example to Africans. Nardal suggested that by joining race consciousness to an enlightened cultural hybridity, Francophone nègres could promote a new “black internationalism.” 122 This brief essay on black internationalism presented a set of cultural nationalist concerns that would be further elaborated by La Revue du Monde Noir, the journal created in 1931 by Jane’s sister Paulette and Léo Sajous, a Haitian activist also affiliated with La Dépêche Africaine. The six issues of this new review were centrally concerned with the question of black cultural difference and transnational solidarity. As Paulette Nardal later claimed, no other black publication in France “studies the Negro question in itself. . . . None of them expresses faith in the future of the race and the necessity of creating a sentiment of solidarity between different Negro groups spread around the world.” 123 Placing great faith in the effectiveness of discursive practices, La Revue du

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Monde Noir hoped simultaneously to represent and to produce a race-conscious Panafrican reading public. Echoing W. E. B. DuBois, who promoted the Talented Tenth, and the New Negro movement’s focus on race leaders, the black elites around La Revue du Monde Noir understood themselves to be a cultural avant-garde. 124 The journal unapologetically identified itself as “an official organ” for “the intelligentsia of the black race.” 125 Even as she lamented that an “awakening of race consciousness” had taken so long to develop among French Antilleans as compared to African Americans, Nardal suggested that through La Revue du Monde Noir, they had an opportunity to “tender to their backward brothers a helping hand.” 126 The journal pledged “to create among les Noirs of the entire world, regardless of nationality, an intellectual and moral tie, which will permit them to better know each other, to love one another, to defend more effectively their collective interests and to glorify their race.” 127 The journal’s concern with producing race leaders, raising cultural consciousness, fostering diasporic connections, and celebrating African civilization informed its distinct strategy for challenging colonial exclusions. If La Dépêche Africaine had argued that colonial subjects should be granted political equality based on their being assimilated members of the modern French nation, La Revue du Monde Noir argued for black cultural recognition based on the fact that African civilizations were as ancient and complex as European civilization. Whereas La Dépêche Africaine had challenged Western universality on the grounds that it refused, as promised, to recognize political equivalence, La Revue du Monde Noir challenged its refusal to recognize cultural difference. It thus mirrored the new Africanist ethnology promoted by colonial humanists. The review did not suggest, however, that their cultural specificity precluded black people from participating fully in modern politics. Nor did it formulate a one-sided nativism that simply rejected the West. As Nardal argued, black “pride in being members of a race which is perhaps the oldest in the world” did not obscure the fact that “we are fully conscious of our debts to the Latin culture and we have no intention of discarding it. . . . Without it, we would never have become conscious of our real selves.” 128 Nardal’s hybrid Afro-Latin identification was confirmed by readers of the review who responded to a survey asking them, “How should les noirs living in Europe dress?” 129 Black and white respondents dispensed fashion advice to black Parisians who wanted to minimize the possibility of being laughed at in public. Most believed that blacks should be free to dress as they liked, including wearing European clothes. But they also counseled that these colonial elites should

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not “wholly abandon their native charm” and should “conserve the qualities of their race.” 130 La Revue du Monde Noir, in other words, did not advocate a primordialist retreat into African culture. Its goal was to secure an African-identified place within modern society. This was a culturalist critique of modernity articulated from within that was aimed at reformulating rather than rejecting its categories. The writers for the Revue suggested that colonized blacks’ universal humanity was a function of their different but equal African civilization, not their abstract individuality. They sought to articulate this culturalism with a universal humanism: “the Negro race will contribute, along with thinking minds of other races and with all those who have received the light of truth, beauty and goodness, to the material, the moral, and the intellectual improvement of humanity.” According to this utopian vision, cultural particularism was a vehicle for, rather than the antithesis of, a multiracial cosmopolitanism to come: “the two hundred million individuals who constitute the Negro race, even though scattered among the various nations, will form over and above the latter a great Brotherhood, the forerunner of universal Democracy.” 131 La Revue du Monde Noir sought to recuperate political universality by grounding it in, rather than simply opposing it to, cultural particularity. Far from a retreat from politics, this group’s focus on culture was an attempt to promote a new cultural politics for colonial elites of African descent. Yet La Revue du Monde Noir’s political imagination was limited by its undifferentiated conception of assimilation. It did not grasp the potentially complementary relationship between its critique of cultural assimilation and La Dépêche Africaine’s critical republican demand for political assimilation. Furthermore, despite its focus on racial difference, La Revue never developed an adequate account of racialization as a sociohistorical process. Its writers presented a relatively dynamic understanding of African civilization, Panafrican community, and a hybrid Franco-African identity as products of slavery, colonialism, and racial oppression. But they regularly referred to these categories as if they were transhistorical essences. More pragmatically, La Revue du Monde Noir sought to raise its readers’ Panafrican consciousness and connect them to the wider sociocultural networks of the imperial metropolis. In this spirit, it contained articles on black arts and ethnography, African history and politics, as well as black poetry. Their diasporic scope included Haiti, Cuba, Liberia, Ethiopia, and the United States. Especially concerned with the latter, it published translations of works by Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, pieces on the Tuskegee Institute, the Scottsboro

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trial, and black American culture. La Revue also published timely announcements for cultural and scholarly events concerning the black colonial community in Paris. Notices implored readers to attend Mauss’s weekly Collège de France seminars and referred them to articles of interest in other colonial periodicals. At least one reader was responsive to the journal’s community-building initiative, writing about wanting to create a “place in Paris where les Noirs could meet . . . a club where they could gather regardless of origin” that would foster “mutual comprehension” through “repeated contact.” 132 This journal was largely the product of a cultural salon organized by the Nardal sisters in the early 1930s, which staged in their own home the diasporic circulation of people and ideas. Paulette and Jane were Martinican children of colonial functionaries and studied black American literature. 133 They hosted Sunday meetings in their apartment in Clamart, which contained a library of Francophone and black American works, for young students, established writers, politicians, and professionals. The Nardal salon, like Maran’s informal soirées, served as a transnational meeting place for several generations of African and Antillean elites who composed the circle around La Revue du Monde Noir. (Several of them also wrote for La Dépêche Africaine.) 134 Participants in these legendary gatherings would recite Antillean poetry, sing American blues and spirituals, discuss African civilization, and argue about contemporary politics. Louis Thomas Achille recounts the bilingual conversations about “world news . . . colonial and interracial problems, the growing place of men and women of color in French life . . . every manifestation of racism.” He characterized their movement as “no longer political like the Pan-Negro movements that preceded it, but cultural and sociological,” concerned with promoting “a black humanism, a black world.” 135 Like classic European salons, this one addressed itself to rational public opinion. But its goal was to produce a particular black consciousness, to cultivate a transnational African cultural enlightenment: “To study and to popularize, by means of the press, books, lectures, courses, all that concerns la civilization nègre.” 136 The Nardals promoted an internationalist black humanism that placed a particularizing interest in cultural difference, a universalizing commitment to rational public discourse, and a cosmopolitan ethic of Panafrican connection in the service of one another. The salon and its associated review exemplified and helped constitute the alternative black public sphere. The Negritude cohort knew the Nardals well and frequented their gatherings. Damas wrote press reviews for La Revue du Monde Noir and distributed it to Paris cafés such as the Coupole and Rotonde. 137 Césaire referred to the appearance of this journal as one of the era’s “relatively

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important literary events” and “a sign that there was some ferment in the small nègre world of Paris.” 138 Although Senghor later minimized its impact on his writing, he claimed that Negritude was initially more influenced by La Revue du Monde Noir and the Harlem Renaissance poets than by either Maran or the other black periodicals of the 1920s. 139 Building on the Nardals’ precedent, Negritude writers would also seek to elaborate a shared Panafrican identity among a transnational community that could then be linked to an alternative black humanism. The Nardal salon exemplified the public discussion about race and African culture that the Negritude movement would later cultivate. Practically, it placed the Negritude students in contact with leading figures of the Francophone black public sphere as well as with African American luminaries whose work they had begun to read. The Negritude cohort became acquainted with the New Negro writings through Maran, the Nardals, and the Achilles. 140 The Achille family was related to the Nardals, and their apartment was, according to Damas, one more “bridge” between Francophone and American black intellectuals. 141 Another crucial transatlantic intermediary was Mercer Cook, an American professor of French at Howard who promoted the black cultural scene in Paris. Through these overlapping diasporic networks, the Francophone elites socialized with prominent African American intellectuals in Paris. 142 Damas and Senghor translated the poetry of Brown, Hughes, Claude McKay, and Richard Wright. 143 Senghor remembers reading issues of legendary African American journals such as The Crisis and Opportunity. 144 Césaire, who had written a university thesis on the theme of the South in Negro-American literature, was already familiar with black American writing. 145 He recalled reading the work of Locke and Hughes in La Revue du Monde Noir and getting to know Claude McKay in Paris. 146 Damas became especially friendly with Langston Hughes. 147 In 1938, both were part of an international group of progressive poets who participated in the Deuxième Congrès des Écrivains pour la Défense de la Culture. 148 During this Popular Front–inspired conference, Damas took Hughes to the Cabane Cubaine, about which Hughes would later write. 149 Acknowledging the importance of these African Americans on his group, Senghor later referred to the Negritude students in these early years as “nègres nouveaux.” 150 The Negritude cohort was especially struck by the New Negro movement’s attempt to demonstrate that black American high culture was the equal of its white counterpart, even as it was grounded in particular cultural experiences and aesthetic forms. Langston Hughes summarized this emancipated racial sensibility in a formulation that the Negritude writers later enjoyed quoting: “We

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younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.” 151 The nascent Negritude movement was concerned with precisely this relationship between racial consciousness and a specifically black aesthetic. Later tensions within Negritude’s cultural vision were prefigured by the distinct versions of racial rehabilitation proposed by Alain Locke and Claude McKay, each of which made an impact on the Francophone writers. When Alain Locke argued that the shared experience of black migration to Harlem under racist conditions created a new sentiment of “race sympathy and unity,” he could have been referring to black Paris. 152 He deployed terms such as self-expression, self-determination, self-respect, spiritual emancipation, and racial awakening to describe this process. 153 Locke, however, emphasized that by rejecting cultural assimilation, educated black Americans were not renouncing their membership in American society. This was a means of transforming America, not escaping it. For Locke, the New Negro movement was simultaneously national (a “collaborator and participant in American civilization”) and transnational (the vanguard of “a new internationalism” that includes “the scattered peoples of African derivation,” for whom Harlem was “the home of Negro ‘Zionism’ ”). 154 Negritude maintained a similar relationship to the French republic by also formulating a simultaneously national and transnational political imaginary. Whereas Locke linked New Negro race pride to black participation in urban, political, and aesthetic modernity, Claude McKay presented an antimodern vision of racial reclamation. If Locke’s black intellectuals sought both to reject assimilation and to claim membership in the nation, McKay’s characters were unable and unwilling to find a place for themselves in nations that insisted on their racial inferiority. In McKay’s poem “To America,” reprinted in the first issue of La Revue du Monde Noir, he refers to America as a “cultured hell” of “bitterness” and “hate” directed against its black citizens. 155 In McKay’s novel Banjo, a similar relationship between racialized blacks and the French nation is figured. Banjo, based on McKay’s own experience in imperial France, presents a critique of modernity from the standpoint of racial difference by establishing a series of irreconcilable dichotomies between intellect and intuition, civilization and primitivism, capitalism and blackness. 156 McKay’s representation of a lumpen community of black migrants in Marseille is written on the border of ethnic fiction and urban ethnography. It demonstrates that global capitalism created a multiracial imperial city through which commodities, laborers, and

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ideologies circulated. The narrative is organized around the relationship between Ray, a disaffected New Negro poet, and the Beach Boys, transient blacks who came to Marseille as sailors and dockworkers. Rather than submit to the labor discipline and racial humiliation endured by the black proletariat in the imperial shipping industry, this group has chosen to hustle their living as itinerant laborers in the Marseille demimonde. In what would have been a nightmare scenario for the interwar colonial state, these black bohemian vagabonds work temporary jobs only when absolutely necessary. McKay presents the Beach Boys as living a Dionysian blackness whose highest values are pleasurable consumption, excessive expenditure, and sensual corporeality: “There was something sublime about waste. It was the grand gesture that made life awesome and wonderful.” 157 Black music and dance become redemptive alternatives to a dehumanizing colonial capitalism. 158 Banjo offers the spectacle of a diasporic black community sharing an unmediated, playful, and embodied access to a primordial Africanity. According to the logic of the novel, the Beach Boys’ racial grounding allowed them to avoid modernity’s instrumental, reifying, and homogenizing rationality. At the same time, Banjo suggests that their rootless and cosmopolitan lives threatened national and imperial categories, norms, and order. Throughout the novel, Ray attempts in various ways to inhabit the modern world of European nation-states but finds that he cannot escape racialization. Rather than struggle for equal rights in a hostile white civilization, Ray’s response is to identify with the Beach Boys. By interacting with them, he develops a Panafrican consciousness. Believing that the racism endemic to modern nation-states will always exclude him from both humanity and Western civilization, Ray ultimately embraces a myth of primordial African culture. The tension that Banjo stages between cosmopolitanism and nativism was also an undercurrent of Francophone black cultural nationalism between the wars. The Negritude writers’ critique of humanism, nationalism, and modernity was more immanent than McKay’s. Like Locke, they sought to reground rather than reject these categories. But like McKay, they formulated a raceconscious nativism that privileged nonrational aesthetics. Although the Negritude circle did not share the rough proletarian lifestyle of the Beach Boys, they would have recognized in Banjo a representation of the broader black cosmopolitan milieu to which they too belonged. The novel’s attention to specifically French republican racism must have also been compelling to them. McKay’s Banjo was perhaps the Negritude circle’s most beloved black American novel. Damas used a quote from McKay as the epigraph for his first published collection of poetry in 1937: “Be not deceived, for every deed you do I

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could match, out-match: Am I not Africa’s son. Black of that black land where black deeds are done.” 159 In his first public lecture that same year, Senghor quoted what became for the Negritude writers an emblematic passage from Banjo: “I believe in a racial renaissance,” said the student, “but not in going back to savagery.” “Getting down to our native roots and building up from our own people, said Ray, “is not savagery. It is culture.” 160

According to Césaire, Banjo “was really one of the first works in which an author [gave] the Negro . . . a certain literary dignity.” 161 Damas remembers his circle reading and circulating Banjo in 1930. 162 He credits this novel with inspiring him and several other Antillean intellectuals to separate from La Revue du Monde Noir because it was not radical enough. 163 This breakaway group of self-identified Marxist dissidents, which also included Étienne Léro, René Ménil, and Jules Monnerot, then created Légitime Défense in 1932. 164 Written by “French-speaking Antilleans” in the name of the “children of the black bourgeoisie [bourgeoisie noir],” it assumed the tone of a revolutionary manifesto “committed to total engagement.” It attacked the “capitalist, Christian, bourgeois world,” denounced “humanitarian hypocrisy,” and celebrated modernist literary heroes such as Sade, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Marx, and Freud. Declaring themselves “traitors to [their] class,” these writers exhorted readers to revolt against their parents’ values and to oppose “administrative, governmental, parliamentary, industrial, and commercial cadavers.” 165 Monnerot denounced elite complicity in Martinique’s socially stratified and racist colonial order. 166 According to Ménil, Antillean literature neither engaged the everyday social injustice that confronted the masses nor expressed the writers’ deepest cultural selves. 167 Léro’s piece argued that because elite Antillean writers seek to imitate French models and efface their own blackness, and are silent about “the hatred and aspirations of an oppressed people,” their work was bankrupt. He argued that proper Antillean literature did not actually exist. 168 The Negritude cohort had encountered their fellow Légitime Défense students at the Nardal salon. 169 But whereas Damas collaborated with them, Césaire and Senghor dissociated themselves from a group that they later dismissed as “mediocre poets.” 170 In their eyes, this journal was so attached to Communism and Surrealism that its poetry lacked an identifiably black dimension. 171 Ménil himself later acknowledged that the poetry published in Légitime Défense

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did not correspond to its call for an authentic racially rooted Antillean literature. 172 Senghor has argued that for Negritude, Surrealism was only a means to rediscover “Negro-African language,” never an end in itself. 173 He even claimed that “we developed [Negritude] in opposition to . . . Étienne Léro and René Ménil.” 174 Yet Senghor also acknowledged that “more than a journal . . . Légitime Défense was a cultural movement.” 175 For the first time, students of his generation were intervening directly in the black public sphere. Although the Negritude group dismissed what they believed was Légitime Défense’s vulgar Marxism, they too identified with the same European avant-garde modernists named in the journal. 176 It therefore set an important precedent for Negritude. Unfortunately, according to Senghor, Légitime Défense did not recognize that “cultural independence . . . is the sine qua non of all other independences, especially political independence.” 177 French authorities apparently agreed with Senghor’s formulation. Even the cultural interventions of the Panafrican groups thus far discussed were treated as political threats by the French state. Maran, we saw, was driven out of the colonial service for his writing. La Dépêche Africaine’s distribution network was disrupted, and the CAI closely monitored its editor, the future deputy Maurice Satineau. 178 Similarly, La Revue du Monde Noir was quickly identified by the Ministry of Colonies as “having tendencies that are clearly hostile to our influence in Africa, although in its mission statement it only declares philanthropic goals.” 179 The Sureté Générale distributed dossiers to colonial authorities in AOF on the organizers of La Revue du Monde Noir, whose socialist, communist, and nationalist political orientations were noted. 180 When the journal sent Henri Jean-Louis to West Africa to raise funds and enlist subscribers, the Government General tracked his daily movements. He was reported to be meeting in Dakar with “people suspected of having extremist opinions.” 181 Damas later recalled that La Revue had “many problems: financial, political, police.” 182 These problems were also apparently shared by Légitime Défense. The French government banned the publication before a planned second issue could appear. 183 Such financial, organizational, and censorship pressures were even more pronounced for those metropolitan Panafrican groups for whom direct action and political transformation were explicit objectives.

Radical Panafricanism During the interwar period, a parallel network of radical Panafrican associations traversed the metropolitan political field I have been discussing. 184 These

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more militant groups struggled to organize colonial workers, overturn the colonial system, and support a worldwide communist revolution. They developed their own ways of participating in French civil society and mobilizing a transnational black public sphere. Their history, which intersected with that of the more moderate cultural Panafricanists, was characterized by shifting political affiliations, financial difficulties, police harassment, and internecine conflict. 185 These militant initiatives were facilitated by the French Communist Party’s Comité d’Études Coloniales (1921) as well as by the umbrella Intercolonial Union. 186 Communist support later enabled Lamine Senghor, a former colonial soldier and prominent labor organizer from Senegal, to found the Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre (CDRN) and its affiliated newspaper, La Voix des Nègres, in 1926. 187 This group was committed to internationalism. It advocated “permanent collaboration with organizations that truly struggle for the liberation of oppressed peoples and for the world revolution.” It was equally committed to the “social evolution of the black race.” Lamine Senghor declared, “nègres do not belong to any European nationality.” 188 He exhorted blacks to overcome racist distinctions between hommes de couleur (educated blacks), noirs (newly assimilated blacks), and nègres (the poorest and most “indigenous” colonized blacks). In an editorial, he explained that “the youth of the CDRN have lifted [the name nègre] out of the mud . . . in order to make a symbol out of it. . . . We feel honor and glory to call ourselves nègres.” 189 By March 1927, ideological conflicts led to a split within the group between a reformist faction, led by Maurice Satineau (La Dépêche Africaine’s Guadeloupean editor), and a communist faction, led by Lamine Senghor (from Senegal) and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté (from Sudan). The latter two seceded to create the more explicitly revolutionary Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre (LDRN), whose newspaper La Race Nègre was also partly funded by the French Communist Party (PCF). 190 The paper was distributed in continental France and in West Africa, where it was monitored and restricted by metropolitan and colonial governments. 191 La Race Nègre was also plagued by internal tensions. By November 1927, Kouyaté accused Lamine Senghor of being a brigand and having expropriated funds from the Ligue that had been set aside for printing costs. 192 When Senghor resigned as LDRN president because of illness, Kouyaté denounced this as a ruse to evade investigation for his financial irresponsibility. 193 Senghor, who had long suffered from wounds received in World War I, died soon thereafter, and Kouyaté assumed responsibility for the group and its journal. 194

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Under Kouyaté, the LDRN retained its radical left political orientation but pursued a more explicit black nationalist agenda and sought to promote Panafrican solidarity through concrete initiatives. In 1928, it distributed posters calling on black political and cultural factions to “cease your internal struggles” and “begin reconciliation.” 195 The paper declared that “the end of racial prejudice will arrive when a great black state will be constituted on a modern foundation: African Zionism.” 196 In a letter to W. E. B. DuBois in 1929, Kouyaté explained the group’s intention to link the “national independence of black people [peuples nègres]” to “the very human ideal of fraternal understanding and collaboration between races” within a framework of “international equality.” 197 The LDRN also demanded that French colonial subjects be granted freedoms of the press, speech, association, movement, and religious belief, as well as the right to local governing assemblies and a fair judiciary. 198 This concern with democratic liberties associated with civil society was perhaps conditioned by the constant police surveillance of the LDRN and censorship of La Race Nègre. The group also demanded the right to work, military exemptions for colonized peoples, and the end of monopoly trade concessions for metropolitan firms. 199 The LDRN planned to protest the upcoming colonial exposition. 200 It established local branches in French African colonies, even interceding with the administration in Senegal on behalf of aggrieved native functionaries. 201 The group’s international legitimacy was evident when in 1930 the League of Nations asked it to submit a report on forced labor. 202 Under Kouyaté’s leadership, the LDRN’s black internationalism placed it in a close but precarious relation to the Communist International. In 1929, Kouyaté traveled to the Soviet Union to raise funds for his movement. In return for financial support, Moscow requested that ten black students be sent to the USSR for their education. 203 Several months later Kouyaté angered the communist Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire (CGTU) when, in Bordeaux and Marseilles, he organized branches of a black trade union that was independent of the PCF. 204 The LDRN sent delegates to the international Black Workers’ Congress in Hamburg in 1930. While there they received promises of “moral and material support” from sympathetic organizations and were asked to create a multiracial Ligue contre l’Imperialisme in Paris. 205 Kouyaté combined this trip with another visit to the Soviet Union for the Fifth Congress of Trade Unions. The international delegates included twenty-five “nègres from oppressed countries.” Although he complained about having been under French government surveillance there, he was able to visit Moscow, Leningrad,

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Stalingrad, and Siberia. He pledged to supply the USSR with three hundred black students a year. 206 When Kouyaté returned to France, he faced a smear campaign against him from within the LDRN. Despite his courting of the Communist International, he had undermined the group’s relationship with its local PCF sponsors by refusing to grant the party oversight of articles to be published in La Race Nègre. 207 Although a communist, Kouyaté insisted on ideological and institutional independence for his nationalist movement. This meant that by 1930, the LDRN faced a financial crisis. The journal was kept afloat by Émile Faure, a black nationalist who was more concerned with promoting black racial purity than revolutionary communism. 208 This ideological difference turned into a power struggle within the LDRN, which again expressed itself through accusations of financial impropriety. When Faure was unable to pay the printer to publish La Race Nègre, he accused Kouyaté of misappropriating funds in order to subsidize his black trade union. 209 Kouyaté’s Syndicat Nègre de Marseille was established “in conformity with the 1884 law [on associations]” in order “to defend and support the collective demands of black workers” by demanding “equal pay for equal work regardless of race, color, and sex.” Organized as an independent entity for those who did not want “to become the instrument of [French] trade union politics,” it would allow its black working-class members “to take care of themselves.” The union envisioned “hostels [foyers] to shelter them in case of unemployment, illness, or other difficulties of the working life,” which would also serve as “a constant meeting place and center for moral improvement.” Black workers of all political and religious persuasions were eligible to be members of what was envisioned as an autonomously managed labor organization. 210 This initiative thus integrated Panafricanist and welfarist visions of corporate self-help. Kouyaté’s black labor union had a counterpart in the Institut Nègre de Paris, a black student union that several members of the LDRN planned to create in 1930. They envisioned a Panafrican association that would improve living conditions for black students within French society by providing “natives of color, without distinction of nationality,” with a library, meeting rooms, lodging, and a restaurant. 211 Led by Léo Sajous, the Garveyist founder of La Revue du Monde Noir, organizers also included Kouyaté, Faure, Paulette Nardal, and Hélène Jaffard. 212 Although independent of the PCF, they were identified as radicals by the colonial administration that monitored them and were attacked by the anticommunist far right press. 213 The Institut Nègre never materialized. Most likely it was undermined by the conflict between Kouyaté and Faure, which eventually led the LDRN to split

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into two factions in 1931. Each briefly published its own version of La Race Nègre. 214 Eventually Kouyaté abandoned this struggle and created the Union de Travailleurs Nègres (UTN) in 1932, with support from the Colonial Committee of the CGTU, as a vehicle to continue his Panafrican political organizing. 215 Through the UTN and its journal Le Cri des Nègres, Kouyaté continued to pursue his vision of transnational and cross-class alliances among Africans and Antilleans, labor militants and moderate students. In 1933, Kouyaté instructed the UTN to invite various leaders of black organizations in Paris to a number of meetings in the basement of Café La Samaritaine on the rue de Rivoli. 216 The goal was to establish a common list of grievances and provide moral as well as material support to black students in France. Rehabilitating the idea of the Institut Nègre, he proposed creating a Maison des Nègres that would include lodging and a library. At the meeting, Kouyaté avoided revolutionary calls for African independence. He simply proposed unifying the weak and fragmented black community in Paris. To “demonstrate” solidarity literally, they agreed to invite other groups to march with them to the Père Lachaise gravesite of Victor Schoelcher, the legendary French statesman who orchestrated the abolition of slavery in 1848. 217 Despite the politically moderate tone of these meetings, the representatives of colonial student organizations, including Léonard Sainville and Léopold Senghor, were reluctant to engage in any political activity that might threaten their members’ government scholarships. 218 They requested that explicit political discussions be prohibited in the new federation. They also objected to Kouyaté’s plan to extend the UTN’s organizing work to colonial West Africa. Others at the meeting argued with them about the need to engage in direct political action, and no agreement could be reached. Student support for the initiative then wavered. At the first meeting Senghor had promised to recruit twelve more Senegalese students for this attempt at collaboration. But he also declined to serve on the new group’s study commission and refused to declare the West African Student Association’s formal support for the UTN project without its members’ approval. 219 Beyond these tensions between militants and students, the project collapsed of its own accord later that year. Kouyaté was expelled from the PCF for having tried to maintain the UTN’s independence from the party, and then he was forced out of the UTN for collaborating on projects promoting Panafrican solidarity with noncommunist figures such as Maran, Satineau, Faure, and Isaac Beton. 220 Eventually the UTN itself, whose members composed perhaps the most successful and enduring radical Panafrican alliance of the interwar period, was threatened with dissolution by its own sponsors.

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In October 1935 the Colonial Section of the Communist Party sought to divide the UTN into separate African and Antillean sections, each with its own newspaper. 221 UTN members protested this authoritarian and fragmenting directive. One Antillean placed Panafrican solidarity over party loyalty and exclaimed, “we are all nègres here and we are united to pursue a common project . . . it is disastrous to divide les nègres.” 222 After months of conflict, during which time the communist credentials of these colonial activists were challenged, this same militant complained, “the Communist Party that leads us treats blacks like children.” Ultimately the French representative from the PCF’s political bureau expressed his exasperation through a racist outburst: “I work with Arabs and Indochinese, but I cannot manage to work with nègres.” 223 He then withdrew from the project and requested that the party impose sanctions on these recalcitrant UTN comrades. Communist Party anticolonialism in the 1930s clearly had its institutional contradictions. But there were also internal tensions within the UTN, again expressed by representatives of Martinican and Guadeloupean students who had participated in these meetings. Jules Monnerot, from Légitime Défense, protested the PCF’s attempt to divide the UTN, arguing “there is no distinction between black Africans and Antilleans.” But Léonard Sainville added, “we must be realistic. It is a fact: there is some difficulty between Africans and Antilleans. There are also problems between black workers and students. We need two organizations and even three journals: for workers, intellectuals, and Africans.” 224 One of these imagined journals would materialize as the Negritude group’s first publication, L’Étudiant Noir, to which Sainville contributed. The history of radical Panafricanism in Paris between the wars reveals an overdetermined tendency toward organizational implosion. The combination of internal and external pressures made anticolonial alliance politics around racial identity difficult to sustain. The PCF seemed unwilling to recognize black nationalism as an autonomous radical movement, radical black nationalists were unable to enter into pragmatic collaboration with moderate but race-conscious reformers, and colonial elites, especially students, were reluctant to commit to the struggles of colonial workers. Chronic financial crisis and constant harassment by the Paris police and colonial government added to this organizational stress. Among the various groups that composed the black public sphere in Paris, these militant organizations had the most difficult time “practicing” citizenship in a sustained way. Our understanding of the more moderate cultural Panafrican initiatives, including Negritude’s later efforts, must be informed by this troubled history of alliance politics among Africans and Antilleans, revolutionaries and

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reformers, communists and nationalists, workers and students. Despite their different constituencies, methods, and objectives, the networks of cultural and political Panafricanists overlapped. But if reformist and radical representatives of the black public sphere often interacted, their relationship was tense. Notwithstanding the Marxist posturing of Légitime Défense, colonial students were more concerned with protecting scholarships than with organizing resistance. They focused on recovering black dignity more than they did on improving African social conditions. Léopold Senghor identified Lamine Senghor as his distant cousin but claimed that the Negritude cohort disagreed with the older Senghor’s militant communism. He also accused La Race Nègre of being too obsessed with racial purity. Negritude’s elitist tendencies are evident when Léopold Senghor dismisses these interwar black periodicals on the grounds that they were published by “amateurs” who were “neither ethnologists nor writers.” As he claims, “we rarely read these journals and, when we did, we thought that their articles were poorly reasoned and badly written.” 225 Clearly the Negritude writers were closer to the cultural and moderate Panafricans than they were to these political radicals. Nevertheless, Negritude also recuperated the term nègre. Encouraged by their militant elders to create Panafrican alliances, these younger students confronted similar challenges in attempting to do so.

L’Étudiant Noir Damas, Senghor, and Césaire, as my discussion suggests, developed their ideas about racial identity, African culture, and republican politics through their engagement with these multiple African and Antillean movements. As Senghor later recounted, “in the years 1928–1935 we had echoes of all the ideas that agitated Parisian nègres, from René Maran up to the Nardal women.” 226 By the mid-1930s, the Negritude students were themselves contributing to this black public sphere through student associations and publications. In 1932, the relatively apolitical journal of the Martinican Student Association, of which Césaire would be elected president in 1934, announced the creation of an Association of West African Students. 227 With Léopold Senghor as its first president, it was meant to help colonial students “elaborate . . . a common ideal, born of the accord between their native civilizations and the demands of the modern world.” They would then be able to “assimilate” and “appreciate the richness of French culture” while “remaining close to [their] own people” and avoiding “mechanical and bleached imitation.” 228 Like the Nardal

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circle, these students sought to formulate a modern Afro-French cultural identity. An announcement in Le Cri des Nègres indicated that this association also wanted “to establish solid ties of friendship between [colonial students]. . . . it will develop in them the idea of solidarity, giving them help, advice, and protection.” 229 Through this voluntary association, cultural positioning, social solidarity, and black self-help were meant to complement each other. This was an ambitious vision for an organization that only had ten members. Among them were Senghor, Soulèye Diagne, Socé Diop, Birago Diop, and a woman named A. Jaillard. 230 Diagne studied law and went on to become a magistrate in Dakar. The two Diops, who had known each other in Dakar, were in France for veterinary studies. Both resisted their assigned roles as future colonial technicians. While in Paris, before receiving his post in the African service, Birago began to transcribe African folktales. 231 Ousmane violated the terms of his scholarship by studying literature at the Sorbonne and was almost repatriated. He was the first of this group to be published. Ousmane’s Karim (1935) was a novel about life in Senegal; it had a preface written by Delavignette and included an appendix of African folktales. His next novel, Mirages de Paris (1937), represented the Negritude students’ cultural milieu in France. 232 At the end of 1933, an article in Le Cri des Nègres complained that the multiplicity of student organizations was fragmenting the black community in Paris. It argued that this dangerous “regionalism” should be overcome through the creation of “a general association of black students [étudiants nègres]” from the Antilles, Africa, and Madagascar. Because “union means force . . . colonial students will be in a stronger position to realize their demands when they are members of . . . a single organization” ready to rally “against certain abuses [and] injustices.” 233 As if mindful of this call to action, Senghor, Césaire, and Damas systematically promoted connections between African and Antillean student communities. The Negritude students sought to turn their private friendships into a public project. More nativist than activist, their focus was less on political organization and militant intervention than on cultural exchange and social solidarity. Senghor led Africans to eat lunch with their Antillean peers at the Cité Universitaire, despite their mutual suspicion. 234 Senghor met regularly with a larger group of Antillean students, including Césaire and those affiliated with Légitime Défense. They regarded him as a “representative of Africa” who read them his poems in which “Negro-African values were glorified.” These Antilleans were eager to learn from the few Africans in Paris. 235 Gradually the African Student Association became acquainted with Damas, Césaire, Sainville, and Monnerot. 236 They would meet in Birago Diop’s resi-

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dence hotel, where, he recounts, “we did not talk politics at my place, leaving that, as far as I was concerned, to our Senegalese and Sudanese elders who were engaged in militant Communism.” These meetings “gave birth to L’Étudiant Noir out of the ashes of L’Étudiant Martiniquais.” 237 In a gesture of Panafrican solidarity, Césaire’s student association changed the name of its journal to the more inclusive L’Étudiant Noir. 238 According to Sainville, L’Étudiant Noir “constituted for us a tool that could be used by all students who openly contested the West, more or less violently, and for us to see there a poem or article by Senghor was an affirmation that contact among the different children of Africa was finally renewed after so many centuries of separation.” 239 Damas, who did not write for L’Étudiant Noir, served as its editorial secretary and described it as “a corporate journal of struggle” whose objective was “the end of tribalism, of the clannish system that rules in the Latin Quarter.” He hoped that through this journal, they would “cease being essentially Martinican, Guadeloupean, Guianese, African, and Malagasy students to become one single and same étudiant noir.” As he declared, “life in isolation is over.” 240 This new journal was a self-conscious attempt not only to address a Panafrican community of colonial students in France but to call one into being. The first and most likely only issue of L’Étudiant Noir appeared in March 1935 and was edited at the Cité Universitaire. Articles by Senghor, Césaire, Sainville, Paulette Nardal, Henri Eboué, and Gilbert Gratient (Césaire’s former lycée teacher from Martinique and contributor to La Revue du Monde Noir) grappled with the problematic cultural status of educated colonial elites enmeshed within a European social order. This was the first published intervention by the Negritude circle. The opening section of L’Étudiant Noir included brief pieces on issues relevant to colonial students’ lives in the imperial metropole. Writers complained that the June 1934 measure restricting scholarships for Martinicans in France was generating undue anxiety and poverty in their community. 241 Others complained about ineffective leadership by and divisions within the Martinican Student Association. 242 But one writer optimistically referred to the emergence of a new generation of enthusiastic students who would regenerate the organization. 243 This new guard was in fact represented in the paper’s second section. Here Paulette Nardal writes a parable about transcending racial self-hatred and class divisions within the black community in order to embrace one’s status as nègre publicly. It takes the form of a personal anecdote about encountering an outlandishly dressed African in a comic military uniform who was reduced to

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playing a public buffoon while selling peanuts in Paris. She recounts at first being revolted by his humiliating predicament. But she describes overcoming her impulse to dissociate herself from this spectacle and interacting warmly with him in the name of “color solidarity” and “real fraternity.” 244 In a different register, Henri Eboué invokes his father’s ethnographic research to discuss an underlying identity between language and music as media of communication in the Congo. 245 The rejection of assimilation and the celebration of African cultural expression would become central axes of the Negritude project. Both themes were further developed in Césaire’s and Senghor’s contributions. Césaire’s article, titled “Nègreries,” is a call to action addressed to “black youth” [la jeunesse noire]. 246 It begins by rejecting cultural assimilation, which Césaire characterizes as a form of stupidity or madness because it ignores “alterity which is a law of Nature.” He explains sarcastically that even when governments attempt to legislate racial equality, “the People, wiser than decrees, because they follow Nature, shout at us: ‘Get out of here; you are different than us; you are simply météques and nègres.’ ” He concludes that assimilation is ultimately impossible, “a dangerous affair for the colonizer as well as the colonized.” Because it ignores irreducible racial differences and the inevitability of popular racism, Césaire dismisses assimilation as a delusion that “always ends in contempt and hatred.” Césaire therefore calls on black youth to emancipate themselves by struggling on three fronts: against assimilating colonizers, against other blacks who support assimilation, and against their own impulse to assimilate. His program for claiming racial authenticity is presented through existentialist aphorisms: “to truly live, you must remain yourself ”; “to be yourself requires action”; and “emancipation is action and creation.” But despite his call to embrace racial particularity, Césaire does not abandon a conception of universality. He argues that by expressing their particular colonial experience, black writers will “contribute to universal life, the humanization of humanity.” His polemic against assimilation and insistence on natural racial differences thus concludes with a universal vision of racial humanism. Conversely, Senghor’s starting point is a conception of black humanism, and he concludes by celebrating a particular aesthetic style shared by all blacks because of race. 247 Whereas Césaire opens with a rejection of assimilation, Senghor begins by rejecting the concept of racial purity. Invoking the new African ethnology, he claims that all nègres are biologically métis. Césaire derives universalism from blacks’ writing about their own experience. Senghor inverts this causality and argues that the very project of universal humanism compels blacks to inquire into their own culture. He presents a concept of “black humanism”

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that would reconcile racial self-discovery with universal humanity: “to be nègre is to recover what is human beneath the rust of what is artificial and of ‘human conventions.’ ” For both writers, racial identification confirms rather than challenges a universal humanism. Like Césaire, Senghor relates black subjectivity to literary creation. He presents René Maran as his model for black humanism. Where Césaire called on black youths to emancipate themselves from the legacy of cultural assimilation, Senghor directs their attention to one of the community’s most publicly assimilated elders. On the one hand, he praises Maran’s cultural métissage, explaining that mastery of the European tradition fostered the writer’s “black sensibility” [sensibilité nègre]. On the other hand, he insists that buried within Maran was the “soul of a nègre,” which allowed him to write so convincingly about Africa in Batouala: “The genius of the bush, across generations of exiles, marked him with its tattoo.” According to Senghor, “we can find the nègre in the style” of Maran’s writing, which he believed contained characteristically African alliteration, onomatopoeia, and repetition. But Senghor does not indicate, as we might expect, that the biological and cultural métissage with which he began the essay generates corresponding hybrid aesthetic forms. According to Senghor, Maran’s writing expresses the tension between European knowledge and an African soul, “a drama and duel between Reason and Imagination, Spirit and Soul, White and Black.” Although he claims that Maran reconciled these oppositions, Senghor’s framework only allows him to understand “African humanism” in racially primordial terms. Throughout their careers, Senghor and Césaire would continue to grapple with the relationship between universality and particularity, through discussions of humanism and race, that had become such colonial preoccupations during the interwar period. These reflections would continually be refracted through aesthetic questions. The possibility of a specifically African or black aesthetic runs through L’Étudiant Noir. Eboué, we saw, invoked the internal relations between African language and music. Both Senghor and Césaire linked humanism to black writing. Senghor did so in the content of his essay on Maran’s authentic “black style.” Césaire did so in the form of his essay, which embedded rational arguments in a critical poetics. The term nègreries is a neologism that condenses nègres and reveries, and can be translated as “black illusions.” 248 But the term is also an economical formulation of Césaire’s critique of assimilation as a “black delusion.” At the same time, it suggests the utopian “black dreams” of emancipation that his article also supports. Césaire concludes his essay with just such a call for revolt, which he presents poetically: “Shear yourself to the edge of fear, from which The

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Identical cannot escape / Shave yourself / This is the first condition of action and creation / Long hair is an affliction.” Césaire here suggests that black emancipation requires an aggressive denuding in order to arrive at, or return to, a state of originary and fearsome racial nakedness. Senghor’s contribution begins with what seems to be intertextual reference to Césaire’s image of cultural shearing. He writes, “we must strip humanism of all that it is not.” The link between existential shearing and artistic creation also indicates the Negritude group’s understanding of the poetic enterprise as a process of cultural stripping and racial self-exposure. Césaire’s and Senghor’s articles can be read together. Both extend issues raised by La Revue du Monde Noir by grappling with the relationship between racial authenticity, universal humanism, and cultural production. Likewise Léonard Sainville’s and Gilbert Gratient’s articles form a pair and suggest another dimension of the emergent Negritude project. Both seek, in different ways, to qualify the elitist tendency in the student movement’s cultural nationalism with a more populist political activism. In this respect, their pieces resonate more with Légitime Défense. In contrast to the other articles in L’Étudiant Noir, they focus on specific issues confronting Antilleans rather than generic “blacks” in modern or French society. Sainville belonged to the same generation and social circle as Césaire and Senghor, but he was more active in the radical UTN than they were. His article links his interests in African culture and social justice. As if challenging his elder communist comrades, it insists on maintaining a distinction between class emancipation and racial emancipation. Sainville also argues that literary questions are no less important for addressing “the black problem” than are economic or political questions. 249 Conversely, as if challenging his Negritude peers, Sainville highlights class divisions that exist in Martinique between assimilated elites and the uneducated masses. The “total incomprehension” and “latent antipathy” between these groups require colonial writers “to make [the black working class] known and loved.” Sainville thereby tries both to persuade the political radicals to treat culture nonreductively and to inject a sociopolitical dimension into the nascent Negritude conversation. Gratient, a member of the older generation, also challenges the Negritude students’ preoccupation with racial authenticity and African origins. He presents the history of Martinique in terms of biological and cultural “supermétissage.” Slavery and its attendant sexual violence, he explains, had destroyed African culture and created a wholly mulatto population for whom the only available civilization was French. 250 Gratient makes three claims about the historical process that created Martinique’s racially stratified society. First, cultural

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assimilation was an inescapable process, not a moral choice: “the mulatto did not detach himself from nègres, he was born detached.” Second, assimilation and “bourgeoisification” have created culturally sterile societies in the Antilles. Third, the younger generation’s rejection of assimilation and claim that “we are nègres like all the others” is understandable but problematic. While sympathetic to his younger collaborators, Gratient challenges their fixation on racial authenticity. Claims to an essential African identity, he argues, elide the specific history of Martinique’s peculiar Creole civilization, which definitively transformed both Europeans and Africans. Gratient contends that a quest for “Pan-Negro originality” risks imitating the logic of European racism and becoming a “reverse snobbery.” He suggests that while these students may rightly reject cultural assimilation, it would be empirically wrong and politically dangerous for them to deny the history of creolization. 251 Gratient implicitly invites the Negritude students not only to complicate their understanding of racial identity but to politicize it. He endorses their belief in an “imperious duty of solidarity regarding all nègres.” But his deployment of identity politics is qualified and strategic. Gratient explains that insofar as he joins the students in embracing a generic black identity, it is in order to support “the cause of the persecuted, my black skinned brothers in disgrace, martyrs to race hatred and villainous imperialisms, I am in solidarity with them and I scream: I am nègre.” Gratient’s gesture of identification is concerned less with recovering a “true and original . . . identity,” which he believes is impossible, than with expressing solidarity with “the political struggle of the mass of exploited noirs, the damned of the earth. . . . Directed against the imperialism that starves, humiliates, and tortures them.” Gratient’s refusal to identify himself fully with Africanity may have given him the appearance of being more culturally conservative than the younger writers. But his insistence on creolization and his use of race as a political, rather than an ontological, claim served as a precocious warning against the nativist strand of Negritude that was already developing. Gratient and Sainville attempt to steer L’Étudiant Noir toward addressing the often unacknowledged existence of cultural mixture and class conflict within the black colonial community. Both seek to link the Negritude group’s reflections on racial identity to the material impact of racism on the everyday lives of ordinary blacks. Such general meditations on assimilation, race, and identity did not yet explicitly engage the imperial nation-state as subsequent Negritude writing would. But L’Étudiant Noir did acknowledge the broader field of metropolitan French politics that these colonial intellectuals engaged. The first issue included a brief piece by Sainville that criticized the extreme-right paper Je Suis

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Partout for its racist and inflammatory articles on “the invasion of people of color (black, yellow, Arab).” He warns his student readers of “the imminent dangers posed to their life and liberties by the rise of fascism.” 252 This seemingly anomalous article may be read as a sign of the concrete political pressures that informed these students’ reflections on colonialism and culture.

Panafricanism and the Republican Public Sphere Despite its modest scope and moderate political tone, L’Étudiant Noir was subject to government surveillance. A police informant reported that this student journal “reflects very advanced, if not revolutionary, ideas.” The members of the group identified are Césaire, Sauphanor, Aliker, Mangée, and Senghor, as well as “known militants” Léro, Sainville, and Monnerot, and “the negresse” Paulette Nardal. 253 Another report quotes Sainville at a UTN meeting declaring that students had created their own journal because the UTN was suspicious of intellectuals. Sainville explained that this journal lost its financial support after two or three issues because of its politics: “we demanded scholarships for students, a larger place at the Sorbonne, we met with antifascist organizations. . . . As a result, several of our scholarships were suspended and our journal collapsed. Since the events in Abyssinia, we began protesting again. We collaborated with other students to defend that country.” Sainville also announced that they made 250 francs from the sale of their student journal in the Antilles. 254 The fact that their writing was distributed in the colonies suggests the scope of their political ambition, despite their moderate tone. Sainville’s comments indicate that these student writers participated in the converging antifascist, anticolonial, and Panafrican movements during the Popular Front years. According to Nancy Cunard, an avant-garde socialite and renowned negrophile, the Étudiant Noir group, along with the UTN and the Algerian Étoile Nord Africain founded by Messali Hadj, marched in the Popular Front’s Bastille Day parade in 1935, led by anthropologist Paul Rivet. 255 Like the other antifascist demonstrators present that day, the colonial groups were there to rally for the republic. But Cunard reports that they also chanted “Africa for the Africans” and carried banners proclaiming “Equal Rights and Equal Status for North African and Colonial Workers” and “Fight Mussolini’s Aggression on Ethiopia.” This public intervention thus enacted their more general intellectual interest in linking republican values to a critique of colonial injustice.

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But this Bastille Day demonstration also reveals that when the Popular Front was mobilizing a broad antifascist coalition in France, metropolitan Panafricanists had already been galvanized by Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. According to James Spiegler, this imperial war had generated a resurgence of intercolonial demonstrating and organizing among Francophone black nationalists between 1935 and 1939. 256 Members of the Étudiant Noir group were politicized by the invasion. Paulette Nardal, for example, along with Kouyaté and Messali Hadj, were leaders of the Comité Internationale pour la Défense du Peuple Ethiopien. 257 In response to this imperial war, Léopold Senghor wrote a long poem, “A` l’appel de la race de Saba,” that stages Panafricanism as an epic struggle that mobilizes the global black community around the Ethiopian homeland, which Ethiopia also symbolizes: “I become equal with the sons of prisoners, and am friends of Moors and Tauregs, congenital enemies / Because the mountainous cry of Ras Desta has cut across Africa, like a long sure sword.” 258 Senghor’s vision of Panafrican solidarity exceeds the Ethiopian conflict as the poem quickly shifts to a vision of general anticolonial revolt and African liberation entailing “the final assault against the bureaucracies that govern the governors of colonies.” But its last verse elaborates a vision of working-class internationalism to supplement its racial transnationalism. The speaker announces, “we are all reunited here . . . different costumes custom language; but . . . the same chant of suffering.” The “we” invoked here includes not only colonial Africans and Asians but also “all the white workers in fraternal struggle” and Jewish victims of German persecution. For Senghor, Panafrican politics enabled and did not simply mirror socialist internationalism. Senghor engaged in practical efforts, stimulated by the Ethiopian invasion, to promote such alliance policies. In 1935, along with Faure, Kouyaté, and Monnerville, he belonged to the Agence Métromer, a “nationalist” but noncommunist colonial news service that published a bulletin edited by René Maran. This group sought to collaborate with white “indigènophiles,” on the one hand, and to create “a grand inter-colonial movement” on the other that would federate all existing “nègre, and notably student, associations.” Its goal was to “make the Mère-Patrie better known in the colonies and the colonies better known in France.” 259 This will to engage a metropolitan public also motivated the Fédération des Peuples Colonisés, which counted among its members Léon-Gontran Damas, Sajous, and Kouyaté. It included students, journalists, lawyers, politicians, and militant socialists from France, Indochina, North Africa, West Africa, and the

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Antilles. Their goal was to “make known colonial grievances in the metropole and work for their rectification” by informing public opinion about colonial injustices. Yet this federation also wanted “to reconcile colonial peoples’ attachment to their respective homelands with the deep love we have for the revolutionary ideal of the France of 1789.” 260 It pledged “to extend and transport [anticolonial] struggle to the very territory of revolutionary France, to Paris in particular, the mother city of generous ideas.” 261 These activists, at once republican, socialist, and Panafrican, thus engaged France as an imperial nation-state. This integrated approach to intercolonial federation and anticolonial politics in the wake of the Ethiopian affair was pursued on multiple fronts by Kouyaté. Although he had been hospitalized for six months after his expulsion from the UTN, he reclaimed a prominent position in the black public sphere in 1935. 262 In addition to becoming a leader of the anti-Italian protest movement, he founded Africa, whose first issue appeared under the headline “Ethiopia Defends Itself.” This journal, which would support the French Popular Front government’s reform initiatives in AOF, was Kouyaté’s most politically moderate enterprise. Extending his earlier attempts to organize colonial students, Kouyaté’s inaugural editorial declared, “Times have changed. Younger generations in Africa are entering the scene, animated by the will to renovate, hearts full of humanity, minds free from old illusions but oriented toward practical, rational, and independent projects [realisations]. They demand to be heard.” It then explains that the journal’s impartial and nonsectarian examination of African problems and government policies will be motivated by a desire “to establish normal relations between races, peoples, and nations, to abolish the hatred that endangers the future of Humanity, to restore an era of Justice, Right, and Liberty.” 263 Whether this reformist political turn was principled or pragmatic, Kouyaté in the late 1930s sought to link black cultural nationalism to social democratic humanism within a reorganized imperial federation. 264 In November 1935 Kouyaté elaborated a plan for a “Franco-overseas alliance” that proposed transforming the empire into a “federal regime with France as its guide-nation.” He envisioned colonies becoming federated states, or dominions, with autonomous governments. The indigènat would be abolished, and all natives would possess French nationality and citizenship in their dominion. They would participate in their own local Chamber of Deputies and would send representatives to a High Imperial Chamber in the federal metropole. Each federated state would define its own civil code corresponding to the traditions and customs of its inhabitants. Under a system of mandatory bilingualism, school instruction would be in French and a second language chosen by the local parliament. All inhabitants of these new dominions would

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have equal access to metropolitan universities. According to Kouyaté, these measures would be the first step toward the emancipation of colonial peoples, who would gradually join all other peoples in a world federation guided by an expanded League of Nations. For the short term, he proposed a series of commercial and agricultural reforms that would promote economic development in AOF. 265 This Popular Frontist vision of imperial federation placed Kouyaté in conversation with colonial humanist reformers as well as younger Negritude writers; both groups sought to revise the imperial order along related lines. Kouyaté’s federal plan, attempts by colonial subject-citizens to confederate themselves in response to the Ethiopian invasion, and the Bastille Day march against fascism indicate how Popular Front activism created openings for Panafrican projects and vice versa. They also suggest the way in which national, imperial, and transnational imaginaries intersected among these groups. Panafrican networks were mobilized for republican objectives, and republican politics sustained Panafrican organizing. The interwar black public sphere both extended and disrupted the republican public sphere. Of course, it is somewhat redundant to speak of a republican public sphere. As we saw in the Rousseau passage cited earlier, republicanism constructed a remarkable chain of equivalences between civil society, cité, republic, body politic, state, and people. Each implied the others. According to Rousseau, individuals in a republic are citizen-subjects: participants in sovereign authority who are subject to the laws of the state. I have reversed this formulation to suggest that colonized individuals in the republican imperium were subjectcitizens: subjects of an external sovereign authority who nevertheless practiced civic virtue in relation to the state, civil society, the republic, the body politic, the people, and so on. But practicing citizenship, for them, was a contradictory enterprise. It entailed acting as if they belonged to a collectivity to which they only enjoyed a semimembership and embracing a civil society that was also an instrument of colonial racism and state power. These contradictions would require them to deploy republican categories (i.e., citizenship, civil society, public sphere) under erasure. The utility of these categories for challenging colonial oppression could be exploited, while the way in which they mediated that oppression could be identified. Gayatri Spivak identifies the logic of this type of double gesture when she describes “the deconstructive predicament of the postcolonial,” who must make political claims “from a space that one cannot not want to inhabit and yet must criticize.” 266 Civil society, public sphere, and citizenship were indispensable critical fictions for Africans and Antilleans. These categories designate truth effects of

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democratic discourses, which in turn allow discourses of democracy to be articulated. Cohen and Arato remind us that civil society is two dimensional: a space of social domination and a vehicle of emancipatory possibility. 267 Similarly, citizenship has functioned both as an formal alibi of postliberal heteronomy and a concrete instrument of political autonomy. Colonial citizenship was a concrete abstraction. It could not necessarily ensure liberty and equality for racialized populations. But as a juridico-political status and object of struggle, it provided an idiom in which to demand liberty and equality. Likewise, republican civil society was not so much a legally protected domain of normative freedom but one from which claims to freedom could be made. It was not a neutral social space defined by the absence of political power but a relational and agonistic field defined by open-ended contests of power. The res publica or republican “thing” was not the source of democratic political practices but their condensed effect. Interwar Africans and Antilleans grappled with the fact that racialization was a dimension of colonial modernity that could not be transcended by affirmative appeals to republican universalism. Yet a categorical rejection of that universality from the standpoint of cultural difference would have left them unable to make legitimate political claims on and from within the nation. An adequate critique of interwar French colonialism had to synthesize demands for liberty and equality with the attempt to reground universality in cultural difference. It would have to be articulated from the standpoints of both difference and equivalence, making claims in the language of race and rights, identity and legality. The various hybrid formulations outlined above—black patriotism, black republicanism, black humanism, and black internationalism—sought, in different ways, to address this dilemma. Subject-citizens in the imperial metropole formulated positions that attempted to articulate European modernity and African civilization, humanist universalism and racial particularity, cosmopolitanism and nativism, national membership and transnational identification, republican and Panafrican political imaginaries. These were not only abstract intellectual formulations. My discussion of the black public sphere indicates the pragmatic and strategic ways in which subject-citizens placed Panafrican networks in the service of republican solidarity, even as they exploited the republican public sphere in order to promote Panafrican solidarity. Their commitments to republican political culture and Panafrican organizing entailed one another. For them, the national and the transnational were not antithetical but coexisted within the framework of Greater France. The imperial nation-state contained a multinational population that was spread across disjunctive territories and was subject to diverse regimes of gov-

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ernance. Within such an entity, political practices that are conventionally understood to be nation-centered were often already quasi-transnational. Similarly, what we now recognize as transnational forms of identification were often modalities through which to participate in the national politics of an empire. The imperial scale of Greater France enabled subject-citizens to reconcile and exploit that which political theory often codes as irreconcilable. To understand better the doubled and contradictory dimensions of Panafrican politics in the imperial metropole, we might turn to the way in which Michael Warner has differentiated among the public (the people in general), dominant publics (those able to presume the universality of their norms), alternative public spheres (those that generate oppositional discourses through the same form of rational-critical debate sanctioned by dominant publics), and counterpublics. The latter use “poetic-expressive” counterdiscourses that “supply different ways of imagining stranger-sociability” in the hope “of transforming, not just policy, but the space of public life itself.” 268 The Panafrican subject-citizens discussed in this chapter were distributed among and moved between these multiple publics. As members of the Greater French nation, they were a segment of the people in general. As patriots, republicans, and humanists, they contributed to dominant public discourses. As anticolonial critics, they formed an oppositional alternative public sphere. But at times, some of these groups also constituted themselves as radical counterpublics. Their two-sided formulations of Franco-African identity, black humanism, Panafrican republicanism, and cultural politics implicitly challenged the grounding dichotomies (modern–primitive, individual–collective, rational–racial, national–global, political–aesthetic) on which the distinctiveness of France’s civil society and public sphere depended. By embracing both sides of these pairs at once, colonial subjects practiced a transformative imperial citizenship that simultaneously followed and challenged the republican rules for engaging in civic activity and public politics. It was no accident that this Panafrican public organized itself not only through political meetings but through popular dances, banquets, and poetry readings. Its members often valued friendship as much as ideology, nonutilitarian sociability as much as instrumental organizing, aesthetics as much as politics, imagination as much as direct action. Such tendencies were less a retreat from the public, as they are commonly read, than an attempt to create counterpublics. We will see that the Negritude movement functioned simultaneously in two ways: as an alternative public engaged in rational-critical discourse about national-imperial politics; and as a counterpublic that insisted on political equality as culturally distinct “Negro-Africans” and whose modernist poetics

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produced a critique of the very rationality with which the public sphere was synonymous. Negritude writers did not simply use republican categories under erasure; they produced an immanent critique of the French imperial nationstate and its underlying political rationality.

Mirages and Visions Ousmane Socé Diop’s novel Mirages de Paris, published two years after the journal L’Étudiant Noir, may be read as a meditation on the cultural duality, mixture, and dilemmas that the Negritude students grappled with during their metropolitan sojourn. A novelist in a group of emergent poets, Diop took notes for this book while socializing with the Negritude circle in black Paris. 269 The protagonist of Mirages de Paris is Fara, a Senegalese villager who was recruited to participate in the West African pavilion of the 1931 Colonial Exposition. Its plot is organized around his troubled relationship with Jacqueline, a white French woman, and the society to which she belongs. The novel is at once a literary ethnography (pace Banjo) that documents the Negritude milieu and a staging of the irreconcilable choices with which these colonial immigrants were faced. The first section of the narrative presents Fara’s experience of racialization as he enters French civil society. On his steamer trip to Bordeaux he encounters the universalizing racism of a colonial teacher committed to African assimilation and the particularizing racism of a colonial merchant who opposes native education. After arriving in France at the appropriately named Hôtel Moderne, he felt “it was the first time in his life that he had such a strong sensation of his being and his color.” 270 On the metro, Fara has the paradigmatic experience of racial interpellation that would later be represented obliquely by Césaire and directly by Fanon. A child points to Fara’s black body and cries out “Mama, look at that man!” As Fara circulates in metropolitan civil society, he experiences such racial subjectivation constantly: “He believed himself to be exposed to grotesque jokes of the ‘uneducated,’ to the jeers of innocent children whom picture books, the cinema, and fantastic tales taught that a black [noir] was a living puppet. He would not be nice if he could not smile from morning to night at the jokes repeated a thousand times by those who wanted to tolerate him” (Mirages, 64). Here we can see that the humiliating public ridicule Paulette Nardal had located in the lowly peanut vendor was a general condition for blacks in Paris. The tension between France’s inclusive promise and such everyday racism is embodied by Jacqueline’s father, who claims to be a liberal but condemns his

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daughter’s interracial romance. In response to this paternal hypocrisy, Jacqueline abandons her family and moves in with Fara. This rupture initiates the second part of the narrative, in which Diop shows us the cosmopolitan world of black students in Paris. Like McKay, he sets scenes in jazz clubs, the Bal Nègre and the Cabane Cubaine, where music and dance signify the supposedly sensual, corporeal, and transcendent character of black culture: “The tom-toms remembered their ancestral cadences. They hammered the brain, chasing out all other ideas, until hypnosis set in” (55–59). We are thus introduced to a Panafrican counterpublic peopled by Senegalese, Martinicans, African Americans, British subjects, Haitians, and Mauritians. Similarly, a “diverse world of blacks” regularly gathered at Fara’s apartment, even though “in Africa, they would have lived in different social spheres and would be hierarchized” (116). Fara’s close friends included Ambrousse, a vagabond world traveler who could have been one of Banjo’s Beach Boys, John, a negrophile white Scotsman, and Sidia, a race-conscious philosophy student whose library contains works by Delafosse, Delavignette, Maran, McKay, Hughes, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Durkheim, and Hitler. Diop thus constructs a semiautonomous sphere of transnational black sociability. It is a domain that both insulates colonial students from the toxic racism of the wider metropolitan civil society and opens itself up to a sympathetic white woman like Jacqueline. The third part of the narrative stages this tension between enclosure and permeability, when Jacqueline becomes pregnant with Fara’s child. Sidia argues against mixed-race children on the ground that the black elite has a responsibility to the future of the race. In response, Fara compares Sidia’s concern with racial purity to Hitler’s and responds: “everything is métis; there is not one pure race on earth, no civilization that is not mixed” (148). When Jacqueline dies in childbirth and her parents adopt the baby, Sidia’s warnings about the dangers of openness and mixture seem to be confirmed. After the death of Jacqueline, Fara becomes despondent, feels estranged from French society, and finally decides to return home to his own family in Africa. Sidia also plans to leave the “mirages of Paris” and return to Africa to struggle for social improvement. In contrast to McKay, Diop condemns the vagabond lives of unemployed colonials in the metropole. The message is that racist French society is ultimately inaccessible to colonial subjects. In this narrative, cultural mixture is as impossible as racial mixture is dangerous. Yet the novel’s ending problematizes the severe choice between Paris and Africa that it earlier required its characters to make. On the eve of his departure, Fara loses himself in reverie as he walks across a bridge over the Seine. In the water he suddenly sees not only reflections of Paris monuments but

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romanticized scenes from his African village and finally the face of his beloved Jacqueline. Imagining that her hand is reaching out to him, he throws himself over the bridge into the river. In Césaire’s terms, Fara becomes a victim of his own nègreries. We might read his delusion-induced suicide as a consequence of his misguided belief that he could integrate into French society or maintain a substantive connection with Jacqueline-as-Paris. But Fara’s final hallucination also suggests that returning to his native Africa was an equally phantasmatic proposition. His death therefore enacted, in an extreme form, the impossibility of choosing between cosmopolitan and nativist strategies for being in and acting on the world. 271 Mirages de Paris, in other words, stages the Negritude students’ struggle to reconcile cultural métissage with racial authenticity. During the 1930s, however, Negritude students did not give in to despair as Fara did. Nor did they choose only one path from among Sidia’s Africa-first philosophy, Ray’s commitment to transnational vagabondage in Banjo, and Veneuse’s assimilationist’s bad faith in Un homme pareil aux autres. Instead they engaged the double bind of colonial racism from within the imperial metropole. Christopher Miller masterfully traces, as metaphors and models of the colonial relation, the intersecting dreams, illusions, hallucinations, and fantasies that structure Mirages de Paris. 272 But I have argued that Greater France was a real abstraction, not simply an ideological deception. Recognizing this, Negritude writers sought to identify immanent possibilities for critique within the existing imperial order. Rather than either accept or unmask colonial hallucinations, they exercised their own political imagination in potentially transformative ways.

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Negritude II: Cultural Nationalism

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0.0pt PgV The organizational, political, and conceptual “failures” of Francophone Panafricanism between the wars were not simply a function of poor planning or bad thinking. Racialized subject-citizens attempting to participate in republican civil society confronted an overdetermined structural dilemma, not an intellectual puzzle. Beginning with the French Revolution’s ambiguous abolition of slavery, internal connections among universalism, republicanism, and rationality, on the one hand, and racism, colonialism, and domination, on the other, undermined modern liberalism’s contention that the existence of terms from one series signaled the absence or failure of terms from the other. This persistent legacy of emancipation, incisively characterized by Thomas Holt as “the problem of freedom,” haunted colonial subjects of the first three French republics. 1 In this chapter I analyze the form (cultural politics) and content (cultural nationalism) of early Negritude’s attempt to confront this long-term legacy by engaging with colonial humanism, its immediate expression. Through close readings of Senghor’s and Damas’s writing, I elaborate their historically intelligible but politically inadequate engagement with interwar colonial contradictions. In this and the next chapter I am especially attentive to the multiple registers, fronts, and scales of the Negritude critique. It situated itself within the dominant public sphere, participated in a rational-critical alternative public sphere, and aligned itself with a poetic-irrational counterpublic.

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It joined demands for political equality and cultural autonomy. Its imaginary identifications were at once republican-national, Panafrican-transnational, and cosmopolitan-universal. It is this multiplicity and this complexity that are often flattened by critics of Negritude.

Situating Negritude Canonical scholarship has largely accepted the founders’ retrospective description of Negritude as a nativism and then disputed whether its racial particularism should be valorized or criticized, whether it was essentially radical or conservative, political or cultural, truly nationalist or not. One tendency celebrates Negritude as an anticolonial resistance movement that anticipated the later African nationalist struggles for political independence. 2 This approach ignores the way Negritude was complicit with the colonial order that it also contested. It erroneously presumes that if these writers were engagé, that engagement was by definition politically radical. Another tendency criticizes Negritude as a movement of elite Francophiles more interested in culture than politics, which collaborated with colonial power in either reformist or reactionary ways. 3 This approach does not acknowledge the inseparable relationship between culture and politics in Negritude’s “engaged” writing. Later critics have recognized that Negritude was a cultural politics or that it attempted to link a rehabilitated African civilization with an alternative universalism, but they have rarely attempted to explain why. 4 We need to be able to account for Negritude’s contradictory character in relation to positions circulating in the interwar black public sphere and in relation to the contradictory logic of imperial politics. With L’Étudiant Noir, the Negritude students began to practice citizenship by extending, reconfiguring, or renouncing currents of existing Panafrican criticism. Perhaps more directly than other black critics, they also developed their project in relation to colonial humanism. They came of age after World War I, precisely when a postliberal form of rule emerged in the colonies and the imperial character of the nation-state became a public issue. Like the interwar reformers, they sought to work through France’s dual imperial traditions: scientific racism, which affirmed the biological inferiority of Africans, and cultural assimilation, which disavowed African civilization and insisted that colonial subjects become French. Both groups shared a preoccupation with cultural politics and sought to rearticulate the relationship between universality and particularity within a renovated imperium. In metropolitan France, these

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cohorts of students and reformers often intersected, whether as collaborators or combatants. Negritude writers became implicated in the elaboration of colonial humanism even as they formulated an alternative black humanism. The Panafrican public sphere and the humanist reform movement constitute dual axes of intelligibility for Negritude. Recognizing this allows us to understand Negritude’s early interventions as contextual yet potentially transformative exercises in political imagination that were at times strategic and effective and at others symptomatic and aporetic. Only then can we identify the novel possibilities opened by Negritude’s critique in the 1930s—a critique at once republican and Panafrican, which refigured the French nation as imperial and the French empire as a transnational federation—before the possibilities were closed down in the post–World War II period. Negritude was a cultural nationalism whose methods, objectives, and limitations must be analyzed in their own right. 5 Partha Chatterjee’s landmark inquiry into the historical specificity of anticolonial nationalism identifies a contradiction between its claim to oppose European domination in the name of an indigenous nation and the postEnlightenment epistemological and ethical frameworks that are implicitly called on to justify logically and morally that claim to nationhood. Chatterjee argues that such movements could not overcome this tension between the need for the postcolonial nation to be both modern, in order to refute European claims about indigenous inferiority, and radically different from the West, in order to legitimize autonomous national sovereignty. He concludes that because anticolonial nationalism ultimately “accepted the very intellectual premises of ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination was based,” it was a “derivative discourse.” 6 By locating this contradiction at the level of nationalist thought, Chatterjee implies that this is an intellectual rather than a sociohistorical problem. But instead of implicitly accusing nationalists of bad thinking, we can relate their dilemma to the antinomic political forms and rationalities that they confronted. Anticolonial actors cannot simply think their way out of such structural contradictions; they can only engage or work through them more or less self-consciously. 7 Rather than evaluate Negritude as a revolutionary or reactionary nativism, we must attend to its dual character, which developed in relation to a doubled form of colonial government. The Negritude circle recognized that because the colonial project itself worked to fix African difference, it was inadequate to critique only the universalizing side of colonial racism by affirming cultural difference. Conversely, because the colonial project used bourgeois individualism to undermine African societies, it was inadequate to critique the particularizing side of colonial racism by insisting on individual human rights. These

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writers sought to recuperate the emancipatory possibilities contained in both universalism and particularism. Negritude not only reacted to colonial humanism but attempted to rethink cultural politics for a republican empire. It formulated what Senghor would call African humanism: a particularist theory of “Negro-African” identity articulated with an antiracist universal humanism. The Negritude critique was notable precisely because it promised a way into rather than out of the imperial nation-state. At the same time, Negritude’s political imaginary was transnational and Panafrican. Scholars of diaspora and postcoloniality rightly exhort us to formulate analytic categories adequate to increasingly postnational geopolitics. We read that because the nation-state is “outmoded” and “obsolete,” we need “to think ourselves beyond the nation” or “think within the nation-state” in order to grasp new transcultural and transnational conditions. 8 But rather than always focus on a putative historical movement from the national to the transnational, we should also historicize the nation-state itself as a political form long characterized by an open-ended relationship among territory, state, and people. It then becomes possible to locate what are now regarded as transnational processes within the nation-state itself once it is conceptualized as an integrated imperial formation. Such an optic would allow us to understand better the seeming tension between national and transnational commitments that marked anticolonial politics within the metropole after World War I. 9 When looked at on the scale of Greater France as a spatially dispersed and multicultural political formation, Negritude’s multiple commitments to republicanism, Panafricanism, and cosmopolitanism were not contradictory.

Negritude Cultural Politics Referring to the 1930s, Senghor has made the strong claim that “Negritude poses a cultural problem not a political problem.” Yet reflecting on this formative period, he has acknowledged that his circle believed there was a fundamental relationship between the two: “we gave priority to cultural independence, and we affirmed, against the communist students, that cultural independence was the sine qua non condition of all other forms of independence. We did not dismiss political independence. We only thought that it was neither the most urgent nor the most important question to resolve.” 10 Senghor remembers that his group’s highest priority was “to reclaim oneself as noir,” which “meant turning [our] backs on the Western values learned in school: on Technology, Science,

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and Reason.” This would require what he called “a descent into the abyss of the black soul or, to employ the password, into Negritude.” 11 We need to analyze the limits and possibilities of that cultural-political journey. Here I use the term cultural politics in three ways: first, to refer to the participation of Negritude students in interwar debates about the policies of the colonial state concerning issues such as education, language, and customs; second, to refer to the political implications of Negritude’s elaboration of and identification with a transnational and transhistorical African culture; and third, to refer to Negritude’s use of aesthetic forms to engage political issues. The primary ambition of Negritude students was to create a new poetry rooted in black experience that addressed colonial racism and Panafrican culture. Although there is no intrinsic connection between poetics and racial consciousness, there are several reasons why poetry became Negritude’s privileged medium for cultural politics. Poetry’s obscure and subjective character meant that it would appear less threatening to the police apparatus than the more explicitly political interventions of the students’ peers. 12 Additionally, because the colonial administration and the metropolitan public were themselves preoccupied with protecting indigenous culture, government authorities could not easily condemn the poetic exploration of Africanity. Finally, poetics became the vehicle for Negritude’s critique of Western rationality (see chap. 8). Damas later recalled the way in which “politics and literature became more interpenetrated,” beginning with the Légitime Défense group in 1932. He argued that “poetry has a task to fulfill” related to “an ardent inquiry into the problems of modern life.” As “colonized people become more conscious of their rights and duties as writers,” Damas explained, “native French language poetry” takes as its subject “poverty, illiteracy, human exploitation, social and political racism . . . forced labor, inequalities, lies, resignation, fraud, prejudice, accommodation, cowardice, abdication, [and] crimes committed in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity.” However, he added that this politicized poetry was also rooted in “hallucinatory visions, fantasy, bitterness . . . and deep emotion.” 13 This is a rejection of sterile formalism in favor of engaged poetics; it is not a call for realist verse. After L’Étudiant Noir Senghor began to develop his distinctive voice in a series of poems, many of which were later published in Chants d’ombre (1945). After receiving his agrégation in grammar in 1935, he obtained a teaching position as a classics professor at the Lycée Descartes in Tours. His proximity to Paris allowed him to study African linguistics and ethnology at the École Pratique and the Institut d’Ethnologie. In 1938 he was transferred to a post at the

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Lycée Marcelin-Bethelot outside of Paris, where he taught, wrote, and studied, until he enlisted in the colonial infantry (and was quickly captured and interned as a German prisoner of war) in 1940. 14 During the 1930s, Senghor immersed himself in French poetry, reading everything “from the Song of Roland to the Surrealists.” He describes his first poems, written while he was at Louis-le-Grand, as imitations of French Romantic and Symbolist poetry. But he reached a turning point when, under the influence of his linguistics and ethnology courses, he read black American and vernacular African poetry. He recognized that their non-Alexandrine meters could not be properly translated into French: “That was when I destroyed all my poems and began again at zero, when I began to look for a new type of verse. . . . I only kept the poems I wrote after 1935.” He then reread the French canon critically in order to identify poetry written in a “style nègre,” that expressed a “sensibilité noire,” and resembled “la génie nègre” (black genius). Senghor recounts that his group of colonial students treated Péguy, Claudel, Saint-John Perse, Éluard, and Breton as if they were examples of “Negritude in French.” 15 Senghor has referred to his early poems as myths of exile and childhood innocence, often animated by “nostalgia.” But he has also described them as instances of unmediated self-expression that emerged “from the very marrow of the real, from the mixture of suffering and desire that the initiated drew, between the wars, from dreams they objectified.” 16 Elsewhere he writes, “I will confess again that almost all the beings and things that [my poems] evoke are from . . . certain Serer villages. . . . I lived there, once upon a time, with the herders and peasants.” 17 His imaginative allegories were thus inflected by the claim to ethnological realism that characterized interwar colonial and anticolonial discourses, whether administrative or literary. Damas’s Pigments (1937) was the first collection of poetry from this circle to be published. Senghor characterized his friend’s inaugural Negritude poems in terms of their “essentially unsophisticated” style. He believed their use of language, rhythm, affect, and humor made these poems nègre: “the ensemble follows the natural rhythm of the tom-tom.” But by reading Pigments as “a vital reaction to inhuman disequilibrium,” Senghor also relates the poems directly to Damas’s personal experiences in France. He recalls that Damas “hung out in the most diverse neighborhoods and milieux, mostly with nègres from all over the world . . . writers, artists, students, workers, and soldiers. A poor student, he lived with intensity the intellectual and material tragedy, the moral tragedy of his race.” 18 Note that although Senghor here presents Pigments as speaking in a collective voice, he identifies Damas’s poems as an expression of sociohistorical

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circumstances not racial essence; they supposedly express the tragedy rather than the soul of the race. Senghor’s insistence on poetic immediacy—on the belief that his own poetry expressed real experience and that Damas’s spoke in a collective racial voice—would become central to Negritude self-understanding. Césaire has described their early writing in similar terms: “All the dreams, desires, accumulated rancor, and hopes . . . of a century of colonial domination, all that needed to get out, and when it does and expresses itself and erupts, carrying away the individual and the collectivity alike, the conscious and the unconscious, the lived and the prophetic, that is called poetry.” 19 Critics often follow this lead and treat early Negritude poetry as documentary, whether an unmediated expression of colonial oppression or of its author’s personal experiences. 20 In contrast, we may analyze this poetry as an engagement with colonial politics that staged a series of problems confronting racialized subject-citizens in the imperial metropole. 21 A commitment to and program for cultural politics were embedded in the poetry of Damas’s Pigments and Senghor’s Chants d’ombre, which I introduce here and explore further in chapter 8. Many of the poems in both collections thematize colonial elites’ complicity with French domination. The speaker of Damas’s “Ils ont” states simply: “They knew how so well / knew so well how to do things / things / that one day we screwed ourselves / threw ourselves to hell.” 22 Guilt here is figured through the shame of assimilation. In “Solde,” the speaker confesses, “I feel ridiculous / my toes not made / to sweat from morning till evening’s undressing / this swaddling that weakens my limbs / and deprives my body of its hidden sexual beauty” (Pigments, 41). 23 This poem constructs a dichotomy between a constrained and artificial Western being defined by ornament and manners, on the one hand, and a stripped-down and natural “black” being defined by corporeality and sexuality, on the other. This primitivist move is emphasized when the speaker invokes his body’s “loin-cloth beauty.” Damas is making a claim here about the speaker’s essential racial being that transcends the time of assimilation and his distance from Africa. But despite this primordial identification, the poem focuses on the assimilated speaker’s shame and guilt in the present: “I feel ridiculous / an accomplice among them / a pimp among them / a throat cutter among them / hands horrifyingly red / with the blood of their ci-vi-li-za-tion” (42). Elsewhere Damas uses assimilation to implicate colonial elites in the very history of Western racism and its criminal legacy. “My friends, I waltzed / waltzed more than my ancestors the Gauls ever did / to the point where I

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have blood / still dancing / in Viennese time. . . . I waltzed / waltzed / madly waltzed / until often / often / I thought I was holding / Uncle Gobineau / or cousin Hitler” (Pigments, 57–58). Here cultural assimilation has so penetrated the speaker that his very blood has been compromised. This colonial whitening, it is sardonically suggested, makes even Gobineau and Hitler into relatives of the assimilated black man. Pigments ends with an uncharacteristically realist poem. “Et Caetera” warns Senegalese tirailleurs against becoming implicated in European violence: “Me, I ask them / to silence the need they feel / to pillage / to steal / to rape / to soil again the old banks / of the Rhine” (80). More radically, the poem invites these soldiers to recognize that as colonized Africans, their interests are directly opposed to those of the French nation: “Me I ask them to begin by invading Senegal / Me I ask them to leave the Krauts in peace” (80). Colonial subjects, in other words, should fight not to protect Europe but for their own liberation. Senghor also expressed this will to revolt in a number of early poems written in Tours but not included in Chants d’ombre. Like Damas’s poetry, they are brief, straightforward, and confrontational. They differ from the more lyrical ethnometaphysical poetry that later dominates Chants d’ombre. These early poems invoke a rigid dichotomy and deep antagonism between the racialized black individual and the white French society that surrounds him: “Touraine springtime / I am a savage / a Violent man / Touraine springtime / let me sleep / Don’t mess with a nègre.” 24 Instead of contesting the racial stereotype of the savage nègre, the speaker embraces it as a source of personal power. In another poem, the narrator warns of his “stubborn rancor” and “the imperious demands of my Negritude.” 25 In “Émeute à Harlem” (Harlem riot) Senghor looks to his more radical American counterparts and frankly celebrates the prospect of racial rebellion: “My head is a boiling cauldron of alcohol / A factory of revolts / Mounted by long centuries of patience / I need shocks, cries, blood / Deaths!” 26 The aggressive and confrontational tone of these early efforts would disappear from the published poetry for which Senghor became known. Such violent revolt obviously contrasted with Negritude’s relatively moderate politics during the interwar period. These poems should not, therefore, be read as calls to direct action. They are provocations, allegories of political desire that express subjective rage rather than realist proposals for objective initiatives. While Chants d’ombre is less oppositional than Senghor’s earlier poetry, it contains a program for anticolonial cultural politics. We can read this collection as tracing an evolutionary movement from the kind of elite complicity expressed by Damas in Pigments, to the recovery of racial authenticity, to the deployment of engagé poetry for a new cultural nationalism. This collection is

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not only an example of Negritude writing; it also presents an affirmative metanarrative of the general Negritude project. Several of these poems stage the drama of a prodigal son who has betrayed his kin, returns home to reckon with his roots, and reclaims his primordial cultural identity. In “Le message” an African “messenger” is sent to recall the displaced and assimilated colonial to his native homeland in order to face his people. First, the errant colonial communicates news of modern Europe to them: “Diseases, ruined commerce, organized hunts, bourgeois propriety” (Poèmes, 19). In response, an African “Prince” communicates his own message, berating the poet’s cultural betrayal: “You are Sorbonne doctors, fat with diplomas. . . . Your daughters, I hear, paint their faces like courtesans / They give out free love and lighten the race! Are you happy?” (19). Here Senghor reverses France’s populationist preoccupation with racial and cultural purity by indicating that Africans rather than Europeans are the ones threatened by mixture. Yet he reproduces the colonial administration’s tendency to conflate women and culture as well as its anxiety about miscegenation. “Le retour de l’enfant prodigue” can be read as a rejoinder to “Le message.” It recounts the return of one of Africa’s prodigal sons, who, despite “the dust of sixteen years of wandering and the anxiety of all the roads of Europe,” insists that “my heart has remained as pure as an east wind in the month of March” (Poèmes, 47). Senghor mimics and undermines colonial racism by insisting that Westernization is an ultimately superficial affair for genuine Africans. We are told that despite his apparent assimilation, the poet’s heart has remained uncorrupted and his essential racial being continues to be unchanged. The speaker then surrenders his will and consciousness to the direction of an unlettered African pastoralist. This return to the biocultural is presented as an Orphic movement from rational reality to surreal musicality, from literacy to orality. “I am led by the golden note of the silent flute, led by the shepherd, my brother in long ago dreams. . . . And pierce shepherd, but pierce with a long surreal note this tottering villa, whose windows and inhabitants have been eroded by termites. . . . He doesn’t need paper; only the bard’s sonorous page and the redgold stylus of his tongue” (47–48). The “tottering villa” here is the speaker’s assimilated self. This “return” to Africa becomes a matter of shedding Western accretions and merging into the transhistorical continuity of an ancestral community. “I lie down on the ground at your feet, in the dust of my respect . . . here are my feet dirty with the mud of Civilization” (48). Salvation is figured as African musical language. In this poem, reclaiming African identity entails an acknowledgment of guilt and a request for forgiveness. The speaker’s betrayal was not only a matter of

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leaving and losing a connection to his native Africa. It was compounded by his having chosen to live with and befriend those who had authored the colonial oppression of his own people, which included “contempt and mockery, polite offenses discrete illusions / Prohibitions and segregation” (Poèmes, 50). The speaker acknowledges his complicity with European domination. “You know that I befriended the forbidden princes of spirit . . . the princes of form / That I ate the bread that brings hunger to the endless army of workers and unemployed / That I dreamed of a world of sunlight in fraternity with my blueeyed brothers” (50). By referring to Franco-African fraternity as a dream, the speaker recognizes that he will also be excluded from French society. “Merchants and bankers have exiled me from the Nation” (49). Cultural assimilation ultimately entails a double alienation. If these poems present a vision of impossible assimilation, they also celebrate the political possibilities that inhere in racial identification. One ends with the lines “I choose my laboring black people, my peasant people, the entire peasant race of the world . . . To be your trumpet!” (Poèmes, 30). This is at once an invocation of the transnational black community and an expression of internationalist working-class solidarity. Significantly, the “choice” here implies a plan for action, not just an affiliation but an intervention on behalf of his “laboring black people.” The “trumpet” image refers to Senghor’s commitment to poetry as praxis. The poetic “return” to Africa staged repeatedly in Chants d’ombre is not simply about recovering a primordial racial identity or reconnecting to a cultural tradition after straying into Europe. In these poems, the exiled African seeks to rejoin his native community—to immerse himself in the aesthetics, wisdom, and practices of ancient Africa—in order to reengage Europe on different terms: as a Negro-African and as a poet. In “Femme noire,” this poetic inspiration and fortification is bodily mediated by a woman who embodies Africa itself: “Naked woman, dark woman . . . mouth that makes my mouth lyrical” (Poèmes, 16). In the eponymous “Chant d’ombre,” this new poetry is directly linked to the natural world. Through it the poet voices the cosmos. “Listen to my singular voice that sings to you in the shadows / This song studded with sparks from singing comets / I sing you this shadow song in a new voice / The old voice of the youth of worlds” (Poèmes, 42). Elsewhere Senghor presents a romantic understanding of poetry as a vehicle of cultural salvation: “I bring back to life the procession of servant girls in the dew / And great gourds of milk, calm, on the rhythm of rocking hips” (Poèmes, 50–51). Tradition here is not only aestheticized but eroticized.

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In “A` la mort,” the African landscape itself becomes a source of poetic strength when, intoxicated by the earth’s scent, the speaker proclaims, “And I will spring up like the Enunciator, and I will show Africa like a sculptor of masks” (Poèmes, 26). If Africa here functions as poetic inspiration, the poetry also undertakes to represent Africa. “Elè-yaye! Again I sing a noble subject; let me be accompanied by koras and balaphone! . . . Let me here be the song of Africa’s future. . . . Ah! I am sustained by the hope that one day I will run before you, Princess, bearer of your scepter to the assembly of peoples” (Poèmes, 33–34). By reclaiming indigenous verse, the poet can produce efficacious representations of Africa as well as literally be a representative for Africa in world politics. This cosmological and ethnographic lyricism is not used to allow the speaker to evade historical reality; it becomes the very modality of an engaged poetics. Fortified by ancient African practices and knowledge, the poet can practice anticolonial politics while displaced in the metropole: Give me the impassioned science of the great Timbuktu doctors Give me the will of Soni Ali . . . Breathe on me the wisdom of the Keitas. Give me the Guelwar’s courage . . . Allow me to die for the quarrel of my people . . . Make me your Master of Language; no, name me your ambassador. . . .

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Tomorrow I head back on the path to Europe, to the embassy Homesick for my black Land. (Poèmes, 51–52)

These lines elaborate a program of cultural politics in which poetry becomes the medium for nationalist struggle. Chants d’ombre traces a double movement from Europe to Africa and then back to Europe again. Senghor’s poetry identifies the metropole as the site of Negritude’s cultural-political struggle. It is only upon returning from his return that the speaker can become Africa’s “master of language” and “ambassador.” Africa is not simply constructed in opposition to Europe but in relation to it: “Paradise, my African childhood, that guarded the innocence of Europe” (Poèmes, 28). Senghor’s poetry valorizes the African culture that had been annihilated or ignored by Western modernity. But it also represents that culture as a source of salvation for the modern West. The colonizers’ destruction

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of indigenous Africa is refigured as European self-destruction. “Here dies the Africa of empire—it is the agony of a pitiful princess / And also Europe, to which we are umbilically linked” (Poèmes, 23). This poem suggests that because primordial African culture is directly related to human being and the natural world, it will be the source of regeneration for a European modernity degraded by technology and violence. Africa is figured as the vanguard of the dawning new world, the essential animating principle of humanity itself. Let us answer “present” at the rebirth of the World Just as leaven is necessary for white flour. For who will teach rhythm to a world dead with machines and canons? Who will launch the cry of joy to awaken the dead and orphaned at dawn? Tell me, who will restore the memory of life to man whose hopes have been eviscerated? (Poèmes, 23–24)

The poem concludes with a defiant image of oppressed Africans triumphantly dancing the world back to life after modernity’s self-implosion: “They call us cotton men, coffee men, oil men / They call us men of death / We are men of dance, who become stronger in stamping the hard ground” (24). This is a refusal to be fixed by the categories of colonial rationality and fully objectified by the requirements of the global colonial economy. It is a vision of Africanity as rhythmic ontology and direct racial connection to the earth. These apocalyptic references to European cataclysm must be understood in the context of imminent world war. In “Poème liminaire,” from Senghor’s second collection of poetry, Hosties noires (1948), the speaker pledges solidarity with Senegalese soldiers killed for France by attacking official and popular racism. 27 “I will not allow ministers and generals to do the talking. . . . I will tear the Banania grins off the walls of France” (Poèmes, 55). 28 But this is not a repudiation of the nation: “Ah! Do not say that I don’t love France—I am not France, I know . . . Ah! am I not divided enough?” (56). The speaker announces his love for France while acknowledging his exclusion from the nation-state. This double identification indicates Negritude’s strategy to claim membership within Greater France as Negro-African citizens. Senghor, however, also sought to create a transnational black community. He writes, “My task is to reconquer distant lands that border the Empire of Blood” (Poèmes, 44). The discourse of Greater France sought to include subjects who lived outside of territorial France in the nation. In contrast, Senghor’s

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poetry presents a Panafrican vision that included people from many nations and empires in a black race and its shared transhistorical culture. This Panafricanist project is expressed in “A` l’appel de la race de Saba” (At the call of the race of Sheba), in which racial loyalty is figured as familial loyalty in the form of a lyrical prayer: “Bless you mother! I hear your voice when I am delivered to the sly silence of the European night” (Poèmes, 57). The speaker’s mother is conflated with mother Africa, symbolized by a violated Ethiopia, which he pledges to defend. The Ethiopian conflict is then generalized to include the broader African liberation struggle: “For the final assault against the bureaucracies that govern the governors of colonies” (60). But this epic confrontation is ultimately imagined as a cultural war fought with poetic weapons: “bursting from the brass of our mouths, the Valmy Marseillaise more urgent than the elephant charge of great tanks that precedes bloody shadows” (61). This reference to the “Marseillaise,” the French hymn of political liberation, rather than to African praise poetry or Negritude verse is remarkable. Here, at the conclusion of this poem’s invocation of the Panafrican racial family, Senghor deploys a political idiom that is both national, invoking a specifically French Revolutionary tradition, and internationalist, indexing the liberation of humanity. The poem’s final verses link this utopia of racial transnationalism to one of working-class internationalism. “Because we are all reunited there, different colors—those who are the color of roasted coffee, others of golden bananas, and others of rice fields / Different costumes custom language; but deep in our eyes the same chant of suffering in the shade of long feverish eyelashes.” After presenting an inventory of newly unified African ethnic groups, the poem also expresses solidarity with the European “Nomad miner indigent, peasant artisan student and soldier” as well as with persecuted German Jews (Poèmes, 61). This Popular Front poem (1936) ends with an eschatological invitation to the speaker’s “mother” to greet “the transparent dawn of a new day” (62). In Senghor’s poetry primordial African culture often enables Europe to overcome the contradiction of a corrupt modernity. Here Panafrican politics enables worldwide working-class politics. In Chants d’ombre Senghor thus echoes Damas’s attempt in Pigments to relate shameful assimilation, colonial complicity, and anticolonial revolt. Senghor’s poetry contains an implicit outline of the Negritude writers’ project to claim racial authenticity, create an engaged black poetry, and become public intellectuals. 29 The rest of this chapter on Negritude criticism focuses on the cultural nationalism that Damas and Senghor elaborated in their roles as “masters of

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language” who “trumpeted” the cause of colonized peoples. It shifts from cultural production as political practice to political reflections on the character of culture. The analysis of Negritude poetics resumes in chapter 8.

Public Intellectuals Although Negritude only became a self-conscious movement after World War II, its members emerged as public intellectuals in the late 1930s They became leaders of a new generation of colonial students in metropolitan France. By 1936, according to Léonard Sainville, “after two or three years of real and fraternal camaraderie,” the Negritude student group became dispersed among Popular Front antifascist movements and multiple French universities. But he also claims that the earliest Negritude interventions served as “a point of departure from which more enrichment and . . . revolutionary political engagements could be envisioned.” 30 Albert Rakoto-Ratsimamanga recalls, “Senghor was our elder, and even more: our master thinker. It was in his ‘school’ that we learned the inestimable value of serenity, tolerance, the refusal of dogmatism, the art of understanding differences within the undeniable unity of the human community.” 31 Because of Senghor’s agrégation, he was a legendary figure among students in Africa. A young Bernard Dadié was in the audience when Senghor gave a public lecture in Dakar in 1937. Dadié explains that his generation of West African elites was being trained “to be French people of excellent quality . . . by deliberately turning our backs on our ancestral values.” These students were inspired by Senghor’s call for a colonial policy based on “deep and rich knowledge of [Africans’] own culture.” 32 Senghor helped animate another round of cultural salons for a new wave of metropolitan student migrants. While living in Tours, he served as a mentor for a younger group that included Mark Sankalé, Alioune Diop, Édouard Ndiaye, Sidy Mohamed Dioury, and Abdou Kader Guèye, who together created their own West African Student Association. Sankalé recalls that “Léopold Senghor came to bring us his encouragement and to assure us of his support. . . . I thus met the man who was without rival the torchbearer of African university students.” 33 Senghor was present at this association’s first meeting, which included radical black nationalists such as Kouyaté and Ebelé. Yet its political orientation was unambiguously reformist. 34 This renovated African student association was immediately preoccupied with student scholarships, but its broader welfarist goal was “cultural solidarity and mutual aid.” Working in a republican idiom, it planned “to produce a list

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of grievances to be presented to the public authorities.” 35 In a letter requesting “moral and financial support” for the association from Minister of Colonies Marius Moutet, the group enumerated its concerns: “to ensure adequate living conditions for all [black African students] during their intellectual and professional training in France . . . to defend their group interests . . . to seek, in collaboration with metropolitan student groups and official organizations, the proper means to help West African students and to resolve the problem of the rational training of an African elite.” 36 In a gesture of Panafrican solidarity, they decided to include all black students from non-French colonies as well. 37 Professing that it was not interested in direct action, this association defined itself as a cultural and professional organization and was not considered to be a subversive organization by the Ministry of Colonies. 38 An informant’s report notes that “Senghor . . . declined all positions in the new association that were offered to him.” 39 In the late 1930s, Senghor was considered “the elder of the Latin Quarter” and was “attentive and receptive” to younger African students. “We saw him often [after our meeting]. . . . He did not frequent our university restaurants, nor our student dorms, nor our cafés, but he remained with us.” 40 When Senghor was liberated from internment and returned to Paris during the war, black students would gather at his apartment on the rue Lombardie. Sankalé recalls that they discussed African culture and read French literature (Gide, Sartre, Apollinaire, Breton, Proust, Valéry), New Negro writing (Langston Hughes, Richard Wright), colonial works (Maran, Tagore), and European thought (both Capital and Mein Kampf ). Senghor would visit the Foyers des Étudiants Coloniaux in order to teach younger students the newest blues and swing dances. Sankalé wrote most of his medical thesis in Senghor’s apartment and asked his older friend to be the best man at his wedding. 41 In addition to participating in the black public sphere, Senghor and Damas joined French avant-garde networks. Senghor combined his cultural Panafricanism with leftist activism. He reports joining the socialist student movement beginning in 1929–30 and remaining a socialist. 42 After the publication of L’Étudiant Noir in 1935, he became involved in trade union politics and offered French courses to workers through the Bourse du Travail, when he taught in Tours. 43 This was when he wrote “A` l’appel de la race de Saba,” which he describes as a leftist call for “colonial governors, like the metropolitan prefects, to obey the government by governing for the Republic and not for the banks.” Senghor recounts, “I was, at the same time, a socialist and the secretary of the Lycée Descartes section of the Syndicat National de l’Enseignement Secondaire [SNES].” 44 He retained this title from 1935 to 1938, and once again became

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secretary of the SNES after moving to his new post at the Lycée MarcelinBethelot in 1938–39. He remembers being one of three among the school’s sixty professors who joined an SNES strike in 1939 against the Daladier government, “after having signed a paper acknowledging that I would be dismissed from my post as professor if I went on strike.” 45 Despite his activism, Senghor’s primary identity was less as a militant socialist than as a teacher, doctoral student, and poet. Senghor was inducted into the dominant public sphere during the 1930s when his poetry and criticism appeared in metropolitan literary reviews such as Cahiers du Sud, Volontés, and Charpentes. 46 Damas was even more connected to the progressive literary scene in Paris. In 1934, five of his poems were published in Esprit, Emanuel Mounier’s leftist Catholic journal of cultural and political criticism. Two years later, Robert Desnos, the Surrealist poet who would write the preface for Pigments, helped him publish several more poems in Cahiers du Sud. 47 Damas was introduced to Desnos by Michel Leiris, whom he knew from the Institut d’Ethnologie. Damas recalls that “all of intellectual and especially antifascist Paris met [at Desnos’s apartment]. And through contact with these people, I became more and more conscious, not only of myself as a nègre, but as Guianese, and also of myself as man period.” Louis Aragon, who had recently founded the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Revolutionnaires, drew Damas further into Popular Front cultural politics after reading his poems. Damas was a member of the Socialist Party’s Trente-Six group of activist writers and in 1938 participated in the Deuxième Congrès des Écrivains pour la Défense de la Culture along with Aragon, Jacques Roumain, René Maran, Nicolas Guillen, Pablo Neruda, and Langston Hughes. During these years, Damas also wrote political criticism for metropolitan journals such as L’Auto, L’Esprit, and Europe. 48 Damas had been encouraged to write Pigments by the Popular Front government, yet after its publication he was harassed by the French police. Officials became concerned about the volume when a group of draft resisters in Côte d’Ivoire translated its antiwar poems into the Baulé language and performed them to African music. 49 Damas recounts that agents of the French Sureté Nationale searched his apartment “to seize my remaining copies of Pigments; they also discovered Senghor’s poems, which they found quite beautiful. They questioned me about my relations with other nègres because I gave the impression in Pigments of being a leader.” According to Damas, the Côte d’Ivoire events were “only a pretext,” as the authorities “asked me why I refused to be Creole in order to remain so attached to my nègre identity. I answered that I only know the black race, that I only know nègres.” 50 This exchange with security agents

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suggests that the very gesture of racial identification, even if not coupled to an explicit political project, troubled the French state. The interrogation of Damas took an unexpected turn when the agents discovered that he was acquainted with the Antillean teachers who had taught them in middle school. “My two visitors finished by agreeing with me, because they, like me, were in the Socialist Party. I saw them again when I was drafted, and they told me that they wanted copies of my poems for their own personal reading. A sort of irony!” 51 This surprising denouement reminds us that Antillean subject-citizens were already incorporated into the French republican civil service and that in the wake of the Popular Front, leftist colonial elites could be welcomed as collaborators even as they were targets of surveillance and repression. Robert Delavignette’s response to Damas’s anticolonial poetry indicates the reform movement’s ambivalence toward the Negritude project. He praised Damas’s work, telling him it was time that such things were said in French. But, echoing the pragmatic strategy of Popular Front antifascism, he advised Damas not to publish the poems for the moment, given current historical conditions. 52 Negritude stood in a relationship of agonistic cooperation with colonial humanism. Although the group’s cultural nationalism challenged the new colonial rationality, Negritude elites also shared many of the reformers’ objectives. Damas and Senghor became directly implicated in colonial humanist initiatives through which their status as colonial public intellectuals was further consolidated.

Damas’s Critique of Republican Colonialism Representatives of the colonial reform movement enabled Damas to write Retour de Guyane (1938), his major work of critical reportage. In 1934 Mauss and Rivet sent Damas, in the name of the Musée de l’Homme and the Ministry of Public Education, on an ethnographic mission back to his native Guiana. He was to conduct research on African survivals in French and Dutch Guyana in order to contribute to scholarship already produced by Melville Herskovits (United States), Fernando Ortiz (Cuba), and Jean Price-Mars (Haiti). Because these official French institutions provided Damas with minimal financial support, additional funds were contributed by the metropolitan journal Vu et Lu. Its editor, Lucien Vogel, wanted Damas to be “the black Albert Londres.” 53 This dual mandate meant that, on the one hand, Damas collected AfroAmerican and Amerindian objects for the museum and wrote a report on his

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findings. 54 By doing so, Damas made a scientific-administrative contribution to interwar colonial ethnology and was implicated in a governing project that fixed indigenous cultures. On the other hand, the trip also allowed him to write Retour de Guyane, a biting critique of social conditions and political institutions in his home colony. After it was published, the governor of Guiana ordered that copies of this polemical book be purchased and burned. 55 Although we must, accordingly, question how widely it was read, Retour de Guyane was an intervention into contemporary debates on the future form of colonial politics. Negritude poetry enacted nativist “returns” to African and Antillean societies in order to claim racial authenticity. Retour de Guyane performed an inverse “return,” from native Guiana back to the metropole, where Damas reports on life in the colonial periphery. This commitment to address metropolitan public opinion and political authority was inseparable from Negritude’s poetic approach to cultural politics. Retour de Guyane begins as an ethnological inquiry into an idealized figure of African authenticity. Damas explains that his “principal object was to study the material and social organization of Nègres Bosh,” the “seven tribes of the black race living in the inaccessible forest regions that straddle Dutch and French Guiana . . . that have remained impervious to even the smallest foreign contact.” 56 But it quickly becomes clear that Damas’s book is less an ethnography than a sociopolitical critique of precisely the colonial conditions and assimilating forces that the Nègres Bosh had supposedly evaded. Damas’s search for “the true face of Guiana” led him to colonial underdevelopment, not to an authentically African fragment of its population (Retour, 10). This inquiry opens with a challenge to the French government’s policy in colonial Guiana: “either improve it or leave” (Retour, 10). His account begins with a brief narrative history of European exploitation and colonial oppression in Guiana since the discovery of the New World. Then, through observation, interviews, and personal reflection, Damas outlines the degraded social conditions that then existed in the colony. Like many of his countrymen at this time, he is especially critical of the way Guianese society had been largely defined by its penal colony (le bagne). He characterizes the penal administration as an extraparliamentary state-within-a-state that exercised a systematically destructive influence on the rest of the colony. According to Damas, a French prisoner who had been treated like an animal while incarcerated is then freed into the general Guianese society, where “he roams as a vagabond, he terrorizes and rapes our children, implanting his morals in the society, degrading it, corrupting it, depraving its instinct. He is an outlaw who hunger and needs make more dangerous” (52). Ironically, Damas notes, these exiled criminals are neverthe-

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less treated better than respectable colonial subjects insofar as they have access to better jobs in the administration and are even allowed to possess guns. 57 This inversion of conventional colonial discourse implies that Guianese society is threatened by contamination from deracinated and degenerate French people. After calling for the abolition of the bagne, Damas turns to the more refractory problem of miserable living conditions in the colony’s squalid cities and isolated rural villages. He presents a portrait of colonial decay in which roads, electricity, schools, sanitation, hygiene, and hospitals in Guiana are all inadequate. Remarking on the absence of labor regulations, social welfare legislation, and the French state’s refusal to pursue genuine colonial development, Damas wonders if anything has changed since the abolition of slavery (Retour, 67–73, 133–40, 117–29). The most original dimension of Damas’s argument, however, is not this condemnation of colonial neglect but his inquiry into the structural contradictions between metropolitan-parliamentary and colonial-arbitrary forms of government in the French empire. In these sections, Damas writes less in the register of polemical journalism than in that of critical political theory. He traces the root of Guianese political problems to the 1854 sénatus-consulte. This legislative provision of the Second Empire’s constitution established that colonial law would be decreed by the emperor, except in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion. Damas acknowledges that such an approach to colonialism may have been consistent with a political system in which Napoleon III was both head of state and primary legislator. But, he argues, under the parliamentary regime of the Third Republic, it has created serious contradictions for an “old colony” like Guiana, which supposedly was integrated into the French nation through legislative representation (Retour, 33). Damas explains that the president of the French Republic has continued to legislate the common law in Guiana by decree, even though the colony sends deputies to the national legislature. Paradoxically, because of the sénatusconsulte, these colonial deputies discuss and vote on laws designed for the metropole, while they are unable to fashion legislation for the territory and population they are supposed to represent. He writes, “Whereas in France institutions are based on the principle of the separation of powers, the executive authority in Guiana retains legislative power” (Retour, 34). Damas argues that the Guianese themselves, through elected deputies, should be authorized to decide which laws are appropriate. Instead these laws are dictated to them by the French state through the medium of the colonial governor. 58 Damas reminds us that in Guiana a single colonial governor possessed myriad authoritarian powers. He could declare a state of emergency, control the

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budget and the police, censor the press, prohibit meetings and assemblies, exercise quasi-monarchial power over colonial justice, dispense criminal and civil law, and monopolize the employment of local officials (Retour, 37–39). Like the black republicans discussed in the last chapter, Damas compares this system to the ancien régime: “a situation that cannot but evidently recall the decreelaw formula of monarchial epochs” (33). He writes: “the colonial regime has remained one of exception. And Guiana finds itself placed under a system of arbitrary government, regulated by decrees for which uncontrolled and unlimited action influences the status of persons, political rights, and property. The governor’s exorbitant powers are not all compensated by the powers of official advisors, whose number he can reduce at will” (39). He adds that suffrage there is “singularly restrained” and magistrates in French courts “are removable” by extrajudicial authorities (40). For Damas, Guiana’s political system is organized around a fundamental contradiction derived from the coexistence of “two present regimes opposed to one another; because one of them is abusively maintained from a constitutional point of view and because democratic France, the France of the Third Republic, persists in applying to the colony dispositions that correspond to a state of affairs that has now disappeared” (34). He concludes that because this sénatus-consulte is anachronistic, it is unconstitutional. Unlike the black republicans, Damas is not simply attacking the French state for failing to realize its inclusive political promises, for ignoring colonial abuses, or for neglecting colonized populations. Rather he is concerned, first, with a historical contradiction between a political form and the transformed conditions for which it is no longer adequate, and second, with structural contradictions within the form itself. Instead of contrasting metropolitanrepublican and colonial-administrative regimes, he locates Guiana’s problems in a contradictory republican-administrative imperial system whose origins may be traced to France’s previous history as an empire-nation. Practices of colonial autocracy legalized under the Second Empire have persisted under the Third Republic and uneasily articulated with its system of colonial representation in the national parliament. Rather than present a moral critique of the way a supposedly civilized society condones colonial injustice, Damas presents a legal-constitutional critique of the authoritarian politics that are legally sanctioned by a republican government. Although he uses different language, we can read Retour de Guyane as a critique of subject-citizenship and the imperial nation-state. Damas draws our attention to the peculiar status of Guiana as a politically assimilated republican colony: “France! Half-France! Republic! Republic

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for hire!” Mirroring and mocking colonial discourse about natives as seminationals, this facetious and quasi-poetic formulation is at once a critique of Greater France as unreal and structurally unrealizable and a description of the French imperial republic as an actually existing if juridically peculiar political formation. For Damas, such contradictions are not mere political abstractions. He indicates their concrete influence on administrative policies and reveals their constraining effect on colonial political culture. For example, he denounces a politically repressive decree formulated by the minister of colonies, Louis Ledru-Rollin. It banned in all colonies, except Réunion and the Antilles, “the free communication of thoughts and opinions that are often said to be the most precious of human rights” (Retour, 150). Damas reminds us that this decree, ironically, was passed precisely at that time when official tercentennial ceremonies (1935) were commemorating the “benefits of French colonialism’s liberalism” in the New World (150). 59 It allowed the administration to impose stiff fines and prison sentences on any publications that provoked resistance to the colonial government’s laws, decrees, rules, or orders and on anyone who, by any means, publicly breached respect for French authority in Guiana. Punishments would be doubled for violators employed by the administration (150–51). Damas provocatively explains that given the legal regime established by the 1854 sénatus-consulte, the new system created by the Ledru-Rollin decree “is neither arbitrary, nor illegal, nor anticonstitutional” (Retour, 152). These were lawful republican measures that functioned, nevertheless, to prohibit any signs of civic republicanism in the colonies: “These edicts, under the pretext of preventing crimes committed through the press, have no other goal or result than to stop the development of local papers, to prevent them from enlightening public opinion, from denouncing abuses of power, from supervising the actions of administrators, from using critical power, which is so necessary” (153). Their primary function was to criminalize people for “publishing an opinion contrary to the opinion of the central government” (153). Such measures allow Damas to criticize the supposedly progressive colonial policies of Marius Moutet, the Popular Front minister who raised no opposition to such censorship (154–55). But Damas quickly tempers his criticism, sarcastically suggesting that such writing puts him at risk of being prosecuted under the Ledru-Rollin decree (155). We should recall that Moutet’s Ministry of Colonies sponsored the initial study mission that had allowed Damas to return to and later come back from Guiana. After the publication of Retour de Guyane, Damas extended his critique of the structural contradictions of republican colonialism in two other essays he

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wrote for the metropolitan public. In June 1939 he published “Misère noire” in an issue of Esprit devoted to providing a forum for “outcasts” such as Jews, blacks, and exiles to speak—“those who have been silenced . . . because . . . excluded . . . from humanity.” 60 Commissioned to write on behalf of les noirs, Damas begins by invoking the “multiplicity of problems regarding the black race in the French empire, including the metropole,” which are revealed in “the disorder of French legislation regulating their personal status.” Here too he criticizes the fact that Guianese are able to rise through the ranks of the colonial administration and be elected to the national parliament but are nevertheless ruled at home by decree, which, he explains, “is nothing but a modern term for Ordinance of the King.” 61 That same year Damas published “89 et nous, les noirs” (89 and us blacks) in the metropolitan opinion journal Europe, in a special issue devoted to the worldwide legacy of the French Revolution. Once again Damas identifies structural contradictions internal to republican history. Damas, however, frames “89 et nous, les noirs” with a traditional Marxist characterization of “colonial imperialism” as “conquest by cunning and territorial violence . . . with the single goal of enslaving these populations in a more or less disguised form for the purpose of economic exploitation.” 62 Damas responds to Europe’s questions about the significance of 1789 by emphasizing the historical interconnections between European Enlightenment and African slavery, the egalitarian principles of the Revolution and the unfree labor that sustained France’s overseas empire. Paying special attention to constitutional debates over the status of French slaves, Damas ultimately connects an economistic reading of colonial slavery to his broader concern with legal and political contradictions. For Damas, colonial racism is at once the cause and the consequence of the structural disorder of republican colonialism. In “Misère noire,” Damas ascribes the “outrageous incoherence of this system” to “race prejudice,” which he calls “an excellent means of colonization.” In a brief account of slavery, emancipation, and post-emancipation labor regimes, Damas addresses the troubled national attempt to reconcile republican universalism with racial difference and the policy swings between promoting and prohibiting assimilation. “For some, a nègre is a brother, for others, a perfected monkey.” 63 He treats racism and assimilation as two sides of the same coin; the persistence of the former and the impossibility of the latter form the second pillar of his critique. In Retour de Guyane, Damas notes that the assimilation of black Americans in the United States never led to national unity: “if effectively the black American

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is American, he has remained no less African” (Retour, 158). Damas argues that the desire for assimilation rests on a double misunderstanding: “On the one hand, he who will be assimilated expects from assimilation the equal treatment that the metropole will never grant him, but on the other hand, they will ask him to pay a price that the other cannot pay: they both agree to try to whiten the nègre, but that cannot happen” (160). Damas believes that in a world of increasing economic competition, white society will never see Africans and Antilleans other than as nègres, while colonized blacks themselves will refuse to fully discard their own cultural heritage (161). He maintains that even when colonial subjects do participate in French society, they do not necessarily share French “social conceptions” (162). Damas’s antiassimilationism is both historical and nativist. He insists that neither the French nor their colonial subjects would allow such a total cultural transformation. But he argues that even if they did, refractory cultures and essential identities would prevent assimilation from ever being successful. According to Damas, the misguided belief in assimilation has had tragic consequences in the Antilles. In Retour, he argues that the petite bourgeoisie in Guiana “only see, only swear by France . . . the France of progress, the France of the great currents of social ideas, a France borrowing from the 1789 Revolution its stirring principles and from the Paris of the Universal Exposition its taste for Rococo and its civilized manners” (Retour, 79). Likewise, colonized urban youth, whom he calls les jeunes citadins, only want to imitate the cosmopolitan lifestyle of their French counterparts. Both middle-class groups, he explains, have embraced the cultural assimilation promoted by colonial schools that ignored local history, geography, and ethnology and focused on valorizing French culture (96–97). Damas argues that colonial education in Guiana functions only to affirm French authority, to benefit the urban elite, and to reproduce a class-divided society (Retour, 98–99). He writes, “there is no question of [these schools] creating in the Guianese a consciousness of themselves, nor of giving them the capacity to develop themselves in terms of their own interests, milieu, or race . . . education in Guyana continues to be an instrument of underhanded but certain domination” (97). He explains that despite the existence of extraordinary exceptions who remain tied to their African heritage, “in the great majority of cases, the system turns out to be excellent. The Guianese who is treated like a child of Gauls from his earliest age does not have the strength to survive as himself!” (104). Like Gratient in L’Étudiant Noir, Damas recognizes that French identification among the educated elite is an overdetermined effect of the colonial state apparatus, not a sign of individual moral failure.

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The result of such systematic assimilation is “the creation of rigorously conformist individuals” who are complicit with the colonial project (Retour, 103). Damas denounces the bloated and incompetent colonial service, which includes cadres of assimilated natives and is characterized by cronyism, corruption, and an abuse of power (113–14). He even attacks Gaston Monnerville, the colony’s deputy to the French assembly whose candidacy Damas had supported in 1932, for being out of touch with Guiana’s common people and local needs (83–85). 64 As in his poetry, Damas does not excuse Guianese subjects as passive victims of colonial abuse; he holds them responsible for their complicity. Public opinion, he argues, has failed to protest these administrative abuses. Native administrators who have been mistreated by the colonial service have failed to organize themselves into effective syndicates out of “cowardice, fear, and impotence” (113, 115). In other words, the Guianese are not practicing civic virtue in the face of arbitrary power, as they should. In “89 et nous, les noirs,” Damas argues that the colonial system in the French Antilles created a generation of educated blacks who, by the twentieth century, chose “to constitute a bourgeoisie of color more odious, more loathsome . . . more conservative, more reactionary, and more racist than the white bourgeoisie itself.” His absolutist denunciation here resonates with the polemical tone that had been adopted by Légitime Défense. He explains that these colonial elites presented themselves as “superpatriots,” participated in “the massacre” of the Great War, and then collaborated in the postwar exploitation of the colonial population by an alliance between the planter class and an autocratic administration. 65 In Retour de Guyane, Damas explains that Guianese social relations and even the Guianese mentality were produced by the territory’s history of colonial oppression, “a long series of misfortunes, iniquities, and abuses” (Retour, 76). He insists that the colonial context must be understood to have shaped non-Western cultures that are studied by social scientists in places like French Guiana (77–78). Damas, in other words, suggests that colonial history has so deformed Guianese society that unmediated cultural authenticity has become a delusion. This position implicitly calls into question the very ethnological mission that generated Retour de Guyane as well as the antiassimilationist desire to recover an original Africanity that partly animated the Negritude project. It also anticipates the postcolonial critique of anthropological knowledge production. We can see that Damas’s historical writing contends that cultural assimilation in the Antilles was at once inevitable and impossible, that assimilated elites were both victims and perpetrators whose predicament could not be helped but for which they must be held accountable.

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Despite his sensitivity to this sociohistorical dilemma, Damas still locates the possibility of political transformation in social groups that were able either to evade or to resist assimilation. For example, he treats Guiana’s “bush Negroes,” who he was sent to study, as inherently anticolonial. He implies that these descendants of Maroons who had formed their own “black republic” embodied his general critique of assimilation: “Many among them preferred life in the jungle to any form of enslavement. . . . despite everything, for more than two centuries these Nègres Bosh have preserved their absolute independence, hostile to all foreign penetration” (8–9). Damas suggests that they viewed assimilated Guianese blacks with contempt. But Damas had already suggested that even this supreme example of a culturally authentic community was led by colonial slavery to organize itself into an autonomous civic society or black republic. Here cultural integrity and modern socioeconomic and political arrangements supplement rather than negate one another. Elsewhere Damas locates this absolute will to black independence in Toussaint-L’Ouverture. In “89 et nous,” Damas presents a brief history of the Saint-Domingue rebellion and the establishment of Haiti as a genuine black republic. He writes colonial slavery back into French national history and proposes Toussaint as a universal model of the revolutionary-republican spirit: “True son of the French Revolution, Toussaint-L’Ouverture had known how to apply his learning to liberate his brothers in race and poverty. . . . he should be placed in the ranks of liberators of the exploited, among the great revolutionaries of all time.” 66 This image of Toussaint would also serve as an inspiration for Negritude writers, who regarded him as an anticolonial hero who not only opposed French colonialism through the very idiom of France’s republican revolution but maintained an organic connection to “the people.” Although Negritude’s cultural politics were neither revolutionary nor genuinely populist, the student movement idealized the imagined alliance between a black avant-garde and culturally rooted masses. In Retour de Guyane, Damas presents a colonial sociology that counterposes the alienated bourgeoisie to an authentic Guianese folk community represented by a figure he calls l’homme rurale (Retour, 79). Like the “bush Negroes” and Toussaint, Guiana’s uneducated masses (semi-urban working people and rural peasants) are presented by Damas as inherently resistant: “Only its members possess a specific character that is incompatible with France” (80). Despite his strong claims about the unavoidable social consequences of colonial history, he argues that this group is virtually unassimilable: “They are unrefined [rude] workers, who understand how to remain themselves in their manner of working and playing. . . . Their songs and dances are clearly in the African tradition” (80).

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Damas suggests that the unassimilability of this authentic, quasi-African social group confers inherent political power on it. “We can expect much from them. They are natural, spontaneous, simple and strong through this simplicity. They happily stand in stark contrast to our petits bourgeois” (Retour, 80). Clearly this is a romantic construction of the unlettered “people” who embody not only cultural integrity but an unconscious principle of sociopolitical resistance. Although Damas is addressing a racial problematic, his treatment of the Guianese common people resonates with the way interwar Marxists construed the proletariat as an inherently revolutionary and universal class. 67 Damas, however, does not exclude colonial elites from his political calculus; his recipe for anticolonial politics attempts to join volkism and vanguardism. Despite his attack on assimilated elites in Guiana, he celebrates the arrival of a new generation of race-conscious colonial intellectuals. On his trip home, Damas had contact with just such a group of “ardent youth” who published a journal, Le Jeune Garde, that “intends to change the present order of things and construct a new edifice” (Retour, 106). As if mirroring his Negritude cohort, “all the members who compose the new elite have done serious studies in France.” But unlike Damas’s metropolitan circle, a single goal guided them: to work, to improve themselves intellectually, in order to return to their home and place their knowledge in the service of a country like Guiana. Very early they had a feeling of being responsible for its future. They have always known that this country is theirs and that they must be the avant-garde, the creators of a new existence, and they were already called to be its leaders. (106–7)

The editor of Le Jeune Garde, whom Damas interviewed, also spoke about this group in terms that resonated with the Negritude project: It was in the course of our studies or our stay in France that we all, who are truly and sincerely in love with our native land and whose secret dream was to return to live there, bitterly noticed the situation of our unhappy country. In the heart of each of us was born, along with this realization, the desire to employ the best part of himself for the improvement of our Guiana, so rich and impoverished at the same time. (108)

According to this editor, Le Jeune Garde hoped to improve the country by educating the masses.

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In other words, Damas introduces the possibility of an alliance between the culturally authentic rural masses (his romantic construction) and a selfconsciously nativist new guard (his political idealization). We know that the Negritude group remained in Paris after their studies and engaged in metropolitan cultural politics rather than overseas social projects. But Damas’s political fantasy in this account was nevertheless consistent with a vision that the emergent Negritude writers began to elaborate in the 1930s: colonial elites identified with their “original” cultural heritage in order to resist assimilation, contest colonial abuses, and reintegrate their homelands into the modern order on their own unalienated terms. In Retour de Guyane, Damas assigns a reconstituted colonial elite an important role in his program for social and political transformation. He explains that the colonial system depoliticizes the indigenous educated class by prohibiting native fonctionnaires from serving in their own colonies: “the general policy of all countries with black colonies was to attract black elites to the metropole and make it impossible for them to return to their countries” (Retour, 353). He complains that a new generation of Antilleans have mostly chosen to remain in France after their studies and are more committed to pursuing their professional careers than to assuming their social responsibilities (351). But Damas insists that such colonial elites have the potential to occupy a subversive social position. Invoking the example of Greeks under Roman rule and blacks in the United States, he argues that such subordinated groups actually “colonize” the dominant culture (Retour, 352). As he explains, “Elites are not absorbed. They can, and in certain cases they even should, absorb the values, science, and technology of the conqueror; but they do not allow themselves to be assimilated . . . whatever their apparent degree of assimilation, the assimilating society detects in the assimilated group a fundamental contempt” (353). As if referring to the transformative projects undertaken by interwar subjectcitizens, Damas argues that a subjugated elite may exercise a “singularly troubling influence . . . on the general concepts of the society that claims to rule over it” (Retour, 353). This idea of conceptual subversion by race-conscious elites corresponds to the cultural politics that the Negritude group was engaged in during this period. Negritude members did not translate this vision of radical alliance into a concrete political program, but their writing elaborated an imaginary identification with culturally rooted colonized populations. Himself a member of this potentially subversive elite, Damas developed a vision of avant-garde politics founded on this alliance between the racially authentic popular classes and the racially conscious educated ones. He located

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the possibility for anticolonial revolt in radically unassimilable social groups. Yet he also believed that educated elites already implicated in the colonial order could fashion alternative sociopolitical visions as long as they resisted the pressures toward embourgeoisement and assimilation. In “89 et nous,” Damas elaborates an innovative political alternative that moves beyond the black republicanism, black culturalism, and anticolonial Marxism on which his writing built. He argues that industrial capitalism or “machinism” has functioned historically to integrate white and black members of France within a single market society in which “the interest of one group is henceforth inseparable from the interest of the others.” 68 His understanding of imperialism as socioeconomic interdependence implies that colonial peoples have a place within this expanded market-nation without having to become culturally French. He suggests that the economic integration of the metropole and the colonies creates an institutional framework through which different racial communities may coexist within a single social formation. Redeploying the language of colonial humanism, Damas explains that whites and nègres “must not assimilate, but associate economically.” He warns “the metropolitan French” not to “succumb to the new appearance of racial prejudice that presents itself in the form of a xenophobic protectionism.” But he also advises his colonial peers “to reject definitively all tendencies to find the solution to the black French problem in a counterracism.” Damas calls on colonial subjects instead to forge alliances of solidarity with the white French working classes on the grounds that “in France the nègre has the same enemies as the white mass beginning most often—alas!—with the leaders of political parties.” 69 We may read this as an attempt to reconceptualize Greater France through a Marxian understanding of France as an imperial nation-state that is progressive, multiracial, and transnational. Unlike most French Marxists of this era, however, and in sharp contrast to the French Communist Party, Damas neither subordinates anticolonial nationalism to revolutionary internationalism nor reduces his racial analysis to a class analysis. 70 In fact, his radical optic may be characterized as fundamentally Panafrican and antiracist. In a comparative discussion of the worldwide black problem, he surveys the defining features of colonial-racial formations in order to specify the insidious character of French racism. He first compares the situation of black Americans, who have no political power but are well organized against racial oppression, to Francophone nègres, who hold highranking offices but are impotent against racism. He uses this comparison to lampoon the mystified character of French racism: “I openly admit, I would rather be insulted by someone who cannot rob me than to be robbed by some-

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one who, in compensation, rewards me with praise.” Next he acknowledges that although blacks in England are victims of a cruder and more “instinctive” form of white supremacy than their French-speaking counterparts, the tradition of English liberalism has enabled them to become more “conscious of themselves” and better able to create alliances with black people elsewhere in the British empire. 71 Damas thereby traces a cultural-political vision that avoids the alternatives of humanist universalism and nativist particularism. He supports racial equality but opposes both assimilation and separatism. He challenges colonial injustice yet imagines a multiracial imperial federation organized around integrated political economies rather than a unified national identity. Moreover, membership in this imperial nation-state would not preclude working toward Panafrican solidarity. Here Damas’s critical reconceptualization of Greater France seems to address the juridico-political contradictions that he identified with republican colonialism. He indicates that the possibility for creating this renovated polity would depend on race-conscious elites and authentic popular classes joining forces in a cultural-political struggle to reconfigure dominant values and categories. There is a tension, however, in Damas’s writing between this experiment in political imagination and the more orthodox Marxist conclusion that he reaches in Retour de Guyane. Damas’s attempt to reconfigure interwar political rationality, through his critique of republican colonialism and radical vision of Greater France, reaches a conceptual impasse. By overemphasizing economic development, he ultimately reproduces one axis of colonial humanism and does not overcome its doubled political logic. Retour de Guyane contains a cogent analysis of political contradictions and affirms the emancipatory potential of elite cultural politics. Yet its Marxist perspective dismisses strictly political responses to colonial injustice as irrelevant and denigrates the educated avant-garde as ineffective. Damas writes, “it is not about creating an artificial black [noire] intelligentsia, like the better Negroes [original English] of Washington. It is not about repeating, after having perfected it, the grandiose error of Victor Shoelcher: emancipating the slaves without emancipating the land” (Retour, 198). For Damas, the progressive republicanism of bourgeois colonial subjects cannot redress the socioeconomic problems that were paramount in colonial Guiana. Sensitive to the dynamic of republican colonial history, he recognizes that political rights without radical social transformation is a recipe for continued colonial dependence. After presenting such an incisive interpretation of the entwined relationship between republican and colonial politics, Retour de Guyane abandons the

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political altogether as a terrain of inquiry or action. Damas pairs his critique of cultural assimilation with a rejection of political assimilation. He did not believe that Guiana, Martinique, and Guadeloupe should become formal departments of France. Far from resolving colonial social issues, departmentalization, according to Damas, would “more than ever allow Guiana to remain a septic tank in the service of the metropole” (Retour, 171). Far from institutionalizing equality, political assimilation would lead to structural dependence without eliminating race prejudice (174–75). He suggests that political assimilation would only distract attention from the more fundamental socioeconomic problems confronting the mass of Antillean peoples (164). Despite his opposition to the departmentalization that Monnerville and Césaire would later help institutionalize in 1946, Damas still exhorts the French state to take responsibility for colonial development in Guiana (Retour, 178). At the end of Retour de Guyane, he returns again to the questions of economic underdevelopment and social misery with which he framed his inquiry. He repeats his opening accusation that the French have created nothing in Guiana. Damas demands neither republican rights nor political autonomy for the colony. His objective is economic and instrumental: “we must realize, with the least possible cost, projects with the greatest possible return, at the fastest possible speed. In these conditions, given these premises, there is only one conclusion: to extract gold” (185). In this affirmation of mineral wealth as the material solution to Guyana’s social malaise, Damas uncritically accepts the classic regime of colonial accumulation through the extraction of natural resources: “We must seize on a veritable slogan: everything for gold and gold for everything” (190). Damas does not criticize capitalism’s instrumental and productivist logic. He simply argues “a rational exploitation of Guyana’s gold deposits must be organized. . . . this exploitation, adequately directed, will by its very existence stimulate the productivity of practically the entire industrial and commercial life of the country” (Retour, 195). For him, this is a problem of distribution, not of production itself. 72 Poetically likening colonial capitalism to a fatal disease, he identifies Guiana as “a poor country dying of consumption upon a disconcerting accumulation of wealth” (197). Damas precociously identifies a deliberate process of underdevelopment as the fundamental source of the colony’s problems: “if Guiana lives in great part due to the artificial support of the administration, on the other hand, the administration deploys all of its subtlety to maintain it in a state of sleep” (196). He identifies this as a fundamentally economic problem that cannot be addressed through Popular Front–type social reforms: “I do not believe that health can come from social change. Never has the imperative slogan been more exactly to the point: economics first” (196).

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Damas even calls on Marxism’s utopian imaginary, announcing that “a world will be born” (197). Note the striking difference between this vision of postcapitalist resource equity and Senghor’s similar-sounding exhortation in “A` l’appel de la race de Saba,” which relates working-class internationalism directly to a racially grounded Panafricanism. How does Damas manage to move from an antiracist critique of assimilation and celebration of vanguard elites to economistic Marxism? Why is there such a disjuncture between his political analysis and his productivist solution? Can his various attempts to celebrate authentic and unassimilable social groups, vanguard elites, and rationalized political economy be reconciled with each other? Is he aware of promoting the very logic of development championed by the French colonial state in AOF and Guiana (e.g., Inini)? Damas’s interwar attempt to engage the character of colonial racism and the contradictions of colonial politics reached a conceptual and political impasse. His immanent critique of colonial politics was undermined by his one-sided reduction of racism to assimilation. There is a tension between Damas’s analysis of republican colonialism as internally contradictory and his preoccupation with the imposition of French culture on colonial subjects. His belief that assimilation was at once inevitable and impossible meant that he had to look outside of the field of normal colonial social relations for a standpoint of political critique. Accordingly, he insisted that bush Negroes, Toussaint-L’Ouverture, and the Guianese folk community remained untouched by the colonial order, which they were able to resist from a position of (intrinsic or deliberate) externality. Damas’s criterion of racial authenticity precluded the possibility that those communities already implicated in colonial politics could work autonomously to reconfigure the imperial nation-state immanently. Within this framework, anticolonialism could only be a revolutionary particularism, whether conscious as in the case of Toussaint or intuitive as with the Guianese masses. At the same time, Damas recognized the limits of nativism for colonial critique; he warned against reverse racism as a political strategy. Damas hoped to reconceptualize the imperial relationship in a way that avoided the alternatives of departmentalization (i.e., political assimilation) and national autonomy (i.e., political separatism.) Searching for an idiom of critique that was universal but neither republican nor assimilationist, and one that was uncompromised by colonial politics without being nativist, he chose Marxist anti-imperialism. But the potential critical power of this position was blunted by the fact that Damas reduced capitalism to the economy and limited his critique of the latter to distribution. He was thus unable to develop a Marxian analysis of the legal and constitutional contradictions of republican

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colonialism that he identified. He simply insisted on the primacy of the economic and abandoned the field of politics all together. He never integrated his analysis of political form and colonial racism with his critique of colonial political economy. Ultimately, Damas’s criticism of republican colonialism led him to advocate a program of economic development. He called on the French state to exploit Guianese natural resources more rationally in the service of social improvement within an imperial federation. Despite his rejection of assimilation, he ultimately affirmed the modernizing-universalizing pole of colonial humanism within an unreconstructed vision of Greater France. His concern with structural contradictions in the political form as well as his alternative vision of elite cultural politics and a multiracial Greater France were submerged within a logic of economic development that was promoted at this time not only by Marxist critics but by colonial administrators. Nevertheless, Damas’s skepticism about political equality without corresponding socioeconomic restructuring accurately foretold the way in which post–World War II departmentalization would become an effective vehicle of postcolonial dependence for France’s overseas departments and territories. 73 Similarly his criticism of black intellectuals who were overly concerned with raising racial consciousness may also be read as an auto-critique of the Negritude project at its very inception. This awareness of the limits of cultural nationalism, which was already expressed in L’Étudiant Noir and Mirages de Paris, would reappear in Césaire’s poetry, and it anticipated the later “revolutionary” rejection of Negritude by figures such as Frantz Fanon, Stanislas Adotevi, René Depestre, and Marcien Towa. 74

Senghor’s African Humanism Senghor too engaged the contradictions of colonial politics and sought to imagine an alternative Greater French nation. Like Damas, Senghor began with a critique of colonial assimilation. He went even further than his Guianese friend in developing a conception of distinct black identity without advocating cultural or political separatism. He hoped to reconcile primordial Africanity with Western modernity and to secure a place for Negro- Africans within the imperial nation-state. Perhaps his signal contribution to Negritude’s cultural nationalism was a conception of African humanism that implicitly mirrored and challenged interwar colonial humanism. When Senghor became a public intellectual in the late 1930s, he was even more implicated in the colonial apparatus

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than Damas was. Humanist reformers adopted Senghor as an exemplary native collaborator. Yet unlike his reformist counterparts, Senghor illuminated the contradictions of republican colonialism and developed an explicit critique of the French racism that colonial humanists disavowed. Senghor developed an especially close relationship with Marcel de Coppet, Marius Moutet’s reformist governor-general in AOF from 1936 to 1938. When de Coppet began his colonial service in Madagascar in 1906, he already had degrees in literature and law as well as a diploma from Langues Orientales. Before World War I, during several tours as a field administrator in Senegal, he was praised by his superiors as having “significant moral influence over natives.” One evaluation noted that “he loves natives and knows how to make himself loved by them.” 75 Although Governor-General Ponty had criticized him for being “too impulsive and often very inept,” de Coppet became known as an expert in native affairs who was assigned to difficult posts, like Ziguinchor, where French authority was fragile. 76 After the war, de Coppet helped oversee the transition from military to civilian rule in Chad, where he served as the director of political affairs, a field administrator, and then governor (1926–32). During this time, he was praised for “ending numerous abuses committed against natives” and for being the first governor of Chad to pursue an overarching administrative vision based on “profound knowledge of the country.” 77 However, he was also accused by the governor-general of being a humanist ideologue who was prejudiced against the military and had “a tendency to treat [administrative] questions in terms of people, not facts.” He specifically criticized de Coppet’s “conception of freedom for natives” along with a “tendency to consider himself to be a righter of wrongs” with “a precise vision of the facts and needs of our [colonial] populations.” 78 These were perhaps the very qualities that led the Ministry of Colonies to make him governor of Dahomey in 1933 at the height of that colony’s economic and social crises. 79 Several years later he replaced Brévié as governor-general in AOF. As the Popular Front’s representative, de Coppet oversaw the application of metropolitan social legislation (legalizing trade unions, native professional associations, and collective bargaining) to AOF. 80 He also created a Committee for the Study of Native Customs, composed of sociologists, ethnographers, jurists, and administrators whose findings would help train a new generation of professional magistrates who specialized in customary law. 81 But de Coppet’s attempt to pursue colonial humanism’s dual imperatives was disrupted when he encountered spirited resistance from Senegalese elites to the “adapted” education and rural schools instituted by Brévié and Charton. 82

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This is the context for de Coppet’s 1937 decision to name Senghor inspector general of education in AOF, a post formerly held by Hardy and Charton. 83 Senghor declined the appointment in order to remain a lycée professor in France, where he pursued his doctorat d’état in linguistics, and to continue writing poetry. But Senghor did accept de Coppet’s invitation, that same year, “to undertake a survey of primary education [in French West Africa] and to study the attitude of [the African] bourgeoisie regarding it.” 84 At the end of his “return” home that summer, Senghor was asked to report on his findings in a public lecture at the Dakar Chamber of Commerce before returning to France. Senghor’s talk would contrast with a lecture that his Parisian colleague Ousmane Socé Diop had recently delivered, in the same venue, at the end of July. If Senghor was in AOF to engage the administration’s educational policy, Socé Diop was there to intervene in local politics. A supporter of Lamine Guèye’s Senegalese Socialist Party, Diop aligned himself with local groups that were contesting Galandou Diouf, then mayor of Dakar and the colony’s representative in the French Chamber of Deputies. 85 An audience of about two thousand, composed of French administrators and African elites, turned out for Diop’s chamber of commerce talk, “Impressions de l’Europe.” 86 After being introduced by Senghor, Diop condemned traditional African and Afro-Muslim culture for retarding black social evolution. At the same time he criticized the French administration for not providing more educational opportunities for colonial subjects. One report suggested that Diop’s “brutal candor” was designed to “prove his independence [from the administration] and his love for his racial brothers.” 87 According to colonial officials, the talk was “a brilliant success” among the educated youth and greeted with enthusiasm by Diouf ’s opponents, two groups whose favor he was trying to cultivate. 88 The administration believed that this lecture was further proof of Diop’s personal political ambitions. Ousmane’s presentation lacked the subtle staging of cultural dilemmas that characterized Mirages de Paris. Its frank evolutionism and influence on local politics distinguished it from Senghor’s more intellectual presentation in September. Paris-Dakar, the local newspaper, ran a series of articles on Senghor’s coming lecture that indicated how implicated he was in colonial humanism’s dream of cross-cultural collaboration. When asked about his impressions of France, Senghor referred approvingly to his university studies and identified the “critical spirit” as “an eminently French quality.” In response to a question about his estimation of Senegal after a long absence, he replied, “I have the impression that the Franco-African cultural movement should succeed . . . despite the imperfections revealed in practice. We only need to inform public

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opinion.” 89 Senghor’s civic republican faith in the public depended on reaching “young intellectuals” who had a “mission” to promote this cultural alliance and to create Senegalese unity. 90 Senghor’s lecture at the chamber of commerce was presented to an overflow audience that included colonial administrators and businessmen as well as African civil servants, municipal politicians, merchants, trade unionists, religious leaders, and students. 91 As in the interviews, this speech did not openly challenge the colonial state but raised pointed questions about cultural policy in AOF. The immediate topic of his hour-long talk was the status of culture in the system of colonial education in West Africa. His principal argument was against retaining a school curriculum based strictly on the French model. He denounced educational assimilation with a provocative declaration: “the time of seduction is over, it is high time we hang the seducers” (“Problème culturel,” Sept. 7). As an alternative, he proposed bilingual educational reforms that would teach African languages, culture, and civilization to even the most educated and urbanized colonial students. Although it focused on practical colonial reforms, we can read this public intervention as engaging the political rationality of Greater France. Without naming it as such, Senghor extends the conception of African humanism that he introduced in his L’Étudiant Noir essay on René Maran. He implicitly demonstrates that universal humanism, when pushed to its logical limit, necessarily leads to a spatiotemporally specific cultural humanism. But rather than endorse an implicitly racist colonial humanism, Senghor presents an alternative, nonseparatist cultural nationalism as its truest expression. His argument deploys the language and objectives of colonial humanism but also subtly displaces them. Senghor’s intervention unfolds as a critical consideration of assimilation. Like Damas, he quickly acknowledges that through colonialism, Africans have been so fully incorporated into the Greater French nation, as well as the capitalist world order, that it is no longer possible to conceive of a distinct and authentic African culture: “we are engaged in the same destiny . . . if we want to live, we cannot escape the necessity of assimilation. Our milieu is no longer West African, it is also French, it is international; we should say, it is Afro-French” (“Problème culturel,” Sept. 8). Senghor rejects the passive model of assimilation in which an external agent imposes sameness on an object of domination. In contrast, he reconceptualizes assimilation as an active practice in which a conscious subject selectively incorporates external objects into himself without losing himself in the process: “It is indeed the action of being made the same, but also of making the same” (Sept. 8). He compares assimilation to digestion.

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Just as an individual does not turn into the food he eats but is nourished by it, all civilizations require nourishment from others: “foreign elements . . . enrich a civilization, they give it another quality, not another direction” (Sept. 8). For Senghor, colonialism produced a novel cultural formation that was “international” and “Afro-French,” which could then serve as the basis on which to construct an alternative political formation that was neither strictly national nor colonial. He refers directly to the discourse of colonial humanism in order to establish that racial differences do exist but cannot be mapped onto an evolutionary hierarchy: “race is a reality (I’m not talking about racial purity). There is difference that is neither inferiority nor antagonism. Delavignette says, ‘We taste the sweetness of being different together.’ ” (Sept. 7). Senghor makes a distinction between acknowledging that racial differences exist and a discriminatory racism that denies political rights to Africans on the basis of such difference. He inverts the logic of colonial humanism by linking a rejection of cultural assimilation to a demand for political assimilation: “Politically, let’s make the West African a French citizen; but not culturally” (Sept. 7). Whereas the discourse of Greater France recognized colonial Africans as members of the nation who were excluded from the polity, Senghor wants to extend citizenship to colonial Africans without their having to be members of the ethno-cultural nation. He thus challenges the implicit relationship between citizenship and cultural affiliation presupposed by French republican colonialism. He introduces the possibility that Africans can become fully integrated into Greater France without having either to identify with French civilization or to disavow African custom. Just as he affirms African civilization without repudiating political universalism, Senghor challenges the idea of abstract humanism without embracing primordial particularism. He reflects on the relation among culture, humanism, and the universal by asking, “What will we make of the black man of tomorrow, or more precisely the West African of tomorrow?” (Sept. 7). Senghor rejects the idea that he should be made into a Frenchman but accepts the abstract universalist proposition that he be made into “a human in the full sense of the word” (Sept. 7). Here Senghor specifies the generic term man, or human, ethno-linguistically: samba-lingeur for Oulofs, kalos kagathos for Greeks, vir bonus for Latins, l’honnête homme for the French. He implies that the universal human being always and only exists in culturally mediated forms (Sept. 7). This is an attempt to reconfigure, not reject, universalism as African humanism. As Senghor implied in L’Étudiant Noir, its very universality is a function of its particularity.

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African humanism then becomes a framework through which Senghor considers the conventional high-cultural proposition that education should focus on the history of civilization in order to nourish one’s “general culture” (Sept. 7). Senghor accepts this humanist formulation but modifies it by redefining its terms. He replaces a generic notion of culture as such (which always implies European culture) with a more relativist understanding of culture as the equilibrium reached by members of specific races with their particular milieu. Senghor reminds his audience that the French human sciences recently turned their attention to the existence of non-European civilizations. So if the objective of a humanist education is, in Senghor’s words, to “realize a culture’s ideal of man,” education for Africans would necessarily have to focus on African culture, African civilization, and the African milieu, in order to produce a culturally rooted ideal human being (Sept. 7). In this formulation, he retains an idea of the universal human but grounds it in culturally particular beings. Senghor tries to link these conceptual reflections to practical educational policies in AOF by proposing “bi-cephalism,” an educational system that would teach colonial students about France and immerse them in their own African “grammar, history, geography, folklore and civilization” (Sept. 11). This would mean teaching even lycée students both French and indigenous languages (Sept. 8). In this respect, Senghor’s proposal is consistent with colonial humanist policy, which emphasized the adaptation of metropolitan education to particular colonial contexts and the teaching of local knowledge in African schools (Sept. 8 and 10). The Negritude writer and the colonial reformers shared a vision of cultural humanism in which Africans would learn about their own cultures. But through a series of revisions Senghor displaces colonial humanism as an instrument of governance that disenfranchises subject-citizens and substitutes a cultural nationalism that allows colonial peoples to become African-identified citizen-subjects of a renovated Greater France. Senghor’s remarks are addressed to the new generation of educated elites whom he implores to study their own cultural tradition alongside the European one. He offers them a new slogan to live by: “It is about assimilating, not being assimilated” (Sept. 7). Senghor locates Africa-oriented education within a broader cultural-political project led by educated youth driven by a “social interest” to serve as “an example and an intermediary” and a “cultural interest” or “mission to restore black values in their truth and their excellence” (Sept. 11). Naming black American poets, he calls for a Francophone version “of the Nègre nouveau,” explaining, “I use this term deliberately; the New Negro must be

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restored his dignity. . . . we will use indigenous language for those genres that express the genius of the race: poetry, theater, folktales” (Sept. 11). The interwar colonial state alternated between viewing African elites as cooperative French-identified auxiliaries or dangerous race-conscious radicals. Here Senghor envisions a different kind of native vanguard whose mission would be to promote cultural rehabilitation as African-identified citizens of Greater France. Through ethnological self-inquiry and aesthetic production, he suggests, colonized intellectuals and the folk can educate one another. Pointing to a case of destructive assimilation, Senghor contends that in the French Antilles “there are many diplomas but little original culture” because colonial students “were never taught the history and civilizations of their African ancestors.” Consequently, “at the assembly of peoples, ‘at the rendezvous of giving and receiving’ as Césaire would say, they are forced to come empty handed” (Sept. 11). 92 Leaving aside his presumption of a singular tradition, we can see that by insisting that évolués as well as peasants study African culture, Senghor implicitly challenges French policies that bifurcated the colonial population into so-called traditional masses whose lives could be governed by custom and assimilated elites for whom political rights were contingent upon adopting European lifestyles. Consider the impact that Senghor, an assimilated and academically accomplished colonial intellectual, might have made when he began his speech by announcing: “it is as a peasant from the Sine that I intend to speak this evening” (Sept. 7). By reconciling French education with an African habitus, Senghor transvalues colonial humanism’s attempt to transform and protect indigenous society. Bernard Dadié recounts being impressed that high colonial officials came to hear Senghor’s provocative talk: “He immediately presented himself as an agrégé in grammar unofficially in the service of his people and his culture. He had climbed high in order better to admire his own culture, better to understand it, translate it, transmit it.” Dadié recalls that “this attitude, in the colonial context, was seen as subversive. It was proof of [cultural] personality. Inadmissible . . . one could try to remain oneself without becoming anti-French. . . . Senghor thus made himself the cultural leader of those who wanted to remain themselves in a world that organized the rules for foreign lives.” 93 Here was one among many moments in the 1930s when cultural nationalist ideas then circulating in the imperial metropole had an impact on elites in AOF. This was precisely the kind of civic contamination that authorities in Paris and West Africa struggled to prevent. Nevertheless, de Coppet later praised Senghor’s presentation as proof that African elites were in the process of constructing a “new civilization” that was

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parallel to but different from France’s. 94 Senghor followed up by sending the governor-general a twenty-two-page proposal outlining bicultural educational reforms in the service of a West African humanism. 95 Several weeks after the Dakar speech, Senghor gave another public lecture in Paris at the International Congress on the Cultural Evolution of Colonial Peoples, which was held in conjunction with the 1937 Universal Exposition. The conference was organized by various ministries involved in colonial affairs, and its participants included an international group of journalists, anthropologists, missionaries, educators, colonial officials, and colonized intellectuals. 96 This gathering reaffirmed many of the colonial humanist principles that had been elaborated at the 1931 conference on native societies discussed earlier. It too was concerned with managing the impact of European colonialism on rapidly evolving indigenous cultures. 97 Colonial states were called “to act upon the native, and promote him, in human terms” by exercising “tolerance” and “collaboration.” Organizers announced that assimilation could not guide administrative policies, indigenous populations must be recognized as possessing autonomous civilizations, and effective administration required ethnological knowledge of local societies. 98 Presentations reflected an implicit attachment to the new cultural humanism elaborated variously by reformers, ethnologists, and black subject-citizens. Once again Senghor lectured on colonial education. Given that this conference was largely devoted to documenting the cultural particularities of colonial peoples, it would have been an appropriate forum for him to reprise his bicephalous proposal for culturally specific school reforms. Instead, Senghor spoke on behalf of Senegal’s assimilated elite and explained to his metropolitan audience why this group opposed the ruralization of their schools through an Africa-oriented curriculum. 99 The campaign to “Africanize” education in AOF by Hardy in the 1920s and Charton (who was in the audience that day) in the 1930s was an important feature of the colonial humanist project. Senghor reminded the reformers at the conference that members of the entrenched Senegalese bourgeoisie remained attached to educational assimilation because they had enjoyed access to French schools for generations. He emphasized that this community rightly equated French diplomas with access to desirable jobs in the colonial service as well as the chance to participate in local self-government. Senegalese évolués, according to Senghor, believed that state policies to valorize African culture were designed to disenfranchise them. Senghor quotes Lamine Guèye’s observation that colonial decrees “each day make our situation as diminished citizens a little more perceptible.” 100 For Guèye and his constituency, the Africanization

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of colonial education would mean eliminating quality training and respectable credentials for this qualified elite. Senghor insists, in other words, that Senegalese resistance was motivated by a desire to protect their social status, their economic opportunities, and their political privileges; it was not a matter of cultural self-hatred. After presenting this sociopolitical reading of a seemingly cultural dispute, Senghor himself does not then reject the administration’s attempt to reform colonial schools, however. He reminds his audience that he is merely a cultural translator, playing the role of an intermediary: “I have tried to explain this resistance, not to justify it.” Instead, he praises the minority of young teachers, students, and graduates of metropolitan universities who are culturally committed to a new “Franco-African” educational system (such as he described in his Dakar speech). But he insists, contra colonial humanism, that cultural rehabilitation must be paired with political opportunities: “they also want their fellows to participate more and more in the administration of the cité.” 101 Senghor supports culturally sensitive educational reforms yet implicitly recognizes that the colonial state’s will to protect indigenous culture was an administrative instrument that functioned to exclude natives from full participation in the public life of their colonies. Senghor’s two 1937 addresses on culture and colonial education may be read as attempts to address colonial humanism’s dual (preservationist and transformative) imperatives simultaneously. Referring to these lectures, as well as to another he published in 1945, Senghor later observed, “these are cultural essays. . . . Politics occupies a small place.” Yet he quickly emphasizes that they were also proposals for an alternative political formation. “Let’s not forget that the mass of Negro-Africans was composed of ‘subjects.’ The first thing that I call for is citizenship for all and, immediately afterward, a federal and confederated organization for the Empire.” 102 Senghor develops his conception of a transnational imperial federation most fully in a 1945 essay, “Vues sur l’afrique noire,” which he considered to be a companion piece to his 1937 speeches. This essay indicates the institutional form toward which his interwar writing was gesturing. 103 In it he again deploys the rhetoric of colonial reform in order to present an alternative vision of a genuinely Greater France in which colonial populations would be neither culturally assimilated nor politically marginalized. Implicitly referring to Delavignette’s vision of Greater France, Senghor argues that “the colonial problem basically is nothing but a provincial problem, a human problem” (“Vues,” 40). He frames his reflections with what was perhaps the guiding question for interwar policymakers: “What should France do with its colonies? What should it do with

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their native populations?” (40). Senghor’s response can be read as an attempt to overcome colonial humanism’s double-bind. First, Senghor grounds the opposition between policies of assimilation and association historically in order to suggest that the choice between them is a false one. He identifies assimilation with the universalism contained in Cartesianism, republicanism, and Catholicism; he identifies association with the particularism contained in medieval monarchy and corporatism as well as Europe’s celebration of nationalism and discovery of non-Western civilizations in the nineteenth century (“Vues,” 41–42). After deriving each doctrine from a current internal to French national history, he links them to persistent and coexisting assimilationist and differentialist forms of colonial racism. Senghor denounces both the universalizing racism of the civilizing mission and the particularizing racism of white supremacists. “Certainly we NegroAfricans are against this false assimilation that is merely identification. But we are no less defiant toward the antiassimilationist current.” He explains that for separatist racists, assimilation “implies a certain intellectual and political emancipation” of blacks and is therefore perceived as “the great enemy.” Senghor calls on colonial peoples to oppose not only assimilation but the antiassimilationist sentiment that was generated by “the metropolitan bourgeoisie’s fear of the idea of a native elite and the political expression of seventy million French subjects or protégés” (“Vues,” 44). While he supports Africans who embrace their black culture, he rejects biological essentialism: “Certainly we have a different temperament and soul. But aren’t these differences a function of a different relationship among elements more than a difference of nature? Underneath the differences, aren’t there more essential similarities? Is not reason most of all identical among all men? I do not believe in a ‘pre-logical’ mentality” (43). Senghor stresses either African alterity or humanity, depending on the form of racism he is contesting. Recognizing that there are oppressive and emancipatory dimensions of both doctrines, he proposes a two-sided engagement with a doubled mode of colonial government: “we must transcend the false antinomy ‘association or assimilation’ and say ‘assimilation and association’ . . . ‘associates’ can have different, if not opposed, conceptions and temperaments . . . they must work in a community of views and interests and reciprocally assimilate each other’s ideas, while each has to adapt to the nature and habits of his associate” (“Vues,” 44). Senghor calls for an “active and judicious assimilation, that nourishes indigenous civilizations . . . an assimilation that allows association,” which would become “the only condition of a French Empire” (45). This integrated attempt to exploit the progressive aspects of assimilation and association corresponds to

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his interest in a hybrid African humanism and underlies his vision of sociopolitical integration in a renovated imperium. Senghor argues that “every civilization is the singular and pronounced expression of certain traits of Humanity”; accordingly he proposes a model of colonization as mutually enriching contact between civilizations (“Vues,” 40, 67). Believing that modern materialism has destroyed the French nation’s spiritual patrimony, Senghor argues that “black Africa can help France to rediscover its own ancient and authentic face, beneath the deformations to which it was subjected by its modern evolution” (60). Senghor couples this conception of African culture as the redemptive cure for a degenerate modernity with an attempt to reimagine the political form of the imperial community. From the perspective of universal humanism, Senghor criticizes Henri Labouret’s proposal for an “imperial citizenship” (discussed earlier) that would provide colonial elites with rights equivalent to those of French citizens, which they could enjoy only within their colonies of origin. 104 Senghor reasons, “I don’t see why the rights of imperial citizens would cease to be valid in other territories within the empire. Are they not still human beings when abroad?” (“Vues,” 59). Instead of restricting citizenship for Africans to the existing empire, Senghor proposes revising the very meaning of citizenship within a new form of empire that would articulate distinct political cultures. In this scheme, Africans would use familial votes to elect representatives to a federal Assembly in which the legislative power of “colonial nations” would rest. Because governor-generals would still possess executive power, Senghor’s system would be something like a decentralized imperial constitutional monarchy. Insofar as Senghor’s proposal does not eliminate the colonial state’s authoritarian elements, it may rightly be read as politically conservative. Yet by attempting to revise fundamental republican institutions such as citizenship and the national assembly, it also contains transformative political possibilities. Its most radical provision envisions an Imperial Parliament, located in continental France, in which metropolitan and colonial representatives would fashion legislation concerned with “problems of general interest” (“Vues,” 60). Senghor is attempting to define new political categories appropriate for an imperial nation-state, based on a consensual and nonhierarchical relationship between metropolitan and overseas France that is formalized in a federal system of representation. As he elaborates, “this system, far from weakening the authority of the metropole, will only reinforce it, since it would be founded on the consent and love of liberated men, of free men. . . . the conductor of the orchestra would have as his mission not to smother the voices of the different instruments, by covering them with his own voice, but of directing them in a unity and allowing the

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smallest indigenous flute to play its role” (60). In this system, colonies would be constituent parts of an extended nation, but as culturally distinct “colonial nations” not as assimilated provinces. We can recognize this federalist attempt to imagine an alternative political formation in Senghor’s earlier essay “La culture et ‘l’empire,’ ” (Culture and “empire”; 1939), which Charpentes published in a special issue of the same name. 105 Here Senghor combines the Negritude rejection of assimilation with a critique of national centralism. He complains that the French “like natives . . . to be consumers of culture, not producers of culture” (“Culture,” 61). In contrast, he argues that the nation depends on its provinces and colonies to influence and sustain metropolitan culture (61–62). Yet Senghor was also suspicious of the colonial government’s attempt to valorize indigenous colonial cultures or to create hybrid “Franco-Sudanese and Franco-Annamite cultures” (62). Public authorities, he explains, only had a pragmatic interest in preserving indigenous cultures because “they feared the moral ‘deracination’ of natives and all the ‘disorders’ that could result from them. The cultural concern, if not absent, was secondary” (62). He recognizes that state policies to promote African culture were political instruments designed to police colonial populations. In response, Senghor proposes a more progressive cultural-political project based on circulation and reciprocity: “I dream of a national movement, of a two-way French movement, between colonies-provinces and metropolecapital. The latter sending, along with its machines and engineers, its professors and teachers; the former, along with its raw materials, their new modes of feeling and living and also of expressing themselves. Is not commerce the best definition of culture?” (“Culture,” 62). Implicitly recalling Damas’s understanding of the empire as an integrated political economy, Senghor imagines a renovated empire in terms of a reciprocal cultural economy in which the national center and its multiple peripheries are mutually nourished by the circulation of knowledge, ways of life, and forms of expression. This vision accepts colonial humanism’s valorization of indigenous cultures. But it uses reformers’ call for collaboration against their tendency to treat these cultures as fixed objects of government policy. “In contrast to the promoters of Franco-indigenous cultures,” Senghor’s cultural humanism seeks to animate indigenous societies as living subjects so that they may save French culture from historical calcification (“Culture,” 63). He calls for a shift away from colonial “exoticism” and toward a genuine collaboration with natives as cultural producers. He contends that colonial peoples are able to “make their own contribution to the cultural elaboration of the Empire, which is to say, to the enrichment of the French tradition” (64). Senghor recuperates colonial

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humanism’s language of cultural respect while criticizing its racist will to objectify and subordinate. Senghor’s vision of imperial federation resonated with other strains of cultural humanism then circulating in metropolitan France. Charpentes, whose mission was “to serve as a link between the provinces and the French colonies . . . to draw from the most vital forms of popular tradition in order to recover the true face of man in his permanence”—published Francophone writing from North America, the Caribbean, Europe, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Madagascar, the Middle East, and South East Asia. 106 The journal celebrated provincial artisans, village life, regionalism, folklore, and the French language. 107 Charpentes hoped to help each of France’s colonial populations “become more deeply conscious of itself ” through “a literature and culture that is both authentic and autonomous.” 108 Through this valorization of cultural diversity, contributors to Charpentes protested the degeneration, technocratic machinism, commercialism, and egoism of modern society. They called for a return to humanism, tradition, spiritual values, and popular traditions. 109 Their concern with recovering culturally rooted and humane forms of life was part of a broader interwar French campaign for a moral and spiritual revolution that would restore human dignity in the context of an alienating modernity. Jean Touchard has associated this “spirit of the thirties” with a generation of young intellectuals, neither Marxist nor fascist, who elaborated a politics of “refusal” in terms of “antistatism . . . (except for certain supporters of technocracy) . . . antidemocracy, antipolitics . . . anti-Americanism, antibourgeoisie, antimaterialism, antirationalism, anticapitalism.” 110 Rejecting the statist, productivist, and bureaucratic rationality that was restructuring peoples’ everyday lives, they privileged particular collectivities over abstract individuality. These cultural humanists were therefore as symptomatic of the postliberal order as the technocrats that they contested. This movement to return the holistic person, as opposed to the materialistic individual, to the center of a reconstituted sociopolitical order also included social Christians such as Jacques Maritain, whose conception of “integral humanism” was a deliberate foil to Maurras’s right-wing integral nationalism, and Emanuel Mounier, the founder of the journal Esprit, who developed an antiindividualist philosophy of personalism. 111 Senghor, who had initially hoped to become a Catholic priest, was influenced by these thinkers. He recounts, “even though I was a syndicalist and socialist, I also attended the Social Christian salons where I met Maritain, Daniel-Rops, the Jesuit fathers Fessard and Médieu, etc. What I retained from them was a certain spirituality that . . . should animate Socialism.” 112 The mixture of nativism, spiritualism, and humanism de-

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veloped in Charpentes and by Mounier and Maritain corresponded to Senghor’s critique of the dehumanizing cultural assimilation and political exclusion sanctioned by French colonialism. If Senghor engaged the doubled character of colonial racism in order to reimagine the political form of imperial France, his black humanism was equally concerned with defining the specific Negro-African contribution to the French nation and to universal civilization. He did so in “Ce que l’homme noir apporte” (What the black man contributes), included in a 1939 collection of essays edited by Cardinal Verdier. In yet another iteration of cultural humanism, Verdier contends that “each of the three great human races have a role to play, a mission to accomplish. We sense today that among all the monstrous errors of our epoch a new humanism is developing.” He extols a particularizing antiracism rooted in Christian universalism that grants “each nation and each race its own destiny and harmonizes all within a single fraternity.” 113 L’homme de couleur sought to exemplify this ethic of cross-cultural imperial collaboration by including contributions from colonial reformers and non-Western intellectuals. 114 Senghor begins his essay by citing Leo Frobenius and affirming the existence of a diasporic “culture nègre” shared by people of African descent across time and space: “A singular and unitary culture . . . born of the reciprocal action of race, tradition, and milieu that, after emigrating to America, remained intact in terms of its style. . . . The civilization disappeared, forgotten; the culture was not extinguished.” 115 For Senghor, this primordial and immutable black culture is a foundational principle of social organization. He criticizes “rationalist” ethnologists for not recognizing a specifically black way of being in the world, knowing the world, and sacralizing the world that is intuitive, cosmological, and collective (“Homme,” 294). According to Senghor, “the black body and black soul are permeable to the apparently imperceptible rhythms, to all the solicitations of the world” (“Homme,” 295). This black cultural ontology, he indicates, enables a corresponding black epistemology that defies the violent subject–object reifications of Western scientific and technical rationality: “the Nègre cannot imagine the object different from himself. . . . He lends it a sensibility, a will, a human soul, but a black soul. . . . All of Nature is thus animated by a human presence. It is humanized. . . . This is the deepest and most eternal trait of the black soul” (295–96). The ambiguity here about whether black soul is a racial or cultural designation or both at once runs through his analysis. This uncertainty is perhaps most acute when Senghor makes his infamous claim that “emotion is nègre, as reason is Hellenic” (“Homme,” 295). He has

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been justifiably criticized for reproducing a long-standing binarism of European racism here, even if he is revalorizing the emotional side of this equation. But what is at stake in Senghor’s comparison between “black emotion” and “Hellenic reason”? Does he racialize emotion as black and reason as white? On closer examination, we can see that his language indexes distinct cultural histories and orientations that have developed into particular ways of being human in the world. Senghor’s argument is that African societies have emphasized an emotional and Western societies a rational relationship to the phenomenal world. He never claims that black people do not possess reason. Dubious as this culturally reductive claim may be, it needs to be distinguished from white supremacist theories of Africans as essentially unreasonable and thereby incompletely human. Emphasizing an “emotional” epistemology, Sengor’s formulation can be located within currents of irrationalist European thought that challenged scientific positivism and technical reason in the period of high modernism (1890– 1930). 116 We may read Senghor as presenting a culturally particular variation of Bergson’s intuition, Lévy-Bruhl’s participation, Frobenius’s paideuma, Heidegger’s Being, and Breton’s surreality. 117 For Senghor, these philosophical concepts are always already attributes of black being and knowing. His racially inflected culturalism thus had more in common with the primitivism practiced by colonial humanists and ethnologists than with contemporary strands of fascism and scientific racism. 118 In fact, Senghor later invoked European ethnology to defend himself against accusations of reverse racism: “Negritude therefore is the collective NegroAfrican personality. It is amusing to hear certain people accuse us of racism, when they themselves competitively extol ‘Greco-Latin civilization,’ ‘AngloSaxon civilization,’ and ‘European civilization.’ . . . Was it not eminent Europeans—Maurice Delafosse and Léo Frobenius—who spoke to us about a ‘Negro-African civilization’? And they were right.” 119 Of course, Senghor does not acknowledge that the colonial state’s culturalist policies did racialize Africans. But rather than condemn or endorse Senghor’s self-description, we need to examine the broader objective for which he deploys these particularist conceptions of black culture, black soul, and black knowledge. How does race function theoretically and politically in this formulation of Negritude? Senghor suggests that historically, distinctive types of black society, politics, and culture developed that were able to avoid the disenchantment, alienation, and dehumanization characteristic of Western modernity. As in his poetry, Senghor produces a myth of a common African social formation shared across space and undisturbed by history or politics.

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In “Ce que l’homme noir apporte,” Senghor pairs black ontology and black epistemology with a black metaphysics when he describes African religiosity: “What the Nègre contributes is the capacity to perceive the supernatural in the natural, a sense of the transcendent and the active abandon that accompanies it, an abandonment of love” (298–99). Likewise, he argues that African morality, enforced only by community sanction, ensures a communion between the living, the dead, the spirits, and God. Senghor implicitly opposes what he imagines as Africa’s social and cosmological harmony to modern Europe’s secular fragmentation. By extension, “black society” is organized around and reproduced by the economic and moral unity of the family and clan. Senghor adds that contrary to the claims of colonial ideology, African women originally enjoyed social equality. In this account, African property is not alienable and labor is not alienated. Senghor presents a utopian vision of the African peasant as an integrated social being: “liberated precisely by his work and from his work, it is about finding the work a source of joy and dignity” (“Homme,” 302). Distinguishing this social order from capitalism, Senghor suggests that in Africa everyone is assured a minimal level of subsistence. There the natural resources and the means of production are common property, and individual property is restricted but not eliminated. In this vision of African society, the individual is not simply submerged in the collectivity, as colonial ethnology insisted. Citing Maritain’s “integral humanism,” Senghor explains that “the individual” may be neglected but “the person” is nurtured. Linked communally to other persons and mystically to the natural world, this African person realizes himself through unalienated and collective labor. This is a primordialist conception of labor: “in la société nègre, working the land is the most noble activity. The black soul obstinately remains that of a peasant.” Here labor also assumes a racially inflected metaphysical significance: “working the earth allows that accord between man and ‘creation’ that is at the heart of the humanist problem . . . the Nègre, feeling himself in unison with the universe, works to the rhythm of songs and tom-toms. Black work, black rhythm, black joy is liberated by work and from work” (“Homme,” 304). African society, in this account, empowers its members to engage in creative, self-determining, and emancipatory practices. This representation undermines the colonial administration’s criticism of African collectivism as oppressive. It also contrasts with the dehumanizing dynamic of Western societies organized around atomized individuals. Senghor presents a mythical ethnography of “black society” as organically socialist and inherently democratic. He criticizes Western democracies

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as decadent systems in which politicians are chosen by financial oligarchies and do not genuinely represent the people. In contrast, he contests the colonial myth of indigenous tyrannies and characterizes politics within “black kingdoms” as properly representative: the king is chosen by the people, and his authority is rooted in traditional wisdom and the spiritual order. Senghor also presents a vision of indigenous civil society in which individuality is not “founded on false liberty and particular interests. . . . But the person nevertheless has a chance to develop himself and to join associations, corporations, the deliberating assemblies—for palavers. . . . Equality and the sentiment of human dignity rule there.” Senghor explicitly identifies Western individualism as “one of the causes of the present crisis of civilization.” He insists that “the fulfillment of the person requires an extra-individualist orientation. It can only take place on the soil of the dead, in the climate of the family and the group. This need for fraternal communion is more deeply human than the withdrawal into oneself ” (“Homme,” 305). In the essay’s final section, Senghor discusses black aesthetics, which he believes constitutes nègres’ greatest contribution to twentieth-century culture. He identifies black art as the supreme expression of the black soul. It is antithetical to the “decadent” realism and Impressionism of nineteenth-century European art, “the adoration of the real that leads to photographic art” (“Homme,” 308). He suggests that the Modernism of Baudelaire, Cézanne, and Gauguin, whom he praises, is realized in l’art nègre. Senghor defines black art in terms of its spiritualism, rhythm, and style. He argues that it is not representational; instead “it signifies” and provides “access to the surreal” (308). Returning to his starting point, Senghor suggests that African aesthetics is the vehicle for a particularly black way of knowing the world: “because this art tends toward the essential expression of the object, it is opposed to subjective realism. . . . rhythm acts on what is least intellectual in us, despotically, to make us penetrate the spirituality of the object; and this attitude of abandonment that is ours is itself rhythmic” (309–10). Just as African society and politics, as presented by Senghor, are more authentic realizations of Western ideals of socialism and democracy, so African art becomes the embodiment of “classical art in the most human sense of the term . . . because the artist, dominating its emotive richness, arouses and guides our emotion to the idea” (“Homme,” 310). Senghor also treats African art as an authentic aesthetic modernism. Similarly, African literature becomes the ideal surrealism, African reason is pure antipositivism, and African society is fundamentally anticapitalist. These idealized claims do not only function to affirm and valorize the existence of African culture in the modern world.

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Senghor’s myth of Africa serves as the standpoint for a critique of Western modernity. The dehumanizing antinomies of modern life are transcended in Senghor’s black culture. It supposedly resolves the heteronomous divisions between subject and object, individuality and collectivity, material and spiritual, living and dead, human and natural worlds, human beings and the products of their labor, and rulers and ruled. Senghor, however, is not simply interested here in constructing Africa as the superior mirror opposite of modern Europe. His goal is to determine “what the black man contributes” to European and universal civilization. He does so through a conception of “African humanism.” Invoking the noncoercive organization of production in African society, he comments, “Here again the Nègre has resolved the problem in a humanist direction” (“Homme,” 302). Likewise, he indicates that the “tribal” solution to social and political problems “achieved ahead of time the ‘pluralist unity’ that remains the ideal of humanists today” (301–2). Senghor suggests that if European society is dehumanizing, African society has continued to privilege human dignity. In one formulation, Senghor summarizes his vision of cultural humanism: “In the elaboration of a more human world, we should be able to request of each people the best parts of itself. In a world divided between democratic individualism and totalitarian collectivism, black people will not come empty-handed to the political and social rendezvous” (307). With this hybrid conception of African humanism, Senghor is not only reversing the priority traditionally accorded to Western over African culture; he is displacing the very opposition. “Ce que l’homme noir apporte” concludes with the provocative image of a “meeting between the Nègre and the Greek” (“Homme,” 314). Senghor attempts to recuperate the genuinely humanist dimension of Greek society, which, like African society, had not reduced human experience to, and through, instrumental rationality. I fear that many people who invoke the Greeks today actually betray Greece. A betrayal of the modern world that mutilated man by making him a “reasonable animal.” . . . The service provided by the Nègre will have been to contribute along with other peoples to re-creating the unity of man and the World: to link flesh with spirit, man with his fellow men, a stone with God. In other words, the real with the spiritual surreal—through man, not as the center, but the hinge, the navel of the World. (314)

This cosmological humanism is presented through tropes of reconstruction, reorganization, reconciliation, realization, and transcendence. Similarly, Senghor

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later wrote of “creating the black man within a humanity marching toward its total realization in time and space.” 120 It is no accident that Senghor would choose Liberté: Négritude et humanisme as the title of the first volume of his collected works. In its introduction, he informs us that the theme of his writing is “the conquest of Liberty as recovery and affirmation, defense and illustration of black peoples’ collective personality: of Negritude. National Independence could not have any other meaning.” He also provides a canonical definition of Negritude as “the ensemble of cultural values of the black world, as they are expressed in the life, institutions, and works of Noirs.” 121 Senghor insists that the goal of elaborating an authentic Africanity is not to withdraw from modern reality but “to present it to the world as a cornerstone in the edification of the Civilization of the Universal, which will be the common work of all races, of all different civilizations. . . . It has been enriched by the contributions of European civilization, which it has likewise enriched.” Senghor argues that “Negritude therefore is not a racism. . . . In truth, Negritude is a Humanism.” He concludes with a lyrical declaration of black peoples’ redemptive role for humanity as a whole: “We have been the seed trampled underfoot, the seed that dies so that a new Civilization can be born—an integral one, on the scale of humanity.” 122 Senghor presents his alternative “African humanism,” grounded in a culturally particular way of being in the world, as different from but equivalent to a European humanism that it complements by making an original contribution to a worldwide “civilization of the universal.” Yet Senghor also presents African humanism as a more fully realized version of Western humanism; it retains that which modern Europe had lost. Moreover, he suggests, it achieves Western civilization’s ever-unrealized promise of a society organized around the centrality of human dignity that avoids the alienating antinomies of Western modernity. Senghor’s African humanism is at once universal and particular, and universal because it is particular. It supposedly contributes to the universal objective of elaborating a more human world, a task that concerns all of humanity. At the same time, it enables humanity to realize itself and transcend itself in Africa and through African-derived culture. Senghor’s attempt to articulate universality and particularity within an African humanism paralleled his attempt to articulate political rights and cultural recognition for colonial peoples within a reconfigured Greater France. But whereas his vision of imperial federation was built on an immanent critique of colonial politics, his critique of Western modernity was formulated from

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a standpoint of transhistorical racial difference. Senghor’s framework for discussing black ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics could not accommodate the histories of cultural and biological métissage that his other writings recognized as fundamental to any understanding of colonial societies or colonized peoples. I am not suggesting that we dismiss Senghor’s work because it sometimes deploys an essentialist understanding of race. There are multiple reasons why a strategic recourse to biocultural categories may have been a conceptually intelligible or politically effective way to engage colonial politics or contest colonial racism. But this aspect of Senghor’s African humanism ultimately reproduced the cultural preservationist pole of colonial humanism. His nativist response to abstract humanism, which took the form of a mythic ethnography of African society and a primordialist metaphysics of black culture, ignored and unwittingly affirmed the primitivist dimension of colonial policies. Senghor’s cultural nationalism alternately extended, contested, and reproduced colonial humanism. Like Damas, Senghor maintained a complex relationship to the cohort of interwar reformers. Consider Senghor and Delavignette’s long association. Both figures developed related visions of cultural humanism and cited each other frequently. Senghor used his contribution to Delavignette’s volume on the imperial community to present Negritude’s critique of colonial modernity. In turn, Delavignette used Senghor in Service africain to illustrate his dream of a hybrid Franco-African culture. These reflections on colonial policy conclude with Delavignette writing, “Léopold Sédar Senghor, it is to you that I want to address myself as I bear witness to this New African world in which we are both engaged.” Delavignette announces that through discussions with Senghor, he learned that “humanism only has a meaning if it leaves you free,” which means that “you do not renounce your African status in taking on a French one.” Instead, “humanism resides in our confrontation and in our mutual enrichment.” 123 But Delavignette’s support for Senghor’s desire to ground universal humanism in cultural membership slides into a liberal formulation of color-blind universalism: “Together we enter the New African World and we will repeat the royal words to ourselves: There is no longer any difference between you and me other than the difference Black and White. A difference that is no longer a separation, nor a subordination, but an accord.” 124 Nevertheless, this exchange indicates the way in which Negritude’s cultural nationalism and colonial humanism were implicated in each other. Senghor received patronage and public legitimacy for his interventions from influential colonial reformers. In turn,

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the program pursued by the reform movement, later exemplified by the post– World War II imperial community, was influenced by Senghor’s demand that African culture and French citizenship be joined.

Immanent Critique and Political Imagination Negritude’s cultural politics extended the critical civic practices that had developed after World War I in the Parisian black public sphere. A rich literature on these antecedents has rightly questioned Negritude’s canonical status in the historiography of Francophone black anticolonialism. 125 But these correctives have also tended to underestimate the variety and complexity of early Negritude’s cultural-political project. It cannot be reduced to a nativist rejection of assimilation and celebration of black identity. At multiple levels of abstraction, Damas and Senghor creatively synthesized contemporaneous black discourses in order to engage directly with the policies of colonial humanism, the discourses of Greater France, the predicament of subject-citizens in an imperial nation-state, the legacy of republican colonialism, and the politicophilosophical antinomies of (colonial) modernity. Their strategy was to reconfigure rather than reject interwar colonial rationality, to excavate and exploit political possibilities that were immanent to an internally contradictory imperial order in order to imagine an alternative political formation organized around integration, circulation, reciprocity, and federation. Moishe Postone describes an immanent critique as one that proceeds from a standpoint that is already internal to the existing society under examination yet points to sociopolitical alternatives beyond it. It neither criticizes one aspect of an existent social order from the standpoint of another that is already an effect of that order, nor posits a utopian, transhistorical, or transcendental standpoint for sociopolitical transformation that is somehow extrinsic to the existent order. Immanent criticism is not possible in unitary social formations but only in societies defined by structural contradictions. 126 Negritude’s status as an immanent critique of a contradictory (French) colonial modernity (albeit not a Marxian one) has not been adequately recognized by scholars. But these are the terms in which we may read gestures such as the reinterpretation of the French Revolution through a colonial optic, the reconceptualization of Greater France as a postcolonial but nonnational political formation, and the elaboration of a hybrid African humanism. Damas and Senghor developed a two-fronted response to a doubled form of colonial government in order to challenge the universalizing and particularizing

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dimensions of colonial racism. By joining demands for cultural recognition and French citizenship, they claimed a place within Greater France not in spite of their race but precisely insofar as they were “Negro-Africans.” They linked republicanism and Panafricanism, humanism and culturalism, cosmopolitanism and nativism, vanguardism and populism, political engagement and cultural production. Negritude writers thereby transformed reformers’ cautious cultural humanism into a potentially disruptive cultural nationalism. Their interventions challenged the presumed identity in the Western tradition between people, nation, and public, called into question the underlying rules governing subject-citizens’ participation in French politics, and disrupted conventional distinctions among the national, imperial, and transnational. To say, however, that we need to reconsider Negritude as a significant object of historical analysis is not to say that we need to rehabilitate its cultural nationalism as a program for political action. I do not want to suggest that Negritude was or had the solution to colonial oppression. Interwar Negritude was a politically moderate project to reform French colonialism. Its writers never called explicitly for the political independence of colonized peoples. They deliberately collaborated with colonial humanism, sometimes challenged it, and unwittingly reproduced many of its problematic positions. Negritude discourse was also undermined by internal contradictions that led it into conceptual impasses. Alongside of its immanent critique of colonial modernity, Damas and Senghor developed transhistorical and transcendental critiques of French imperialism from the standpoint of fetishized social groups or a mythic Negro-African society supposedly outside of and intrinsically opposed to modern colonialism. Unable to reconcile his formal critique of republican colonialism and his economistic critique of colonial capitalism, Damas supported a one-sided vision of modernizing development. Unable to reconcile his sociohistorical understanding of Franco-African culture or politics and his primordial conception of the black soul, Senghor often advocated a one-sided primitivism. Each often reproduced either the universalizing or particularizing pole of a doubled political rationality. My objective, however, is not to draw up a balance sheet of Negritude as either a failed or successful form of anticolonialism. An adequately contextual appreciation of Negritude that grasps its insights and impasses is not possible without relating it directly to the colonial rationality and imperial order that it confronted. Conversely, by reading Negritude as a creative critique of colonial modernity rather than reducing it to a symptom of nativist ressentiment, we gain a richer understanding of the imperial nation-state that it addressed and the postcolonial political formation that it imagined. Without such analysis

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we cannot presume to know Negritude any more than we can know colonial humanism. By identifying Negritude’s limitations, I am not accusing Damas and Senghor of bad thinking. They confronted and became caught up in durable structural impasses, double binds that were persistent legacies of France’s nationalimperial history. 127 When republicanism and colonialism, reason and racism, universalism and particularism are intrinsically related to one another, most available standpoints are already internal to the object of criticism. In such cases, even two-fronted critiques often reproduce, rather than transcend, these historically generated oppositions. Remarkably, the Negritude project itself recognized the impasse of rational critique under such conditions. We have already seen elements of self-reflexive criticism in L’Étudiant Noir, Socé Diop’s novel Mirages de Paris, and Damas’s reportage. The next chapter analyzes Negritude writers’ attempts to move beyond the reasonable engagement with colonial double binds in order to produce a critique of (colonial) rationality itself from the standpoint of their Africanity. – – – During the 1930s Negritude writers imagined replacing the imperial nationstate with a transnational federation that transcended their immediate options (colonial overrule, full political assimilation, or national autonomy). Exploiting the imperial character of the expanded French nation that actually existed, they conceptualized a novel political formation grounded in an alternative universalism or African humanism. In this renovated Greater France, the imperial disjunction between territory, people, and government would be turned to an advantage. Citizenship would be disarticulated from culture, nationality would no longer covertly depend on race, and sociopolitical participation would no longer require identification with a single collectivity. Scholars today recognize that the nation-state is less the telos of modern history than one of modernity’s historically specific forms. Notable was Negritude’s ability to recognize the fundamentally imperial character of France, to develop categories outside of the national paradigm and against the grain of classical political theory that were adequate to this curious political formation. Negritude writing before 1945 entailed gestures of colonial critique and exercises in political imagination that would later become submerged in the era of Bandung and decolonization, when Negritude became an internationally recognized movement. If we must identify (the reformist, nativist, transcendental) limitations of Negritude’s imaginative-utopian gesture, we must also acknowledge its conceptual and historical originality. By revisiting the early years of

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Negritude discourse before it calcified into a caricature of itself, at a time when the problematic of the imperial nation-state was suddenly a subject of public debate, we allow ourselves to recall sociopolitical possibilities that were once available, not just imagined, but never fully pursued. This type of historiographic operation is itself an attempt to identify immanent possibilities for sociopolitical alternatives contained within colonial modernity. Inquiry into what might have been based on what actually existed may open possibilities for pursuing what might be beyond what is. There was a direct connection between these writers’ immanent critique of colonial modernity and their exercises in political imagination. Because Greater France was a real abstraction, because African humanism joined elements that were already products of a doubled colonial government, Negritude’s political imaginary was not only expansive, creative, and utopian. It was also grounded in the material conditions and sociopolitical structures around which the interwar imperial order was actually organized. Here the immanent and the imaginary, the given and the possible, the historically specific and the utopian were not antithetical to one another. 128

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Negritude’s engagement with the interwar colonial order was doubled in several respects. By demanding citizenship for black colonials and rejecting assimilation, the movement engaged both the universalizing and particularizing dimensions of colonial racism. It imagined a transnational political formation that would accommodate both republican and Panafrican identifications. These revisions of colonial humanism and Greater France were rational-critical interventions in the republican public sphere. Yet Negritude’s immanent critique was undermined by its own contradictory relationship to colonial humanism, whose antinomies it unwittingly reproduced. Colonial racism was enabled by a scientific-administrative complex that worked simultaneously to produce black equivalence and fetishize black difference. In what way could these writers deploy rational arguments against a racial logic that seemed to contain within itself all available antiracist standpoints? The Negritude writers confronted a rationalist impasse that they alternately acted out and worked through. Fanon would later describe this predicament when he wrote that “for a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason”:

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As a good tactician, I intended to rationalize the world and to show the white man that he was mistaken . . . [but] the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason . . . my unreason was countered with reason, my reason with “real reason.” Every hand was a losing hand. . . . I wanted to be typically Negro—it was no longer possible. I wanted to be white—that was a joke. And, when I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me. 1

Once again, with regard to reason itself, subject-citizens confronted an “impossible situation.” 2 They had to decide how to treat a category of political modernity that was “both indispensable and inadequate.” 3 This chapter focuses on critical and poetic writings in which the Negritude cohort confronted this rationalist impasse. Here too their cultural project was doubled. At the same time that they formulated an immanent critique of colonial modernity from within the rational public sphere, they also produced a critique of that very rationality from the standpoint of their (imagined or lived) Africanity. In Partha Chatterjee’s terms they exercised a “refusal to engage in reasonable discourse.” 4 As Edouard Glissant later wrote of the postcolonial “impasse” confronting Martinique: “the attempt to approach a reality so often hidden from view cannot be organized in terms of a series of clarifications. We demand the right to obscurity.” 5 Damas, Senghor, and Césaire linked their immanent work on the political imaginary, which conceptualized an alternative imperial order, to more transcendental experiments with the surreal or phantasmatic imaginary, which placed into question the spatial and temporal coordinates of their empirical social order. Negritude writers did not only tack back and forth between what Charkrabarty has called historicist and hermeneutic or analytic and affective modes of inquiry. 6 They implicitly joined these modalities within a critical enterprise that challenged the imperial order and its rational underpinnings, proposed alternative epistemologies, and questioned the very possibility of such criticism. Negritude’s critique of colonial modernity linked a liberal discourse grounded in republican rights and rationality to a postliberal discourse grounded in racial alterity and irrationality. This dimension of Negritude drew on various countercurrents of the Western tradition, including vitalist philosophy (Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger), primitivist ethnology (Lévy-Bruhl, Mauss, Delafosse, Frobenius), and modernist aesthetics (Symbolism and Surrealism). It also drew on various reactions to modernization, whether Marxist,

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culturalist, welfarist, or spiritualist. Negritude’s critique of (colonial) reason may be read as one among many interwar attempts to exceed, overturn, or find alternatives to materialism, individualism, and instrumental rationality. 7

Politics and Poetics Negritude’s cultural nationalism was not only a rational critique of colonialism; it was a critique of (colonial) rationality itself. But as with republicanism and humanism, it sought to reconfigure not reject modern reason in order to engage colonial contradictions, not to abdicate politics. The close relationship between reasoned colonial criticism and a critique of colonial reason is addressed directly in Césaire’s legendary Discours sur le colonialisme (1950). The Discours is a political polemic in which Césaire argues that colonialism, which “de-civilizes” and dehumanizes its practitioners, will lead the West into a new barbarism that ultimately will destroy European civilization. 8 More importantly, this landmark intervention proposes that colonial violence is not simply a violation of European reason but is enabled by the rational order of bourgeois society and liberal politics. Césaire provocatively compares colonialism to Nazism and makes the accusation that the West is not shocked by Hitlerian violence per se, which it condoned in the colonies, but only by its appearance in Europe (Discours, 12). 9 He writes, “At the endpoint of capitalism . . . there is Hitler. At the endpoint of formal humanism . . . there is Hitler” (13). But Césaire is less concerned with Nazism than with European barbarism more generally, which he blames on the liberal bourgeoisie, who claimed to oppose fascism and authoritarianism (24). According to Césaire, the “watchdogs of colonialism” were not only those with immediate power, such as “sadistic governors and . . . colonizers who flog and greedy bankers . . . [and] corrupt politicians” (Discours, 32, 31). Equally implicated in colonial violence, according to Césaire, were republican institutions and their affiliated knowledge producers (parliamentarians, journalists, academics, ethnographers, sociologists, scientists, and novelists), whose discourses legalize colonial atrocities and legitimize white supremacy (13– 54). 10 Césaire indicates that such complicity was systemic and not reducible to individual intentions (32). This structural understanding of European violence is condensed in his arresting image of capitalism as “a crude animal that, by the elementary exercise of its vitality, spreads blood and seeds of death” (46). Through this organic metaphor, Césaire recognizes, in sharp contrast

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to Maran’s preface to Batouala, that social violence is produced by the very functioning, not by the failure, of rational modernity’s institutional order. Despite his radical rhetoric in the Discours, Césaire does not develop a cogent solution to the colonial domination that he analyzes so passionately. Instead he identifies poetics as an alternative to bourgeois de-civilization. He praises Lautréamont’s Chants de maldoror for having broken free of realism, overturning the established conceptual order, and celebrating debasement and degradation. “Delirium of a sick imagination? . . . The truth is that Lautréamont had only to look into the eyes of the iron man forged by capitalist society to apprehend the monster, the everyday monster, his hero” (Discours, 46). Césaire argues that modernists like Lautréamont used aesthetic forms to expose the contradictions of modern bourgeois society. He proposes that “a materialist and historical interpretation” of Chants de maldoror will allow us to read “this deranged epic” properly as “an implacable denunciation of a very specific form of society, something that could not have escaped the sharpest gaze around 1865.” Césaire explains that once we discard “the occult and metaphysical commentaries” on Lauréamont, we will be able to recognize “a barely allegorical portrait of a society in which the privileged, comfortably seated, refuse to move over and make room for the new arrivals” (45–46). By reminding us that a historicist reading of Lautréamont will yield critical insight into practices of exclusion in modern society, Césaire implicitly outlines a methodology through which his own poetry should be approached. It is telling that Césaire, in a politically engaged essay about the intrinsic relationship of reason, capitalism, humanism, Nazism, and colonialism, presents excessive poetry as a principle of redemption. This relationship between irrationalist poetics and political critique is precisely the nexus that Jean-Paul Sartre identifies in “Orphée noir,” the essay that helped Negritude consolidate as a self-conscious and public movement in 1948. 11 Sartre’s essay should be read as an attempt to explain to a radical audience why Negritude’s racial thinking was not reactionary in a colonial context. He does so by imposing a HegelianMarxist framework on Negritude, which he calls an “antiracist racism” that was “the only path that could lead to the abolition of racial differences” (“Orphée,” xiv). In Sartre’s infamous formulation, “Negritude appears as the weak beat in a dialectical progression.” According to this schema, white supremacy is the thesis and Negritude’s transvaluation of blackness is the antithesis whose ultimate goal is “to prepare the synthesis or realization of the human being in a society without races. Thus Negritude works to destroy itself, it is a departure, not a destination, a means, not a final end” (xli). Sartre fetishizes colonized blacks as

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the universal subject of world revolution: “in each epoch the circumstances of history elect a nation, a race, a class, to take up the torch” (xliii–xliv). But he does so by submerging the specificity of their cultural-political claims within a metanarrative of general human emancipation. Faced with the alternatives of race consciousness among colonized peoples and utopian internationalism, Sartre subsumes the former in the latter. He writes, “the man of color . . . walks on this crest between the past particularism that he just climbed and the future universalism that will be the twilight of his Negritude; he who lives particularism to the limit in order to find in it the dawn of the universal” (“Orphée,” xlii). Sartre thus turns Negritude into a leftist humanism by discounting and discarding its racially specific formulations: “this poetry, which at first seemed racial, is finally a song by everyone for everyone” (xi). Whereas Senghor sought to articulate universality and particularity through a conception of African humanism, Sartre can only reduce one to the other. Sartre’s paternalist refusal to recognize black alterity, however, is followed by a primitivist insistence on it. Sartre analyzed Negritude not only through a Marxist framework but also through a phenomenological-existentialist one. He defines Negritude as “a certain affective attitude toward the world . . . a certain comprehension of this universe. . . . Negritude, to employ Heideggerian language, is the being-in-the-world of the nègre” (“Orphée,” xxix). 12 In this way, Sartre sought to account for what he saw as a necessary relationship between the movement’s black poetics and its anticolonial politics. He argues that because racial oppression, unlike class oppression, targets black identity, “nègres must oppose it with a more adequate [juste] view of black subjectivity,” which is intrinsically revolutionary (xiv–xv). Whether or not we agree with Sartre’s analysis, he poses the crucial question about the relationship between Negritude writing’s poetic form and its political content. Sartre points to the contradictory character of Negritude’s anticolonial poetry: “the nègre declares in French that he rejects French culture . . . he installs within himself the thought apparatus of the enemy” (“Orphée,” xviii). According to Sartre, “as soon as he opens his mouth he accuses himself ” (xxi). Despite this presumption of linguistic authenticity, Sartre here recognizes something like the rationalist impasse invoked by Fanon, Memmi, and Césaire: to speak reason to race often confirms rather than challenges racial hierarchies (just as speaking race to reason does). Sartre contends that poetry alone provides a way out of this dilemma. Because poetry celebrates the nontransparent relationship between words and the world, he believes that it contains a disruptive power to illuminate the arbitrary character of the rational order. In sharp contrast to

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Césaire’s characterization of capitalism as a vital beast, Sartre figures language as a broken machine: “we see the entire system; it is now no more than an overturned and out-of-order mechanism whose arms still wave, trying to indicate in the emptiness; we suddenly judge the mad enterprise of naming; we understand that language is essentially prose, and that prose is essentially failure” (xx). Rather than mourn this failure of reference, poetry exploits it: “by making words crazy [fous], the poet makes us suspect. . . . The poem is a dark room where words knock into each other madly [fous]. Colliding in the air: their flames reciprocally illuminate each other and fall” (xx). By exploiting the inevitable disjuncture between language and being, poetry becomes an alternative form of violent illumination. Sartre argues that Negritude developed just such a subversive poetry, using French to “speak this language in order to destroy it”; it used words in order to “crush them together, rupture their customary associations, violently couple them . . . creating from this ruined language a solemn and sacred super language, Poetry” (“Orphée,” xx). When Sartre speaks of black experience as a combination of metaphysics and history, he seems implicitly to recognize the doubled way that Negritude embraced poetic madness in order to engage colonial politics (xxxvi). Sartre’s Marxism, paternalism, and exoticism prevents him from addressing Negritude as an autonomous cultural nationalism. Although “Orphée noir” has been justifiably criticized, critics rarely acknowledge that Negritude writing was preoccupied with precisely the relationship among poetry, unreason, critical insight, and anticolonial engagement that Sartre discusses. When Senghor, Damas, and Senghor began writing, a long-standing current of thought within European high culture had already opposed poetics to the rationalism, individualism, and materialism that sustained bourgeois society. This counter-Enlightenment tradition included irrationalist philosophy, antibourgeois social theory, and antirealist modernism. More immediately, Negritude engaged with Dadaism and Surrealism as cultural-political projects that combined insurgent poetics with programmatic prose. For Negritude writers, poetry became a privileged medium for transcending not only the antinomies of the colonial order but of Western modernity in general (subject and object, individuality and collectivity, spirit and matter, sacred and profane, reason and emotion). They also attempted to exploit poetry as a means to recover authentic racial subjectivity and to affirm the alterity of a distinct Negro-African cultural order organized around radically particular conceptions of the person, the community, and the natural and spiritual world, as well as counter-epistemologies that were neither instrumental nor analytic.

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Senghor relates Negritude to European antiliberal modernisms, which he links to the “Revolution of 1889” and situates in the era of high imperialism following the 1885 Congress of Berlin, when European material, scientific, and racial superiority were challenged from within. 13 He invokes Bergson’s argument that “the objects of discursive reason were only the superficial surface that must be surpassed [dépassé], by intuition, in order to have a deeper vision of the real” (“Négritude,” 70). Also referring to Werner Heisenberg, Gaston Bachelard, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Senghor suggests that this modernist revolution generated forms of thought unconstrained by the “classic dichotomies” and “old dualisms of philosophers.” According to Senghor, such thinkers demonstrated that “there is not matter and energy, not even matter and spirit, but spirit-matter, like there is space-time. Matter and spirit reduce themselves to each other, to a ‘fabric of relations,’ as Bachelard would say: to energy defined as a network of forces” (71). Inspired by these predecessors, Senghor wants to “harmoniously” reconcile “the heart and the head, intuitive reason and discursive reason” (72). Senghor places alongside these philosophical and scientific revolutions the aesthetic transformations initiated by Symbolism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism. The crucial moment, according to Senghor, came when these movements turned away from an aesthetic realism derived from the Aristotelian conception of mimesis as “an imitation of the object” (“Négritude,” 75). The new modernism, in contrast, entailed a different approach to representation. “Art does not consist in photographing nature, but in taming it. Like the hunter who reproduces the call of the animal he pursues, as two beings of a couple, separated, two lovers—in order to find each other again and unite” (75, 77). Senghor emphasizes the convergence between this modernism and Negritude, both of which developed a relational theory of representation as intuition or participation that challenged dominant European epistemologies. Despite Senghor’s metaphysical claims about a worldwide Negro-African culture, Negritude for him was also a contemporary intellectual and aesthetic practice; it consisted of Negritude writing. He believed that poesis was the fundamental medium through which Africans had always expressed their culture and that it could overcome modernity’s conceptual antinomies, reconcile its existential oppositions, and transcendentally access the cosmological. We must therefore read some of Senghor’s nativist formulations as elements of a philosophical critique of modern empiricism, positivism, utilitarianism, economism, and realism. Senghor maintains that blacks are organically connected to the natural world that they represent poetically: “beings docile to the rhythm of cosmic forces,

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who have contact with the sun and the stars, earth, fire, and water, animals and trees and stones.” 14 He then relates this racially derived connection with the physical world to a specifically Negro-African epistemology, a form of black cognition that transcends the European distinction between subject and object. He writes that “for the European, Homo Faber, it is a matter of knowing Nature in order to make it an instrument of his will to power: to utilize it. He will fix it by analyzing it, will make it a dead thing to be dissected” (“Apport,” 141). In contrast, he argues, the nègre is “porous to the breath of the world” and “discovers the object in its reality: its rhythm. He abandons himself, docilely, to this living movement, going from subject to object . . . for the Nègre, to know is to live—to live the life of the Other—by identifying with the object. To know [connaître] is to be born [naître] in the Other by dying oneself: it is to make love to the Other, it is to dance the Other. ‘I feel, therefore I am’ ” (141). Negritude may thus be related to a tradition of European vitalist thinking. Senghor links black vitalism to black poetry through a symbolic theory of signification. He maintains that African languages “are essentially concrete. Their words are always pregnant with images.” For Senghor, these languages are intrinsically poetic, consisting of “word images” in which signifier and signified are identical: “simultaneously the sign and the meaning and the sensual virtues of the word—timbre, tone, rhythm—reinforce the meaning, not the sign. . . . [In Negritude poetry] words stick to things, illuminate things, are things in their life, beyond appearances” (“Apport,” 142, 143). This framework enables Senghor to interpret Negritude poetry as the direct expression of “Negro-African” being (and knowing and speaking). “Negro-African rhetoric, or more precisely poetics,” Senghor writes, originates in a transhistorical “black style” [style nègre], which is “the fruit of intuition and experience more than discursive reason.” 15 Black poetry, he believes, entails an unmediated expression of the cosmological life force. According to this view, Negritude poets approached an object by singing “the meaning of its ‘Vital Force’ ” (“Langage,” 165). Senghor explains that the “mystical image” enables these writers to “participate in the life of telluric forces, expressions of the ‘Great Force’ of God, to whom the Nègre is so permeable” (164). Likewise, rhythm is “the essential quality of verse” because “beyond the sign, rhythm is the essential reality of this thing that animates and explains the universe and which is life. It is flux and reflux, night and day, inhalation and exhalation, death and birth . . . in the final analysis, it is rhythm that gives form and beauty to the art object” (169, 171). Elsewhere, Senghor argues that there exists an essentially black form of reason that is based on emotional ways of knowing. He defines emotion in

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metaphysical rather than psychoanalytic terms as “the world beyond the rational world, beyond the visible world of appearances. . . . This magical world is more real than the visible world. It is surreal.” 16 Senghor explains, “emotion is this seizure of the total being—consciousness and body—by the irrational world, the irruption of the magical world into the world of determinations. What moves the Negro-African is not so much an aspect of the object as its deeper reality, its surreality, not so much its sign as its meaning” (“Éléments,” 259). He argues that emotion is not a state of “diminished consciousness” but “on the contrary . . . is about reaching a superior state of knowledge” that transcends the opposition between subject and object (259). This racialization of emotion certainly reproduces long-standing colonial stereotypes. But it is important to note that Senghor here is not, as is often assumed, constructing a crude opposition between Western reason and African unreason (madness) or nonreason (animality). Rather he is attempting to elaborate an alternative, antipositivist form of reason and way of knowing. European modernism and irrational philosophy were engaged in a similar critical project. Senghor’s move, like those of a number of cultural anthropologists of this period, was to define this difference in biocultural terms. This may be a conceptually indefensible and politically dubious gesture. But we should be clear about what Senghor is in fact trying to do and how it relates to other attempts to criticize modern Western reason. Senghor uses this conception of emotion to argue that a European confronts the natural world antagonistically and instrumentally as an object: “He keeps it at a distance, he immobilizes it, he fixes it. Equipped with precision instruments, he dissects it through pitiless analysis. Animated by a will to power, he kills the Other and, in a centripetal movement, he transforms it into a means to be utilized for practical ends. He assimilates it” (“Éléments,” 255). Senghor contrasts this instrumental rationality with an alternative “black reason”: Here subject and object are dialectically confronted in the same act of knowing which is an act of love. Descartes wrote, “I think [je pense] ( therefore I am.” . . . The Negro-African could say: “I feel the Other, I dance [je danse] the Other, therefore I am.” . . . We can guess that black reason [la raison nègre], as it appears here, is not the discursive reason of Europe . . . it cleanses [dérouille] things, it perforates them with its rays in order to reach their surreality: more precisely, their primordially damp under-reality [sous-réalité]. European reason is analytic through utilization, black reason is intuitive through participation. (“Éléments,” 255–56) 17

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For Senghor, Negritude poetry embodied this emotional knowledge and intuitive black reason. In “Poésie et connaissance” (Poetry and knowledge; 1945), Aimé Césaire also turned to poetics to formulate an immanent critique of reason. This programmatic essay, first delivered at a philosophical conference in Haiti and later published in Césaire’s journal Tropiques, is organized around a fundamental opposition that Césaire elaborates between “scientific knowledge” and “poetic knowledge.” He characterizes the former as an instrumental modality of domination: Science offers a view of the world. But it is summary and superficial . . . the essence of things escapes it . . . scientific knowledge numbers, measures, classifies, and kills. . . . To acquire it, man sacrificed everything: desires, fears, feelings, psychological complexes. To acquire the impersonal knowledge that is scientific knowledge, man depersonalized himself and deindividualized himself. 18

Césaire then contrasts science’s impoverished knowledge with other forms of what he calls “satiated knowledge,” characterized by “presence and plenitude” (“Poésie,” 158). He traces these alternate ways of knowing to prehistory, when humanity stood in an enchanted and unmediated relationship to the natural world. 19 Man was never closer to certain truths than in the first days of the species . . . when [he] discovered, in fear and delight [revissement], the shivering [palpitante] newness of the world. Attraction and terror. Trembling and wonderment [émerveillement]. Strangeness and intimacy. It is in this state of fear and love, in this climate of emotion and imagination, that man made his first, most fundamental, and decisive discoveries. (158)

Césaire argues that in the modern era, this original enchanted relationship to the world has survived only in “the sacred phenomenon of love” and “the nocturnal forces of poetry.” He declares, “in all times the poets always knew” (159). But, Césaire argues, the knowledge possessed by these poets went underground until “the close of the Apollonian moment,” which he identifies with Baudelaire in 1850. Césaire refers to this modernist moment as “the great leap into the poetic void,” when “prosaic France crossed over into poetry. . . . Poetry became an adventure . . . at the end of which was clairvoyance and knowledge” (“Poésie,” 159). His genealogy of modernist trailblazers also includes

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Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Breton, and Lautréamont. Césaire regards these figures as the guardians and producers of an original and cosmological “poetic knowledge” of pure simultaneity and rapturous interconnection: The basis of poetic knowledge is an amazing mobilization of all human and cosmic forces. . . . Presiding over the poem . . . is the totality of experience. . . . Everything that has been lived. Everything possible . . . all the pasts and all the futures. . . . And, in a more troubling manner, the cosmic totality as well. . . . In us humanity from all ages. In us all of humanity. In us the animal, the vegetal, the mineral. Man is not only man. He is the universe. . . . Abandoned to the vital movement, to the creative élan. Joyous abandon. (162–63)

Césaire thus develops a cosmological humanism with the poet as redeemer: “a man saves humanity, a man places humanity back in the universal concert, a man marries human flowering to universal flowering; this man is the poet” (163). Césaire’s supra-universalism is grounded in poetics, which he contends has a dis-alienating power: “all great poetry, without ever renouncing the human being, at a very mysterious moment ceases to be strictly human and begins to be truly cosmic. There, and by the poetic state, are resolved the two most anguishing antinomies in existence: that between the self and the other [de l’un et de l’autre], that between the self and the world [du Moi et du Monde]” (163). He thus celebrates poetry’s capacity to reconcile the individual, the collectivity, and the natural world as well as the past, present, and future. Césaire also emphasizes poetry’s powers of creative destruction and critical disruption. 20 Referring to the figure of the poet, he writes, “never was a man of peace, never was a man of depth ever more rebellious or pugnacious” (“Poésie,” 164). He characterizes poetry as “a restlessness that shakes the most solid foundations”: “it is appropriate to speak of poetic violence, poetic aggressivity, poetic instability. In this climate of fire and fury that is the poetic climate, money ceases to have value, tribunals cease judging, judges cease condemning, juries cease acquitting. Only the firing squads still know their job. . . . The police strangle themselves. Conventions exhaust themselves” (165). Here Césaire is proposing a way out of the rationalist impasse. If the rational order of Western modernity— including the free market, the administration of justice, the guarantee of social order, and international human rights—is inseparable from political domination (e.g., colonial violence), it cannot be uncritically mobilized for emancipatory projects. Césaire, with his Negritude peers, turns to poesis in an attempt to leap outside of (colonial) modernity altogether—not in order to escape it but in order to disrupt it. His celebration of poetry is a

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grand if politically weak gesture of refusal designed to open up utopian possibilities. Alongside of poetry, Césaire also identifies humor (especially as it was deployed by Lautréamont) as a nonrational agent of transformative insight: “Only humor alerts me to the other side of things” (165). 21 Césaire reminds us that the realm of rationality has inherent limitations. Without naming Kant per se, Césaire challenges Kant’s attempt “to reduce analytic judgment to synthetic judgment.” Césaire then responds to this attempt by contrasting “the poverty of judgment” to “the richness of the image” (“Poésie,” 166, 165). He does so in poetic form: “Judgment is poor from all the reason in the world / The image is rich from all the absurdity in the world.” Césaire repeats these alternating propositions several more times with slight variations: he likens judgment to thought, rationality, and immanence and likens the image to life, irrationality, and transcendence (166). For Césaire, the poetic image is a disruptive and revolutionary force that overcomes the limitations on perception and understanding that are imposed by logic and reason. “The barriers are there: the law of identity, the law of contradiction. . . . It is in the image, the revolutionary image, the distant image, the image that disrupts all the laws of thought, that man finally breaks through the barrier. In the image A is no longer A. . . . In the image A could be not-A. . . . In the image every object of thought is not necessarily A or not-A” (166). Although Césaire posits the “revolutionary image” as antithetical to reason’s order, he does not characterize it as a gateway to disorder and chaos. Rather, “because the image immeasurably extends the field of transcendence and the right of transcendence, poetry is always on the path to truth . . . the image ceaselessly surpasses that which is perceived . . . the dialectic of the image transcends antinomies” (167). It is important to note that this is not a frontal assault on reason, not simply a celebration of madness. As with Senghor’s “black reason,” Césaire attempts to evade the stark opposition between reason and unreason by proposing “poetic knowledge” as an alternative form of rationality that differs from scientific or instrumental reason. Unlike Senghor, Césaire does not reduce this cosmological irrationalism to an essential feature of black culture; this is not a racial epistemology. But he does imply that such poetic knowledge guided his own poetic writing. In a passage that invokes a poetics of temporal transformation, Césaire summarizes the operations that would be performed by the Negritude poets in the 1930s: When the sun of the image arrives at its zenith, everything is possible again. Cursed complexes dissipate; it is the moment of emergence. What emerges is the universal foundation. . . . My past is there. . . . My future is there. . . . It

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is my childhood that speaks and seeks me. And what also emerges is the old ancestral foundation. Hereditary images that only the poetic atmosphere can bring back for deciphering. Buried millennial knowledge. (“Poésie,” 167)

I suggest that Negritude poetry would likewise reconfigure time in order to seize history and engage colonial contradictions. These writers hoped that poetry’s necessary and revolutionary violence, which Césaire characterizes as “the crashing of a mental wave against the rock of the world,” would lead to a form of truth that was at once historical and cosmological (170).

Transcending Colonial Time-Space Negritude writing was not confined to metatheories about black epistemology and radical poetics. Senghor, Damas, and Césaire enacted their critique of colonial reason in poetry that worked to reconfigure the time-space of the imperial nation-state. As we have seen, its spatial order was characterized by disjuncture (between continental and overseas France) and its temporal order by deferral (of either French citizenship or national autonomy for colonial subjects). In contrast, Negritude poetry condenses time and space. I am referring here to the process of condensation that Freud identified in dreams, in which a multiplicity of times and spaces become identical, unconstrained by the coordinates of empirical reality. 22 In Negritude poetry, metropolitan and overseas territories no longer appear to each other as elsewhere; they interpenetrate. Similarly, this poetry responded to the colonial state’s not-yet temporality by figuring all of African and colonial history as always now. This poetry may be understood as exploring the terrain of Bergson’s “pure duration” characterized in terms of qualitative intensity, multiplicity, simultaneity, interpenetration, and heterogeneity. Bergson sought to recover a form of cognition that preceded and exceeded the way modern reason analytically objectifies time and space into extensive measurable quantities. 23 Negritude writers did not only seek to overcome disparate times and spaces; they sought to link them to one another. They did so partly through the use of supercharged images linked to nighttime, childhood, and colonial encounters. These images—which recur in their poetry as scenes in which violence, revolt, and their memories are acted out—specify distinct spatiotemporal sites that in turn generate novel spatiotemporal possibilities. These images function as chronotopes, which Mikhail Bakhtin defines in terms of “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed

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in literature. . . . [they express] the inseparability of space and time. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.” 24 For Bakhtin, chronotopes are at once referential, rooted in existing conditions, and imaginative: “out of the actual chronotopes of our world . . . emerge the reflected and created chronotopes of the world represented in the work (in the text).” Representations of time-space, he suggests, are mysteriously able to act upon, and even overcome, temporal and spatial givens: “the event that is narrated in the work and the event of narration itself . . . take place in different times . . . and in different places, but at the same time, these two events are indissolubly united in a single but complex event.” 25 Such representations are at once descriptive and transformative. Insofar as they are simultaneously real and imaginary, Bakhtin’s chronotopes may be understood to provide a link between a Freudian or phantasmatic conception of time-space condensation and a Marxian conception of time-space compression as an inherent feature of capitalist modernity. 26 When Negritude writers condensed time and space in their imaginative representations, they were also expressing a real sociohistorical process of time-space compression that linked metropole and colonies within an increasingly integrated imperial nation-state. They produced a form of poetic knowledge that both referred to and reconfigured the time-space presumed and produced by interwar colonialism. Negritude engaged in poetic play with geography and history in order to illuminate the intrinsic relationship between France’s national present and its colonial past as well as between its national history and colonial presence. This transformative poesis produced versions of what Walter Benjamin called dialectical images. Defining the dialectical image in contrast to sterile historicist understandings of the steady accumulation of homogeneous empty time, Benjamin writes, “the true picture of the past flits by. . . . To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” Benjamin thereby identifies the radical political implications of disruptive forms of remembering that “brush history against the grain.” Negritude poetry deployed chronotopes in order to provoke precisely such charged memory flashes that challenged the constraining continuum of history as additive time. Negritude poetry performed a version of Benjamin’s “tiger’s leap into the past” in order to understand history as “time filled by the presence of the now.” 27 A productive tension existed in these poems, which were at once historical (a way of working through the impasses of colonial history) and transcendental (an attempt to leap

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outside of them by reference to the cosmological). Each standpoint was used as means of approaching the other. By allowing its speakers to encounter buried colonial violence in pastoral village life and primordial Africa in everyday Paris, Negritude poetry engaged in the “profane illumination” that Benjamin identified with Surrealist aesthetics: “we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.” 28 Benjamin believed that such acts of antihistoricist remembering and irrationalist creativity enabled historical actors to engage politically with their given conditions. Negritude poetry neither conformed directly to Benjamin’s revolutionary Marxism nor to his outrageous Surrealism. But these poets did practice the kind of disruptive cultural politics, or political poetics, that he envisioned. Their poetry staged the fundamental interconnections of here and elsewhere, now and then. It defamiliarized the everyday by insisting on the invisible colonial violence that was its substratum, and it familiarized the exotic by making colonial life a straightforward extension of French national life. It is no accident that my analysis of Negritude draws on attempts by Freud and Bergson before World War I as well as attempts by Bakhtin and Benjamin after it to reconceptualize rationalist conceptions of time and space inherited from Descartes and Kant. All of these thinkers, including the Negritude poets, participated in the modernist movement to revise the epistemological certainties that governed bourgeois modernity and enabled societal rationalization in the early twentieth century. In their attempt to think time-space differently, the Negritude writers confronted colonial rationality with an alternative “poetic truth” or “black knowledge.” In Chants d’ombre, Senghor relates historical memory to transformative time-spaces, such as night, and liminal states of consciousness, such as dreams, madness, and nostalgia. “Nuit blanche” describes the poet’s sleepless reverie in which a violent colonial past becomes painfully present: “Then thrown back into the furnace of anxiety / I smell the odor of my flesh roasting like a slab of gazelle” 29 Elsewhere, night stimulates powerfully positive memories of Africa. “Sometimes a chant / in the evening a savage choir / Wells up from the depths of my childhood / and arrives streaming” (Senghor, 582). In many of Senghor’s early poems, solitude and alienation are overcome through flashes of memory that lead back “home” poetically. In “Comme je passais,” a speaker walking by the Cabane Cubaine hears some jazz and smells “the penetrating perfume of a Negress.” In an instant, these sensations transport him, “Here are the nights / Here are the days without sleep / Horizons were awakened in

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me that I thought were deceased” (Senghor, 589–90). The imaginary object of these poetic flights is the presence and fullness of Senghor’s mythic Africa and Kingdom of Childhood. The poetry in Chants d’ombre traces a movement from European solitude to African homecoming by way of memory flashes that overcome physical time and space. But in this poetry there is often a second return, back to Europe. The collection’s opening poem crystallizes the back-and-forth movement, the double return, that characterizes the volume as a whole. It begins with an image of seemingly unbridgeable distance between the speaker and his French neighbors, between subject-citizens and the metropolitan public: “It’s Sunday / I fear the crowd of my fellow men with faces of stone / From my glass tower, inhabited by migraines and impatient Ancestors / I contemplate roofs and hills in the mist” (Poèmes, 9). Senghor here describes Europeans with the term semblables, a term that signifies those who are like me. He may be referring to the inclusive rhetoric of colonial assimilation and Greater France, which is belied by the speaker’s feeling of alienation. Separated from his “fellows” by a wall of glass, he is isolated within the “tower” of his consciousness. Despite his supposed similarity, he also knows he is different. Trapped with his “impatient Ancestors,” he cannot or will not act. He only suffers; his head aches. This state of reverie and reflection, however, this meditative isolation, also allows him to overcome the constraints of physical reality and conscious rationality. It transports him back to a mythic Africa: “And now from this observatory, as from the outskirts / I contemplate my dreams, distracted along the streets, lying at the foot of the hills / Like the leaders of my race on the banks of the Gambia and the Saloum / And now on the Seine, at the foot of the hills / Let me remember my dead!” (Poèmes, 9). Here a consciousness of racial difference has slid into a daydream or wakeful unconsciousness of cultural memory and memorialization. Reversing this psycho-geographic trajectory, “Joal” begins by invoking childhood Africa and ends with an image of metropolitan alienation and remembrance (Poèmes, 15). “I remember, I remember . . . / In my head the rhythm / Of such a weary walk across the long days of Europe where sometimes / An orphan jazz appears that sobs sobs sobs” (16). The body of the poem is a lyrical evocation of a vital African culture: “I remember funeral feasts smoking with blood of slaughtered animals / The noise of quarrels, the rhapsodies of griots” (15). In this poetry, remembering is not only a nostalgic attempt to escape historical reality but a way of elaborating the rapidly disappearing reality of African society. The memory flashes that allow these speakers to trip back across time and space to a mythic childhood past can be read within the context of Senghor’s

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broader project to preserve the historical memory of devalued African cultures. He writes about the comforting rhythms of everyday life there, presenting detailed lyrical accounts of African landscapes, social activities, and heroic histories. In response to the annihilating power of assimilation, he affirms a présence africaine. Senghor writes village Africa back into world history, preserving its memory by constructing a romantic ideal. This is a poetry of cultural witness and valorization, an ethnographic poesis. In “Que m’accompagnement kôras et balafongs” (To the music of koras and balaphons), we read about Europe’s rivers running with blood. Faced with apocalyptic violence, the speaker overcomes his discouragement through an act of ethnographic remembering. Once again the trip back to Africa takes place in the time-space of evening: “At least, each evening, I am consoled by the traveling mood of my double / Toko Waly, my uncle, do you remember those nights then when my head weighed heavy against your patient back? . . . You Toko Waly, you hear the inaudible / And you explain to me signs spoken by the Ancestors” (Poèmes, 36). Here, Senghor contrasts his childhood Africa directly to the image of an alienating West. European crisis is countered by village tranquility. Beyond their documentary function, these romantic recollections allow the speaker not only to escape European geography but to transcend the constraints of his imperfect assimilation. In this poetry, mythic Africa, often figured as woman and encountered at night, becomes a space beyond rationality, consciousness, and reality, a site of cosmological wholeness. In one poem, a woman’s touch leads to primordial sleep, and in another communion with the figure of woman-Africa allows the speaker to overcome personal despair, presumably born of exile and displacement (Poèmes, 14–15, 16–17). Senghor thus figures this primordial time-space, Africa, or childhood, before-beyond history, reason, and modernity as female and maternal. This gesture mirrors a parallel tendency by vitalist philosophers to conflate femininity, poetics, and irrationality in order to contest realist or positivist epistemology. It thereby reproduces long-standing Western discourses on sexual difference that reduce women to natural, embodied beings, remove them from rational debate and political spheres, and counterpose them to a dehumanizing modernity. Here the Negritude poets join the many nationalist movements that have located cultural authenticity, national integrity, and popular recalcitrance to unwelcome change in women’s bodies. The uncritical gender ideology embedded in his poetry leads Senghor to reaffirm the colonial order he is trying to disrupt. The administration in AOF, recall, also regarded African women as the embodiment of native culture and an

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index of social evolution. Negritude poetry revalorized the feminine-primordial but left in place an equivalence that continued to be used by the colonial state to exclude the majority of indigenous populations from French citizenship. Here there is a tension between the work performed by Senghor’s rational-critical prose and his imaginative poetry. Women or the feminine in Senghor’s poems also mediate nighttime and childhood, transformative chronotopes that enable the speaker to transcend instrumental rationality, rationalized violence, and the fragmented or contradictory character of modern life. Night that delivers me from reason from salons from sophisms, from pirouettes and pretexts, from calculated hatred and humanized violence Night that melts all my contradictions, all contradictions in the primal unity of your Negritude Receive the child, still a child, that twelve years of wandering has not aged. (Poèmes, 37)

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This is a poetry of metaphysical homecoming in which primordial childhood functions to counteract cultural and spiritual alienation. Yet the possibility of ever actually arriving home is quietly challenged in Senghor’s poetry. In “Nostalgie” we read, “Where are you going? / To which paradise? I say: paradise / First clarity of my childhood / Never recovered” (Senghor, 590). On the one hand, the speaker is affirming that this paradise is quite real and mundane to his skeptical questioner. On the other, he acknowledges its phantasmatic and inaccessible character, a place to be imagined but never recovered. This flash of insight, which was staged in Socé Diop’s Mirages de Paris, is submerged through most of Chants d’ombre but is thematized directly by Damas in Pigments. Damas also uses chronotopes to narrate mythic scenes of colonial encounter and cultural violence that nevertheless draw on the real time-space of the imperial order. His poetic strategy resonates with another of Bakhtin’s useful descriptions of chronotopes: “in the last instance [the author-creator] can represent the temporal-spatial world and its events only as if he had seen and observed them himself, only as if he were an omnipresent witness to them.” 30 Damas’s poems are peopled with contemporary figures who themselves experienced the entire history of colonial violence, not just its legacy. These time-tripping participant observers place social scientific documentation, critical testimony, and transformative poetics in the service of one another. Damas’s

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poetry may thus be understood as an subversive variant of the “ethnographic surrealism” that James Clifford has used to describe the metropolitan avantgarde at this time. 31 Throughout Pigments, nighttime functions to disrupt or transcend the coordinates of physical reality and colonial rationality. Its hallucinatory quality is underscored in “Nuit blanche,” which can be translated as “Sleepless night” but also carries the trace of its racially inflected literal translation, “White night.” This poem thus makes the very connection between night and race that I have been tracing. Its speaker confesses, “So often my feeling of race frightens me / as much as a dog howling in the night . . . / I always feel ready to foam with rage against what surrounds me / against what prevents me / from ever being a man” (Pigments, 49). Here nighttime becomes a gateway to other times and other spaces. It exists or leads outside rational reality from which colonial rationality may be (poetically) addressed, remembered, or reflected upon. This dynamic nighttime is also central to “Ils sont venus ce soir,” dedicated to Senghor. Its speaker exemplifies Bakhtin’s “omnipresent witness” by insisting that he himself experienced the traumatic upheaval that accompanied the slave trade. The poem stages a mythical scene of originary colonial encounter. The implicit setting is Africa as homeland; the time is “that evening,” figured as an unspecified single moment of intrusive contact, decisive conquest, and irremediable (cultural) loss. Neither geographical place nor historical time is ever specified within this poem. The distilled encounter takes place in mythic time and in a generic place, utopia as no-place rather than perfect-place. The poem stages a utopian scene defined by a culturally authentic ritual space that is ruptured by the arrival of outsiders: “They came that evening / as the tomtom rolled from rhythm to rhythm the frenzy / of eyes / the frenzy of hands / the frenzy of statue feet” (Pigments, 13). Corresponding to the abstraction of “that evening” are the equally abstract intruders, the “they,” who encountered generic Africans. Here the indigenous people are presented as living the unselfconscious fullness of their Africanity, signified by the music and dance of ritual or celebration. This myth-time is not only represented in the poem by these Africans, who seem to live outside of time, but is created by the poem through a structure of repetition. The second half of the poem mirrors the first exactly. Without having to characterize this rhythmic repetition, pace Senghor, as a typical feature of Negro-African aesthetics, we can recognize its incantatory quality. Rhythmic drumming serves as both content and form of this poem. Its circular quality reinforces the nonhistorical or mythic character of the poem’s temporality. Repetition serves as a gateway to the phantasmatic. It conjures a circular rather

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than linear time even as it traces a path backward to an idealized primordial Africa. Because the time of this scene is removed from the historical past, the violence of the encounter can remain eternally present in the poem. The speaker places himself literally at the center of the poem—“moi, moi, moi”—capitalized in the middle of the page, located precisely between the repeating halves of the poem: “since / how many of me me me / died / since they came that evening when” (Pigments, 49). The Guianese poet in Paris indicates that he himself was there then. He establishes a historical identity between those enslaved Africans and the subsequent victims of colonial oppression, who include himself. The repeating structure and circular time allow him to establish this continuous present of violence and victimization. This poem represents the original sin of colonialism as a moment of historical rupture. Yet frenetic African dancing defines the world before and after this seemingly decisive break in time. The poem stages a dynamic tension between historical and mythical time, between colonial rupture and cultural continuity. Damas reconfigures historical time in order to make a historically specific claim: he, as an assimilated Antillean and colonial student in Paris, identifies literally with those Africans who were forced into colonial captivity. By erasing the real spatial and temporal difference between himself and primordial Africans, he seeks to challenge the way the inclusive discourse of Greater France effaces the violent past of French colonial slavery. This poem may thus be read as complementing, in another register, Damas’s critical rereading of the French Revolution through a colonial optic. Damas returns to this mythic scene of cultural loss in “Limbé,” which begins with a present-day colonial dystopia and moves back toward the utopian time of pre-contact authenticity (and its violent rending). The refrain in “Limbé” is “Return them to me my black dolls” [Rendez-les moi, mes poupées noirs] (Pigments, 43). These dolls become the objectification of original Africanity. In the form of indigenous “fetish” figures, they stand in for primordial culture even as they figure authenticity as a fetish, originality as an already produced object (of colonial intervention). The poem thus refers obliquely to and brushes against the interwar discourses of colonial ethnology that fetishized material culture. Damas himself, we saw, was sent on an ethnographic collection mission to Guiana, where he participated in the plunder of his cultural patrimony and facilitated the ethnological objectification of his people. 32 We may also read “dolls” as a reference to black women who have been literally and symbolically “stolen” from their rightful male “owners” through colonialism as theft, violence, and rape. This poem turns women into fetish

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objects that embody (an impossible) cultural authenticity. They become circulating tokens of exchange in a patriarchal-imperial economy of conquest and revendication, a material patrimony that must be returned to their proper place as possessions, toys for innocent children’s play. By making women embody culture and enable resistance, Damas, like Senghor, is complicit with the colonial state’s gendered racial and racialized gender politics in a way that his selfflagellating poetry of complicity does not address. The salutary image of “black dolls” is set in opposition to images of prostitutes, which seem to inhabit the speaker’s colonial present: “pallid whores / merchants of love” and “stacked big-bottom marionettes” (Pigments, 43). It is not clear whether these prostitutes are black women, signifying the degradation of colonized peoples, or white women, signifying a more general European (or colonial) decadence. In either case, these figures of commodified sexuality in the “real” present constitute a distorted unreality for the speaker, who refers to them as an “incredible image” [image hallucinante]. In contrast, we read that the “black dolls” will “clear away” [dissiper] these hallucinatory images and open a path back to childhood innocence and uncorrupted cultural identity: “Give me back my black dolls / so I can play with them / the innocent games of my instinct / in the shade of its laws / my courage recovered / my audacity / turned back into myself / myself again / what I was Yesterday / yesterday / without complexity / yesterday / when the hour of uprooting struck” (Pigments, 44). These “black dolls” do not only lead away from colonial degradation to utopian African authenticity; they lead back to the mythic scene of colonial violence, “the hour of uprooting.” This decisive encounter is now figured as the theft of a child’s toy–spiritual object–black woman. We read, “they broke into the space that was mine” (Pigments, 44). The theft of dolls becomes a violation of the space of culture, which the narrator inventories: “custom / days / life / song / rhythm / effort / trail / water / hut / smoked gray earth / wisdom / words / palavers / elders / cadence / hands / time / hands / stamping / the earth” (44–45). This cultural space entails the marking of time, again through music and dance. Time here is la mesure, rhythmic time, musical cadence, the beat, rather than le temps, clock time, calendar time, historical time. We are once again in a utopian, or mythic time-space. This transfiguration of time, this leap out of historicity, allows the speaker to locate himself there at the moment of original loss. He speaks of a direct confrontation between “they” and “me” (my dolls, my space, my heart, what I was yesterday). By speaking of “yesterday,” he also transforms this idealized past

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into his personal present. Parallel to the dystopic “incredible image” of colonial reality, from which he fled, he has constructed an equally unreal utopia, a mythic primordial Africa and a mythic scene of colonial disruption. The speaker’s direct identification with African society and cultural loss is enabled by this poetic deformation of time and space. Yet even within the text, the speaker recognizes that he has simply countered one (negative) image hallucinante with an equally fantastic (positive) image of African origins: “Give me the illusion that I will no longer have to satisfy / the sprawling need for mercy snoring / under the unconscious disdain of the world” (Pigments, 43). In other words, the return of his black dolls only provides him with an illusory escape from colonial reality; it does not restore the fullness of Africa lost. Similarly in “Blanchi” (Whitened), the speaker inserts himself directly into the story of colonial enslavement. But here the poem is a vehicle for more concrete historical memory: “Whitened / My hatred swells in the margins / of their wickedness / in the margins / of their gunshots / in the margins / of their rolling / slave ships / of fetid cargo from cruel slavery” (Pigments, 60). The text establishes a direct relationship between slavery and the speaker’s personal experience of assimilation. He was presumably “whitened” in the colonial Antilles: “Whitened / My hatred swells in the margins / of the culture / in the margins of the theories / in the margins of the chatter / with which they believed they should stuff me in the cradle / even though everything in me longed to only be as black / as my Africa that they robbed” (60). Africa’s loss, in this formulation, is his own personal loss. Slavery and assimilation are made equivalent. Temporal intervals are erased, centuries are conflated, time is condensed. Once again, however, the text signifies the impossibility, or fundamental inaccessibility, of an originary African identity. The speaker comments on being “stuffed” with “their” culture, theories, and chatter, “even though everything in me longed to only be as black / as my Africa that they robbed” (Pigments, 60). At the precise moment when the speaker identifies with “my Africa,” when he expresses his black being, he can only assert his longing, his desire to be as black as Africans. The very affirmation of this primordial blackness emphasizes his difference from that (mythic) identity. 33 Many of the poems in Pigments are characterized precisely by this process of reconfiguring time and space in order to claim an African being that can never be fully inhabited. The guilt thematized in Pigments, discussed in the previous chapter, often follows the speaker’s uneasy acknowledgment that in the modern colonial order there is no unmediated access to authentic African identity. The European world is always internal to modern black people. The poetic retreat into cultural

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unity, colonial mythos, or the night of hyper self-consciousness can be understood as a reaction to this recognition. Damas writes: “I look in vain for / the hollow of a shoulder / to hide my face / my shame / of the / Re / al / i / ty” (Pigments, 71). This line indicates the speaker’s need and failure to evade the immediacy of colonial society and cultural complicity. The very word reality is internally divided, not identical to itself, heterogeneous and multiple. This textual dispersion indicates the fragmenting power of colonial history as well as the fragmented experience of diasporic populations. It also signals a critical desire to disrupt and dismantle the given colonial order. The speaker repeatedly attempts to defy time and space in order to affirm his Panafrican identification with the original victims of colonial violence, his slave ancestors. But the poetic attempt to escape modern colonial reality or recover primordial cultural identity only underscores the fact that there is no clear way out of the rationalist impasse produced by contemporary racial politics. This is the very dilemma that Césaire addresses in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, another remarkably self-reflexive poem that acts out and works through the impossible desire for racial self-recovery.

Césaire’s Autocritique of Negritude

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Framing the Cahier Senghor and Damas sought to reconfigure imperial time-space through nonrational poetry rooted in myths of black authenticity, yet their poetic play indicated the impossibility of finding racial authenticity in the modern colonial order. Conversely, Césaire’s disorderly poetics addressed precisely this impossibility yet ultimately longed for it. The initial version of Césaire’s monumental poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, was written in 1939 at the close of the period that has been the focus of this study. It can rightly be read as the crowning achievement of interwar Negritude, its summit and synthesis. But it must also be read as an autocritique of Negritude itself, a text in which the self-reflexive doubt about cultural nationalism that momentarily surfaced in the work of Gratient, Sainville, Socé Diop, Damas, and Senghor is pursued deeply and directly. Césaire began writing this epic poem while he was at the École Normale Supérieure and preparing his degree in English on black American literature at the Sorbonne. He started to work on the Cahier shortly before a decisive return to Martinique, in the summer of 1936. It was his first visit home since arriving in Paris. 34 We have seen that after the publication of L’Étudiant Noir, Damas and Senghor also made important trips to their home colonies that had

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an impact on their subsequent poetry and criticism. This was also the period when Césaire suffered his breakdown. He recounts being a disaffected student, disillusioned with the academic strictures placed on his thought, who failed the agrégation because his tutor felt that his examination responses were presented in the form of poetry, not essays. 35 From the outset, Césaire’s recourse to poetry entailed a rejection of institutional knowledge production and rational academic forms. But he was equally critical of formal Parnassian verse, as he recalls when explaining the genesis of his “deranged epic”: The first thing I wrote was the Cahier. . . . I definitely began it around 1936 as a notebook [cahier]. A notebook because I had renounced writing poems: all traditional meter bothered me greatly, paralyzed me. I was not content. Then one day I said to myself, “After all, pitch it to the winds [fichons tout en l’air].” Then I began to write, not knowing what would come out, verse or prose; I had to speak from my heart. In reality, it became a poem. In other words, I discovered poetry at the moment I turned my back on formal poetry. 36

This strategy of creative destruction, of recovery through negation, would figure in both the form and content of the Cahier. At a time when scholars and policymakers were preoccupied with ethnography, Césaire’s choice of a “notebook” as the format for his hybrid attempt— at once prosaic and poetic, affirmative and critical, spontaneous and strategic, historical and transcendental—to produce an alternative “poetic knowledge” is telling. It connotes both a documentary ambition and an improvisational attitude. Damas later wrote that “with Aimé Césaire . . . Antillean poetry resolutely leaves its ivory tower” in order to incorporate within itself “the painful psychological, social, and historical preoccupations of people who live in this corner of the French New World, who suffer and seek the truth in the shadows of a manufactured culture.” 37 Césaire’s freeform notebook-poem was indeed animated by a will to incorporate. It is packed with internal quotations, voices, and fictionalized anecdotal observations. The Cahier was first published in Volontés, a small Parisian literary review, in 1939 by Georges Pelorson, Senghor’s contact at Charpentes. 38 When Césaire completed the poem, he read it first to Damas to whom he confessed the influence that Pigments had exercised on his own writing. 39 He later recounted, “I will never forget Damas, because I knew him when I was very young. At that time Senghor and I were still in the university working on our diplomas, and Damas was already a poet to us, the poet who intrigued us, the cursed poet

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[poète maudit] because he was the first to liberate himself. . . . He launched the first cry, the fundamental cry.” 40 Over time, Césaire would continue to develop this conception of poetry as a primordial utterance “surging from the inner void, like a volcano that emerges from primitive chaos, it is our place of power [lieu de force]; the eminent situation from which we appear; it is magic, magic.” 41 The image of volcanic eruption crystallizes Césaire’s understanding of poetic production as a spontaneous and organic form of authentic self-expression: “Poetry is certainly a descent into oneself, but it is also an explosion! . . . my poetry is basically a volcanic poetry [poésie péléèn]. There are things that I do not express, that accumulate, and then, one day, they suddenly come out.” 42 Alongside this naturalizing and romantic rhetoric about involuntary emissions, Césaire also acknowledged that a more worldly, measured, and pragmatic strategy guided the exuberant disorder of his poetry. Responding to a question by a French interviewer about the violence of the Cahier, he explained that “back then, at first, the ‘volcanism’ was compacted, or rather, internalized . . . and then, at the beginning, everything had to be smashed so that a new Antillean literature could be created from the pieces. This required a cannibalistic violence.” 43 This gesture of parasitic creativity corresponded to Césaire’s frequently noted practice of deforming and reconfiguring French language. In another interview, he recalled “one has to use what is at hand . . . but we had a responsibility to be original. A means does not become an end. For us, consequently, we had to conquer French, dominate it, and if necessary, re-create it.” 44 Whereas Sartre argued that the French language was a self-defeating medium for black poets, Césaire treated it as an opportunity, cultural raw material to be reworked into productive poetic truth. Césaire related this project to creatively destroy French language to poetry as a deliberate act of engagement that was not spontaneous, unconscious, or wholly subjective. He explains, “I attempt to express myself. . . . But in speaking . . . I utter others.” 45 Césaire emphasized the poet’s social and cultural responsibility: “The role of the poet and poetry is to be a ‘ferment’ of hope. . . . My role is to remember to be, if I can, a ‘griot’ who links the people to its history . . . the human and literary revolution would only resemble a tempest in an inkwell if it did not unleash [débouchait] the political revolution.” 46 For Césaire, as for Senghor and Damas, poetry and politics were inseparable. “Me, who’s great-grandfather was a slave, I wanted to try to lead a small people that the immense wave of slavery vomited onto American soil. . . . I am fundamentally a poet, but an engaged poet. I cannot dissociate poetry from action . . . politics would not deserve the least energy if they were not justified by a cultural

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project.” 47 Between 1936 and 1939 Césaire’s cultural project was Negritude, which he insists “must be situated historically.” He explains, “Negritude was of a certain moment. That moment only needs to be remembered for us to see how justified this movement was.” 48 His most important interwar contribution to Negritude was the long Cahier. Varied and insightful as they have been, scholarly interpretations of Césaire’s Cahier have largely focused on questions of subjectivity and identity (whether individual or collective) as well as the poem’s unidirectional movement. 49 But this poem does not simply narrate self-realization or coming to racial consciousness. It should be read as staging and challenging a variety of possible responses to colonial racism. Three distinct movements can be identified in the Cahier. It begins with an excessive representation of colonial reality in Martinique, moves to the speaker’s confrontations with colonial racism, and concludes with a transcendent leap outside of historical time and into a cosmological universality. But it does not unfold linearly. Recursive and dialogical, the Cahier attempts to work through the tension between movement and stasis, progress and regress. By enacting Negritude’s repeated inability to overcome a racism that is at once rational and irrational, this poem is a critical meditation on the very project with which Césaire would become most identified. An understanding of the doubled and scientific character of interwar colonialism should therefore inform any analysis of the Cahier, which, following Césaire’s reading of Lautréamont, must be historical.

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Reading the Cahier Like the other Negritude poetry discussed, Césaire’s Cahier is framed by a transfiguring nighttime. It opens, more precisely, at the liminal moment between night and day: “at the brink of dawn.” The opening pages of the poet’s “return” home contain long prose passages that present colonial Martinique as a place of geographic decadence and social stasis. Sunrise here does not herald the unfolding of a new day. There is only a “cursed venereal sun” illuminating a violated, degraded, and inert territory: “the extreme, deceptive desolate bedsore on the wound of the waters . . . rotting under the sun silently . . . the beach of dreams and the insane awakenings.” 50 Here geographic inertia signals social inertia; indigenous life in colonial Martinique is mute and immobile, containing “a desolate throng under the sun, not connected with anything that is expressed, asserted, released” (Césaire, 37). The population “crawls on its hands without the slightest desire to drill the sky with a stature of protest” (41). This is a dehumanized crowd, not a collectivity capable of concerted action.

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Whereas Senghor represents Africa as a place of metaphysical vitality, Césaire presents a disenchanted image of the colonial Antilles as having been used up, impotent, a space of death: “mute, vexed no matter what, incapable of growing with the juice of this earth” (Césaire, 35). Like Damas in Retour de Guyane, Césaire draws our attention to degraded living condition in the Antillean periphery. But in contrast to the documentary discourse of typical interwar study missions, the Cahier contains the dark and excessive lyricism perfected by Lautréamont and Rimbaud. Yet insofar as it sheds poetic illumination on social misery, the poem functions as a type of exposé. Césaire’s native land is presented in Dionysian gestures of verbal hyperbole whose rhythm disrupts the measured cadence of realist description: “the exacerbated stench of corruption, the monstrous sodomies of the host and the sacrificing priest . . . prejudice and stupidity, the prostitutions, the hypocrisies, the lubricities, the treasons, the lies, the frauds, the concussions . . . the greeds, the hysterias, the perversions, the clownings of poverty, the cripplings, the itchings, the hives, the tepid hammocks of degeneracy” (Césaire, 37, 39). 51 By naming his masterwork a “notebook,” Césaire clearly wants to emphasize the provisional and processual, rather than formal and conventional, spirit in which it was written. But the title also connotes the notebooks carried by journalists, investigators, and ethnographers who bore witness, recorded field notes, and produced firsthand accounts of colonial realities through rational discourse. By deploying and parodying the notebook form, Césaire presents a novel medium for the production of poetic knowledge about colonial surreality. Césaire immediately places these opening images of colonial squalor and social immobility in counterpoint to what seems to be a self-critical reference to his black student community in Paris: “our foolish and crazy stunts to revive the golden splashing of privileged moments, the umbilical cord restored to its ephemeral splendor, the bread and the wine of complicity” (Césaire, 39). These lines emphasize not only the disjuncture between expatriate imaginaries and degraded colonial living conditions. They also express the futility of nativist celebration. Valorizing past glory cannot erase present misery, and the failure to confront colonial reality constitutes a form of complicity. In short, attempts by an expatriate native elite to elaborate a glorious racial heritage are no more politically effective than the silent resignation practiced by the local population. From the outset, Césaire indicates that there is a relationship between speech and complicity. Voice is posed as a problem, and the possibility of antiracist discourse is placed into question. The rest of the poem seeks to work through precisely this issue.

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The dilemma confronting colonial intellectuals is crystallized in the following verse: “And neither the teacher in the classroom, nor the priest at catechism will be able to get a word out of this sleepy little nigger, no matter how energetically they drum on his shorn skull, for starvation has quicksanded his voice into the swamp of hunger (a word-one-single-word . . . you-should-see-thislittle savage-who-doesn’t-know-any-of-the-Ten-Commandments)” (Césaire, 37). Here the silent child confirms particularist racist stereotypes of native ignorance and godlessness, even though his silence is an effect of poverty created by colonialism. Yet if the student were to obey the teacher or the priest, his speech would sanction the universalist racism of assimilation. Either way he is complicit with a colonial order whose authority is secured through the paternalist and improving mediation of evangelists and educators who target indigenous consciousness. If secular and religious rationality are instruments of racial domination and silence is proof of racial inferiority, what mode of discourse would allow the poet to avoid colonial complicity? Rather than simply affirm nativism as a project, the long middle part of the Cahier stages Negritude as a problematic series of attempts to engage this dilemma. First, the silent colonial subject is replaced by an affirmation of poetry as voice: “I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado” (Césaire, 43). This is a voice of collective identification and political engagement: “I would go to this land of mine and I would say to it: ‘Embrace me without fear. . . . And if all I can do is speak, it is for you I shall speak. . . . My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth” (45). Having conflated nature, territory, and people, Césaire’s poet claims membership in the broader African diaspora, including “Haiti where Negritude rose for the first time” (47). 52 Although he invokes the heroic memory of Toussaint, the speaker challenges colonial racism poetically through language rather than politically through rebellion: “We would tell. Would sing. Would howl. / Full voice, ample voice, you would be our wealth, our spear pointed. / Words? / Ah yes, words!” (49). 53 Black revolution is reformulated as cultural politics. In a second move, however, the poet recognizes the limitation of voice as opposition. “Reason, I crown you evening wind. / Your name voice of order? / To me the whip’s corolla” (Césaire, 49). When the voice of order, or reason, enables colonial violence, rational discourse is an always inadequate response to colonial racism. How then could the poet oppose a rationalized racism through words? The solution at first appears to be a Dionysian negation of reason in favor of madness: “Because we hate you / and your reason, we claim kinship /

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with dementia praecox with the flaming madness / of persistent cannibalism” (49). But Césaire’s poet is not negating reason as such. He proposes an alternative modality of knowledge: “the madness that remembers / the madness that howls / the madness that sees / the madness that is unleashed” (49). This is a surreal, nonscientific form of reason: “And you know the rest / That 2 and 2 are 5 / that the forest meows / that the tree plucks the maroons from the fire / that the sky strokes its beard” (51). Anticipating the argument he will later make about “poetic knowledge,” the Cahier enacts a conception of poetic reason and knowing madness that is analogic and associative rather than analytic and definitive. Refusing to choose between rationality and irrationality, myth and order, the poem displaces the very oppositions between rationality and irrationality, knowledge and myth, upon which colonial order was grounded. Irrational speech, poetic reason, and knowing madness become vehicles for a metaphysics of black presence and self-expression. “Who and what are we? / A most worthy question! / From staring too long at trees I have become a tree . . . / from brooding too long on the Congo / I have become a Congo resounding / with forests and rivers” (Césaire, 51). As when Damas’s poetry claims to have experienced past oppression firsthand, the poet here merges literally with primordial Africa. He then identifies with an African sorcerer whose discourse disrupts communicative rationality and even transcends conventional temporality: “voum rooh oh / that the promised times may return . . . / and the days without injury / and the nights without offense” (53–55). The Cahier thus indicates that by navigating between silence and rationalism, past and present, Negritude’s poetic knowledge of a specifically black African reality was an intelligible and even redemptive response to colonial racism. Yet, in a third move, the poet shifts registers again and mimics colonial discourse: “I declare my crimes and that there is nothing / to say in my defense / Dances. Idols. An apostate. . . . I have exhausted the missionaries’ patience / insulted the benefactors of mankind. . . . The extent of my perversity overwhelms me!” (Césaire, 51–53). In one respect, these lines suggest that to embrace colonial representations of natives as savage is a subversive act. Once recuperated, perversity becomes emancipatory. The lines also encourage blacks to reclaim their cultural heritage without slipping into nostalgia, by accepting its unsavory as well as positive elements. Césaire thus challenges, even parodies, the Negritude students’ desire to transvalue colonial racism by idealizing a mythical African past. These lines, however, also recognize the perversity of claiming an African tradition that has already been defined and devalued by colonial power as perverse. Because there can be no access to cultural tradition that is not mediated by

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colonial knowledge, affirmations of authentic Africanity risk confirming European stereotypes of natives. As the speaker complains, “we still see madras rags around the loins / of women rings in their ears / smiles on their lips babies / at their nipples” (Césaire, 57). This resigned acceptance of persistent racial stereotypes, in this case of the exotic Antillean woman, indicates the futility of using nativism to oppose primitivism. 54 As he then acknowledges, “exoticism is no provender” (59). Poetic knowledge and cultural particularity may be usefully deployed against universalizing forms of racism. But the speaker here recognizes the limits of an antiracist strategy that relies on the celebration of indigenous cultural difference when colonial racism itself works to particularize natives. The poet thus confronts an impossible situation in which Western rationalism and Africanist nativism (a nonrational modality of voice or poetry) are equally inadequate responses to colonial racism. At this point, he longs simply to leap out of the colonial order altogether: “What can I do? / One must begin somewhere / Begin what? / The only thing in the world / worth beginning: / The End of the World of course” (Césaire, 55). He then declares, “enough of this outrage. . . . / Know this: / the only game I play is the millennium / the only game I play is the Great Fear / Put up with me. I won’t put up with you!” (57). These alternating gestures of absolute denial and absolute defiance are ahistorical; rather than grapple directly with the dilemma that has been so persuasively elaborated in earlier passages, they seek to evade or erase it altogether. The poet has reached the impasse that the poem has staged. At this point, the Cahier becomes dissonant and dialogical. 55 A disjunction grows between the poem’s elaboration of racial dilemmas and the speaker’s assertions of foundational identity that simply reject without working through racism. As if responding to Césaire’s earlier call to action in “Nègreries,” the poet here insists that colonial alienation could be overcome through an act of will: “I am forcing the vitelline membrane that separates me from myself ” (Césaire, 57). In a grand gesture of autonomous self-fashioning designed to conjure a stable identity, he declares, “I and I alone choose / a seat on the last train of the last / surge of the last tidal wave” (57–59). 56 Yet the poem also performs a dialogue between refractory strands of colonial racism that either violently fix blacks as inferior or exotically fetishize them as rhythmic. First he presents the crude negativity of white supremacy: “(niggersare-all-alike, I-tell-you vices-all-the-vices-believe-you-me / nigger-smell, that’s what makes-cane-grow / remember-the-old-saying: / beat-a-nigger, and you feed him)” (Césaire, 59). Next he presents the condescending and

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decontextualizing positivity of Negrophile exoticism: “Or else quite simply as they like to think of us! / Cheerfully obscene, completely nuts about jazz to cover their extreme boredom / I can boogie-woogie, do the Lindy-hop and tap-dance / And for a special treat the muting of our cries muffled with wahwah . . . / My dignity wallows in puke” (59). These passages shift back and forth between examples of colonial racism and Negritude’s multiple nativist responses to it. The speaker alternates between making assertions of primordial Africanity and conceding the futility of such assertions. Rather than celebrate the realization of authentic racial self-consciousness (for which the poem would become famous), the text in fact traces the fragmentation of racialized subjectivity. 57 Ultimately, Negritude’s cultural poetics, the means and ends of the poem itself, are renounced by the speaker as misguided: “But I approached the wrong sorcerer . . . / this voice that cries, little by little hoarse, vainly, vainly hoarse / and there remains only the accumulated droppings of our lies” (Césaire, 61). Césaire seems to mock his generation’s desire to celebrate a mythic Africa: “I refuse to pass off my puffiness for authentic glory / And I laugh at my former childish fantasies” (61). The poem negates Negritude poets’ idealization of and identification with a glorious African history: “No, we’ve never been Amazons of the king of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana. . . . I may as well confess that we were at all times pretty mediocre dishwashers, shoeblacks without ambition, at best conscientious sorcerers” (61). The speaker here redirects attention from the romantic past to an oppressive present. Confronted with the impasse created by colonial racism, the speaker then shifts from defiance to resigned acceptance. “Nothing could ever lift us toward a noble hopeless adventure / So be it / So be it / I am of no nationality recognized by the chancelleries / I defy the craniometer. Homo sum etc. / Let them serve and betray and die. / So be it. So be it. It was written in the shape of their pelvis” (Césaire, 63). These lines do not so much concede the truth of rational biological racism as acknowledge its inexorable presence. They recognize the power of motile racial discourses to anticipate any discursive attempt to refute them, whether scientific or poetic, rational or irrational, humanist or nativist. The final scene of this middle section of the Cahier underscores the contradictions inherent in Negritude. It presents an existential encounter on a Paris streetcar between the speaker and a visibly impoverished black man who is a conspicuous presence in white public space. “A nigger as big as a pongo trying to make himself small on the streetcar bench” (Césaire, 63). The guilty poet

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confesses to dissociating himself from this degraded colonial worker through a racializing gaze: “You must know the extent of my cowardice. . . . A comical and ugly nigger, with some women behind me sneering at him / He was comical and ugly. . . . / I displayed a big complicitous smile. . . . / My cowardice rediscovered!” (63). His self-flagellation continues, “Hail to the three centuries which uphold my civil rights and my minimized blood! / My heroism, what a farce! / This town fits me to a t. . . . / For my face I demand the vivid homage of spit!” (63). Once the assimilated Antillean is unable to identify with this common nègre, his desire to promote Panafrican solidarity is revealed as elitist and hypocritical; he is again complicit with the colonial order he sought to oppose. Césaire later explained that the model for this streetcar nègre was Hanna Charley, a Guadeloupean member of the older generation of militant black nationalists. 58 This charged public encounter, which restages Nardal’s encounter with the African peanut vendor, signals the class differences that divided the Negritude elite from common colonial subjects in Paris as well as the problematic relationship between its rarefied poetics and the more direct struggles for social and political justice waged by other groups within the black public sphere. 59 In sum, the middle section of the poem can be read as a struggle between affirming cultural nationalism and acknowledging its futility before a colonial racism that was simultaneously universalizing and particularizing. Yet in its final section, the poem slips into an uncritical affirmation of nativism and a transcendent leap beyond colonial racism into a cosmological universalism. Césaire seems to have forgotten his own insight about the refractory character of racism and the limitations of Negritude’s response to it. Despite, or perhaps because of, the shameful act of self-loathing in the Paris streetcar, the speaker identifies even more strongly with his primordial blackness and Panafrican community: “I now tremble with the collective trembling” (Césaire, 65). He presents an image of a harmoniously integrated black African culture that is metaphysically linked to the natural world’s élan vital: Eia for those who have never invented anything for those who never explored anything for those who never conquered anything but yield, captivated to the essence of all thing ignorant of surfaces but captivated by the motion of all things indifferent to conquering, but playing the game of the world

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truly the eldest sons of the world porous to all breathing of the world. . . . Blood! Blood! all our blood aroused by the male heart of the sun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eia perfect circle of the world, enclosed concordance! (Césaire, 69)

This vision of a lived blackness that mediates the worldly and the spiritual, the racial and the cosmological, would come to characterize Negritude discourse in coming decades. We can see that the nativist gesture shifts from a strategic response to colonial racism to an expression of primordial racial being by the poet as redeemer of his people: “make my head into a figurehead . . . the lover of this unique people . . . make me a steward of its blood / make me trustee of its resentment / make me into a man for the ending / make me into a man for the beginning / make me into a man of meditation / but also make me into a man of germination” (Césaire, 69–71). There is no longer any trace here of the poem’s earlier critique of voice and Negritude as necessary but inadequate. The concluding verses of the Cahier provide a decontextualized and existentialist account of unalienated identity and metaphysical arrival. Natural and numinous metaphors displace historical and political ones. The speaker imagines himself precariously balanced in an African dugout canoe in a raging sea, where he must navigate universal issues, which he does through a kind of poetic prayer: “preserve me from all hatred / do not make me into that man of hatred for whom I feel only hatred / for entrenched as I am in this unique race . . . that what I want is for universal hunger / for universal thirst” (Césaire, 71). Despite the poem’s earlier insistence on racism as fundamental, the speaker now simply asserts his membership in an abstract universal humanity: “Look, now I am only a man, no degradation, no spit perturbs him, now I am only a man who accepts emptied of anger” (73). Racial identification here is no longer a militant stand but an act of quasiChristian surrender: “I accept both the determination of my biology . . . measured by the compass of suffering . . . miraculously lying in the despair of my arms the body of my country” (Césaire, 77). Through self-effacement, the racialized poet positions himself as a savior of humanity. Rather than address the problematic nexus of colonial racism, modern reason, and poetic voice, he uncritically turns speech against reason: “Mulish reason you will not stop me from casting on the waters at the mercy of the currents of my thirst . . . your end, my defiance. . . . And I caress you with my oceanic hands. And I turn you / around with the trade winds of my speech” (75). This is poetry as prophecy.

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No longer a political instrument, voice becomes a sacred power outside and above phenomenal reality. In the poem’s final section, triumphant Negritude and cosmological universalism converge in a transcendental phallic fantasy: “Suddenly now strength and life assail me like a bull . . . / And we are standing now, my country and I, hair in the wind, my hand puny in its enormous fist / and the strength is not in us but above us, in a voice that drills the night” (Césaire, 77). Here the homeland assumes the form of a virile father who is directly empowered by natural forces. This tempestuous patrie figured as father-nature with a voice that drills menacingly may be contrasted with Senghor’s maternal Africa, whose touch sooths quietly, or Damas’s female objects, stolen and silent. The Cahier concludes with uncritical affirmations of nativism, poetry’s metaphysical power, and the speaker’s unified consciousness and unmediated connection with the cosmos. It presents an image of Negritude as uprising: “And the nigger scum is on its feet / . . . / standing under the sun / standing in the blood / standing and free” (Césaire, 81). The poet now imagines himself as a self-grounding and autonomous subject somehow untouched by racialization: “There still remains one sea to cross . . . that I may invent my lungs . . . the master of laughter? / The master of ominous silence? / The master of hope and despair? / The master of laziness? Master of the dance? / It is I!” (83). He seems to have entered a realm of absolute freedom. If speech and voice were earlier recognized as the very media of colonial domination, here they possess a mystified power to transcend racism through spiritual declaration: “coil, wind, around my new growth . . . to you I surrender my abrupt words . . . bind my black vibration to the very navel of the world” (Césaire, 85). The poet has become pure spirit; the poem’s final image hurls him beyond consciousness and outside of history: “then, strangling me with your lasso of stars / rise / Dove / rise / rise / rise . . . rise sky licker / and the great black hole where a moon ago I wanted to drown it is there I will now fish the malevolent tongue to the night in its motionless veerition!” (87). The poet simply declares himself free and identifies with his racial community, which allows him to disappear into a black hole in the universe and allows the universe to be incorporated into his black self. Given this endpoint, we can see why the Cahier lends itself to Hegelian readings that focus on recovery, fulfillment, overcoming, and self-realization. However, this itinerary in the poem is always shadowed by a countervailing dynamic grounded in doubt, complicity, failure, impossibility, and impasse. Each unfolds in counterpoint to the other and must be analyzed together. It is possible to read the conclusion of the Cahier as a “return” to the very island that was the

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poem’s starting point. This chiasmus is signaled by the repetition of the poem’s framing line: “at the end of the wee hours.” This second-order “return” is less an index of Hegelian synthesis than Nietzschean recurrence. The Cahier closes with an image of the “black hole” of Martinique, which has shifted from being a source of despair to one of inspiration. But at the end, as at the beginning, the island is characterized by motionlessness. Césaire’s cosmological universalism mirrors colonial immobility; both stand outside of history. Primitivism and nativism resemble one another as transhistorical realms disconnected from concrete political entanglements. If Césaire’s Cahier was an exemplary triumph of Negritude writing, it’s examination of the rationalist impasse was also a self-reflexive critique of Negritude’s cultural nationalist and antiracist project. The “return” staged in the poem places into question the very possibility of ever recovering one’s racial origins. It turns the Negritude project back on itself. Written on the eve of World War II, the poem stages refractory issues that underlay so many interwar debates about the imperial nation-state. It is a poetic excavation that reaches the deepest strata of colonial rationality. Yet, like Damas and Senghor, Césaire’s attempt to overcome the antinomy between universality and particularity ultimately reproduced it. Although the Cahier is a profound engagement with the double bind of colonial racism, it ends with the poet ignoring rather than engaging that impasse. It concludes with a dual assertion of radical particularism and cosmological universalism. The speaker seems to access the latter through the former. But the relationship between these unintegrated positions is never adequately worked through. Elsewhere, Césaire made clear that his objective was to formulate an alternative universality grounded in black humanism. In one interview, he explained: “my will to be rooted is ferocious. Hegel wrote that the universal is not the negation of the particular, because one moves toward the universal through a deepening of the particular.” 60 Césaire defended the primacy of a specifically black struggle that should not be subsumed within the Communist Party’s vision of working-class universalism in similar terms: “Provincialism? Not at all. I do not enclose myself in a narrow particularism. But nor do I want to lose myself in a lifeless [décharné] universalism. There are two ways to lose oneself: through walled segregation within the particular and through dilution within the ‘universal.’ My conception of the universal is of a universal enriched by every particular.” 61 Césaire implies that the Negritude writers recuperated the category nègre in order “to assume our position within humanity, in all its particularity and its heritage, which is to say, its Negritude. It is through this

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particularity that we arrive at generality, at the love for all humanity.” 62 Sounding like Senghor, he explains, “we asserted that our Negro heritage was worthy of respect . . . that its values . . . could still make an important contribution to the world.” 63 The tensions enacted within the Cahier between rationality and irrationality, Apollonian instrumentality and Dionysian exuberance, worldliness and transcendentalism, universality and particularity, also shaped Césaire’s life as a public intellectual. In that capacity, his anticolonial interventions linked irrational critical poetics to rational-critical prose. Work along this seam was further developed in the journal Tropiques, which Césaire, along with his wife Suzanne and René Ménil, began publishing in 1941 in Martinique, where they were confined during the war. This avant-garde literary journal extended many of Negritude’s interwar concerns. It became a forum for modernist European and Antillean criticism, poetry, philosophy, ethnology, folklore, and journalism. 64 Immediately after the war, Césaire participated directly in French imperial politics as an institutional reformer. Under the new Fourth Republic, he served as mayor of Fort-de-France and as Martinique’s Communist Party deputy to the National Assembly, where he helped fashion the infamous law on departmentalization. 65 Yet, through his Discours sur le colonialisme (1950), he launched an impassioned polemic against the entire colonial order. He later explained that this essay summarized thoughts he had long held and gave him “the opportunity to say everything that I was not able to say in the forum of the National Assembly.” 66 After the war Césaire expressed his disillusionment with departmentalization. He also developed a coherent vision of cultural politics that directly addressed the cultural violence of colonial domination and attempted to theorize decolonization. In 1956, at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Césaire argued that regenerated indigenous cultures will not only be able to adapt to the modern world but will provide it with original solutions to its specific problems. Césaire charged the colonial intellectual with announcing and preparing for the arrival of colonized black people onto the scene of world history. In his letter of resignation from the Communist Party that same year, he insisted on the specificity of colonial domination, refused to allow the movement for black liberation to be subordinated to a supposedly more primary working-class struggle, and insisted that black radicals have a responsibility to lead their own people. In his address at the Second International Black Writers Congress, in 1959, Césaire further developed his idea that black intellectuals or men of culture constitute a political vanguard. He argued

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that this elite must create a national and popular consciousness in their home colonies so that the people may express themselves in a struggle for genuine decolonization. 67 Like Damas and Senghor, Césaire believed that transformative possibilities were opened up when elite political actors grounded themselves in indigenous cultures and allied themselves with popular constituencies. Through essays and dramas on the Haitian Revolution, the French abolition of slavery, and African decolonization, Césaire explored historical precedents for contemporary struggles. 68 This search for political possibilities within colonial history mirrored his attempt to formulate immanent critiques of humanism, universalism, and reason by reconfiguring rather than rejecting the elements of colonial modernity.

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Utopian Poetics What we might call Negritude’s phantastic poetics implied several varieties of utopia. Insofar as the Negritude writers recognized that the double bind of colonial racism was insurmountable through rational discourse alone, poetry became the medium for an alternative form of expression that would not be always already complicit with colonial rationality. Exploring the surreal terrain of dreams, madness, hallucinations, reveries, organic vitality, racial ontology, and transcendent spirituality, their modernist poetics refused to accept the empirical coordinates of given reality. Creative poesis allowed them to reject the rationalcritical order and retreat from an instrumental praxis that seemed fruitless under colonial conditions. Embedded in this gesture was a depoliticized utopia of escape or withdrawal from the actual world, which was derived from despair, pessimism, and resignation. Alternatively, the Negritude circle used phantastic poetics to elaborate mythic conceptions of the African homeland, a shared black soul, an intrinsically nonrational form of black reason, or a fundamentally unalienated experience of black being. Embedded in such transhistorical fantasies of a unified culture was a romantic utopia that merged nostalgia for an idealized past with longing for a transcendent future in order to remedy present (cultural) dispossession. Such escapist and romantic versions of utopia turn to the imagination as a refuge from the given world. They invent social, cultural, and political alternatives that are untouched by historical dynamics. These utopias are justifiably vulnerable to being dismissed as fictional, unrealistic, implausible, naïve, delusional—private fantasies that are weak substitutes for considered analysis, practical action, or viable solutions to pressing problems. This is precisely the

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criticism that the succeeding generation of African and Antillean intellectuals would level against Negritude. This evaluation is often shared by social historians. In contrast, Robin Kelley has argued forcefully for treating “marvelous” desires, dreams, imagination, and poetry, including that of Aimé Césaire, as crucial components of radically emancipatory projects. 69 This is an implicit vision of utopia based on imaginative free play as a worldly practice oriented toward desirable dreamworlds in which (Negritude) poets would rather live. The novel alternatives imagined by Senghor, Damas, and Césaire, however, can only be understood in relation to the historical conditions that their writing addressed. Their phantastic poetics certainly attempted to reach beneath and move beyond the given world, but by reconfiguring the colonial order’s “political unconscious” in the service of novel possibilities already implied by existing institutional arrangements. 70 This gesture resembles what David Harvey calls “dialectical utopianism,” an operation grounded in concrete historical conditions, contradictions, and possibilities in which imaginative play and government authority necessarily condition one another. 71 Within the Negritude project, praxis and poesis were indeed dialectically linked. Rational engagement and phantastic poetics incited and complemented each other. If Negritude’s critical essays functioned as experiments in political imagination, its experimental poetry functioned as a critique of colonial politics. Poetry was a form of public intervention meant to confront the existing world in order to reconfigure it in utopian ways. Negritude’s poetics attempted to transform the imperial time-space in which they were nevertheless rooted. Even when writing outside of the boundaries of reason, these poets sought to work through the political rationality and colonial modernity that they confronted—not in the sense of resolving but of passing through, writing in relation to and in terms of. By enacting the magical interpenetration of here and there, then and now, Negritude poetry was dialectical in Benjaminian terms: it made everyday life impenetrable, and the impenetrable everyday. Negritude’s subversive modes of remembering penetrated the national fetish in order to demonstrate the colonial relations that were its occluded condition of possibility. Its poetic condensation of distinct times and places revealed the ways in which the existing national order contained within it congealed histories of colonial violence that continued to haunt its political present. Negritude’s chronotopes illuminated the ways in which seemingly external colonies were already internal elements of a contradictory imperial nation-state. Negritude’s conceptions of African humanism, black epistemology, and poetic knowledge sought to work through the antinomies of modern consciousness in order to rework the certainties of colonial modernity.

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By treating Negritude poetics as simultaneously utopian-imaginative and dialectical-political, I do not intend to suggest that they either contained a blueprint for an alternative order or resolved the dilemmas of the existing one. Rather they were a site of engagement, a means through which persistent impasses were staged, explored, and reworked in novel but also contradictory, limited, and problematic ways. Césaire’s earlier term nègreries might describe the multiplicity of Negritude’s utopian poetics, which operated at the intersection of black reveries, dreams, illusions, and delusions—at once real and imaginary, historical and transcendental, rational and irrational, escapist and transformative, romantic and critical, nativist and universalist, humanist and cosmological. Césaire’s Cahier may be read as a supreme example of one such nègrerie that was also a self-critical exploration of the various nègreries circulating among black subject-citizens between the wars.

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Léopold Senghor’s death on December 20, 2001, signaled the eclipse of an era during which the French state had exercised a high degree of paternalist influence over its former colonial territories. Senghor’s passing was emblematic not only because he was a leader of that generation of postcolonial African heads of state who cooperated closely with French policymakers, nor because he was one of the architects of Francophonie. It was the shocking decision by President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin not to attend Senghor’s funeral celebration in Dakar that was symptomatic. Their bipartisan absence, interpreted by the African press as a humiliating insult, was one of a series of events since the end of the cold war that marked the gradual dissolution of the perverse alliance linking the French government, Francophone African rulers, and large sectors of African public opinion. Such events included the massive devaluation of the CFA franc in the name of structural adjustment, France’s reluctance to oppose the Mobutu regime in Zaire unequivocally, its decision to arm and support Hutu fighters even after the genocide in Rwanda began, and its inability to broker a stable resolution to the violent civil war in Côte d’Ivoire, its model client state and longtime showpiece of neocolonial cooperation and development in Francophone West Africa.

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Historians rightly distinguish between late colonial and postcolonial periods. But the pragmatic embrace between the French nation and independent Africa beginning in the 1960s may also be understood to have extended in a restructured form an institutional arrangement designed by the Fourth Republic after the Second World War that was largely inherited from the interwar initiatives discussed in this book. From a distance, we can see that Franco-African relations in the second half of the twentieth century were largely underwritten by the twin pillars of economic development and cultural autonomy, both of which were legacies of the interwar colonial rationality elaborated by colonial reformers and colonized critics. I encountered this dual legacy directly in 1986, when I arrived in Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer. After several months of training to be an agricultural extension agent, I was in Lomé, the coastal capital city, for a “swearing in” ceremony before being sent to my post in a northern region. While there, rebels based in southern Togo attempted a coup d’état against the northerner president Gnassingbe Eyadema, popularly referred to as Le Patron, who had himself ascended to power after a coup he had led in 1963 during which the nation’s first president, Sylvanus Olympio, was murdered. A veteran of the French army who had served in the Indochinese and Algerian wars, Eyadema modeled himself after his Zairean patron, Mobutu Sese Seko, by instituting an autocratic one-party government and soliciting cold war development aid through close political alliances with France and the United States. Like Mobutu, Eyadema pursued a cultural political project of authenticité, which entailed the superficially anti-imperialist Africanization of public and private life in Togo. This state ideology—used to enforce national unity, prohibit political dissent, and undermine local social movements—indicated one of the unfortunate postcolonial legacies of Negritude’s cultural nationalism. After several days of violence and confusion in Lomé, the coup attempt, purportedly led by descendents of Olympio, was crushed by the Togolese army. The subsequent return to order was spectacularly demonstrated when French fighter jets patrolled the skies, communicating to the Togolese people, potential rebels, and the world that France would ensure that its chosen leader remained in power. President Eyadema signaled his victory through an equally spectacular televised march through the capital, during which he was accompanied by Mobutu, who had sent troops to support his friend and ally. Sometime in the course of that postcolonial performance of French international patronage and Togolese national integrity, I wandered into a bookstore in Lomé and discovered Senghor’s poetry and Césaire’s Cahier, which I first read while waiting to begin working with rural cultivators. When I did finally

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arrive at my post, I learned that the bookstores in even the small towns of northern Togo, although nearly empty of stock, carried copies of Negritude poetry, Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, and canonical African novels written during decolonization and the early years of independence. That these texts were required reading in Togolese schools was remarkable because they employed a critical sensibility, and in this single-party society severe restrictions were placed on any unsanctioned civic association or political discourse. Eyadema was precisely the kind of comprador ruler that Fanon prophetically had warned against. However, the privilege accorded to writings by Senghor, Césaire, and Damas in the Togolese school curriculum was also perhaps a testament to how easily Negritude could be depoliticized and recuperated for conservative ends. Agricultural development was similarly domesticated. I was assigned to work in a cluster of villages among the Kabye people in the Lama-Kara region, not far from Eyadama’s birthplace. At that time, the president’s ethnic group and home region received an excessive percentage of public works and international development funding. I was assigned to an existing USAID project that promoted the use of draft animals for plowing among rural farmers. From the beginning, I was self-conscious about participating not only in what we used to call the “development racket” but about doing so as an American under the auspices of a U.S. government cold war program designed to maintain U.S. influence over a friendly African nation. (At the time, Togo’s proAmerican stance contrasted sharply with the anti-imperial socialist experiments of its West African neighbors, including those of Jerry Rawlings in Ghana and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso. During my training we were addressed by a bureaucrat from the U.S. embassy who warned us that Soviet agents might try to recruit Peace Corps volunteers and instructed us not to accept any free trips to Moscow.) In short, it was difficult not to recognize that the local development program to which I was assigned was part of a broader neocolonial enterprise. I even learned that USAID had inherited the project from French Catholic missionaries. However, it would be many years until I learned, coincidentally while conducting archival research for this project, how directly my Peace Corps work was a legacy of the interwar colonial humanism examined in this book. Many of the technologies and techniques concerning draft animals, plows, and fertilizers as well as the system of technical advisors and field agents that I was supposed to promote had been introduced into Francophone West Africa sixty years earlier by Governors-General Carde and Brévié. The very language and methods—intensive agriculture, modern farm management, model farmers,

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demonstration fields, farming competitions—that I was instructed to use were inherited from France’s interwar development policies. In the course of technical visits and agricultural events in the late 1980s, older Kabye farmers would recount stories of being recruited to labor, often forcibly, on public works projects and in government fields during the colonial era. They laughed ruefully about their poor treatment by French administrators, while I clucked along with them supportively. At the time, I naïvely thought that they recognized me as a fellow critic of the colonial past who had a serious interest in recent African history. Only retrospectively did I realize that they were emphasizing the substantive genealogy linking French colonial and American development projects. Peace Corps events reminded them literally of their earlier encounters with figures through whom promises of agricultural innovation and social improvement were bound up with imposed change and government surveillance. The colonial administration had experimented with various strategies for development and cooperation long before an official apparatus for dispersing aid to West Africa was created by the French state after World War II. Interwar developmentalism was part of the general reorientation of colonial government that anticipated the increasingly indirect forms of control over African economies and populations that Western states would refine in the decades preceding and following decolonization. The Negritude critics ultimately, if unwittingly, helped the reform movement institutionalize many of its West African experiments and proposals on an empirewide scale after World War II through the renovated Union Française and departmentalization. Their support included intellectual interventions about imperial integration and practical initiatives by Senghor, Damas, and Césaire as national legislators in the Fourth Republic’s Chamber of Deputies. After World War II, Negritude evolved from a loosely organized cultural project into a quasi-institutionalized movement sustained by widely read books, the journal Présence Africaine, and international conferences. When Senghor was elected as Senegal’s first independent president in 1960, Negritude had become a highly influential form of cultural nationalist consciousness that spread from France to Africa and the Antilles and then globally throughout the black diaspora. Its advocates continued to emphasize cultural valorization by writing race-conscious poetry, criticism, and history. But by the 1950s, the French Union appeared to be an anachronistic and unrealistic attempt to retain an empire from which the Indochinese people had already separated and that Algerians were rejecting, Americans were undermining, and French capitalists

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were abandoning. By then, even members of the expanded circle of Negritude writers were preparing for African political independence. As decolonization began to unfold, Negritude’s culturalist and cooperative orientation seemed to be out of joint with postwar sociopolitical conditions and anticolonial movements. During the postwar period, the variety and experimentation that characterized Negritude writing in the 1930s gradually disappeared. It calcified into a nativist cultural ideology concerned with primordial Africanity and a developmentalist political ideology concerned with postcolonial nation building, both of which served to legitimize authoritarian state politics across the continent. In the late 1960s, a new cohort of Francophone black intellectuals denounced Negritude for being disconnected from ordinary people, for privileging culture over politics in order to mystify real conditions of social oppression, and for failing to advocate direct action against global capitalism. Their critique of Negritude for mythically constructing Africa and its diasporic populations as culturally undifferentiated was extended in the postcolonial period by new movements in African philosophy and Antillean créolité. This justified criticism has largely conditioned scholarly characterizations of Negritude either as a romantic nativism or as a misguided form of Francophilia. Perhaps Negritude’s most concrete legacy was indeed to have helped enable enduring postcolonial dependency relations between France and its former territories. Because Negritude was more notable for enacting than resolving impasses, I am not suggesting that we rehabilitate the movement uncritically. But for this very reason, Negritude interventions help illuminate pertinent sociopolitical impasses, an appreciation of which simultaneously helps illuminate the Negritude enterprise. Historiographic characterizations of Negritude as a failure have depended largely on a premature presumption that we already know what needs to be known about a movement whose writings were self-evident. Alternatively, recent literary reappraisals of Negritude texts, which demonstrate a welcome commitment to taking the movement seriously, often bracket the concrete sociohistorical conditions in whose terms they are intelligible. We cannot understand the Negritude project apart from the imperial nation-state (as well as its colonial humanist and cultural nationalist subsidiaries) in relation to which it developed and to which it was largely addressed. Conversely, attention to the multiplicity, complexity, and contradictions of Negritude’s cultural nationalism yields precious insight into the existence of this national-imperial state, its underlying antinomies, and the predicaments of racialized subjectcitizens.

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Decolonization signaled the end of an era of late colonialism that was consolidated after World War I, when historical actors became remarkably selfconscious about the promise and perils raised by France’s status as an imperial nation-state. Decolonization marked not only the loss of French overseas territories but a process of political restructuring that transformed the imperial state into a more circumscribed national one. In this respect, the interwar empire was not the source of a subsequent postcolonial inheritance. It was the final condensed form of a long-term history of republican colonialism that empirewide networks of reformers and colonized critics acted out and worked through in the 1920s and 1930s. In the colonies and the metropole, they sought to formulate juridico-political categories that were adequate to France’s disjointed imperial polity. Their myriad reflections on the relationships among republic, empire, and law, among culture, nationality, and citizenship, and among race, reason, and humanity provide us with crucial insight into the imperial nationstate as a political form. They variously confronted and imagined a polity that was or would be at once constitutional and colonial, republican and federalist, universalist and particularist, national and transnational, technocratic and ethnographic, postcolonial and nonnational. Interwar efforts to correlate historical conditions and institutional arrangements—however implausible, shortsighted, or potentially oppressive they might have been—provide us with a valuable conceptual legacy at a moment when the isomorphism among territories, peoples, and states has once again been placed into urgent question by historical conditions and social critics. Inherited political theoretical categories and oppositions are as inadequate for analyzing our present conjuncture as they are for historicizing late colonialism. Accordingly, interwar insights and processes may help us to grasp our given world and imagine alternative political possibilities immanent within it. We must therefore treat Negritude writers and many of their consociates in the black public sphere as engaged critical intellectuals who theorized the national-imperial order in which they were embedded. These theorists of (colonial) modernity extended modernist critiques of instrumental-analytic reason by linking them to an immanent critique of persistent political dilemmas confronting colonial subjects. Hence Negritude’s alternative conceptions of Franco-African federation, black humanism, and poetic knowledge. Similarly, colonial humanists did not only propose administrative policies. They selfconsciously produced a second-order discourse on colonial government, juridical categories, and Greater France. These groups cannot be treated simply as historical informants whose writings can be understood in a documentary manner.

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Throughout this study I have often read conventional historical evidence the way I would read abstract sociopolitical theory and vice versa. My examination of political rationality impelled me to recognize a range of discourses crystallized in various media along a continuum of practical reason that linked journalism, social science, pedagogy, plans, policies, and administrative practices. The concept of political rationality allowed me to identify systemic continuities across seemingly disparate policy domains in metropolitan and colonial governments and among state and nonstate actors. It enabled me to recognize the imperial networks through which reformers and subject-citizens converged and competed on a common discursive and political field. By doing so, I have attempted to work through some of the methodological challenges that accompany the effort to treat the French empire as an object of study that is not reducible to other objects such as nation, republic, or colony. Analytic categories and frameworks of inquiry appropriate to it cannot simply be imported from national republican historiography. French republicanism was not necessarily liberal, universalist, metropolitan, or white. Conversely, colonial government in French West Africa was not limited to direct, atavistic, or dysfunctional state violence. Nor can either of these entities be understood apart from the colonial capitalism that articulated them within an increasingly integrated imperial entity. Histories of the French nation must remember that the empire was not elsewhere. Histories of African colonies, likewise, must recognize that the most advanced currents of French capitalism, administration, and republicanism were already internal to them. In sum, I have attempted to develop an imperial analytic in order to counteract implicit imperialist tendencies in French historiography. In the intellectual division of labor, especially among scholars of empires, there is an important role to be played by macrohistories that avoid the parallel limitations of idiographic empiricism and nomothetic abstraction. The fear of generalization, as strong among descriptivist as among poststructuralist historians, often diverts researchers from developing historically specific structural analyses of (imperial) political forms. To elucidate abstract features of a given sociopolitical order on the basis of historical research is not the same as constructing an ahistorical social scientific model applicable to any time and place, especially when the system in question itself operates by generating abstractions. If some degree of either conceptual purity or documentary thoroughness is thereby compromised, the undertaking may nevertheless remain theoretically and historically rigorous. The point is not to protect either theory or history from contaminating the other, but to be receptive to novel insights that might be generated by genuinely interdisciplinary work. Although

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microhistory and pure political theory are indispensable, they too have inherent limitations. Unless we are resigned to a scholarly terrain divided between (brilliant but) ungrounded abstractions and (banal but) impeccable documentation, the risks of interdisciplinarity seem well worth taking. This book may therefore serve as a plea for a new rapprochement between history and social theory.

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{ NOTES }

abbreviations AOF CAOM CARAN EC GG JOAOF JORF SLOTFOM

Afrique Occidental Française Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer Centre d’Acceuil et de Recherche des Archives Nationales École Coloniale Gouverneur Général Journal Officiel de l’Afrique Occidentale Fran¸caise Journal Officiel de la République Française Service de Liaison avec les Originaires des Terrritoires Français d’Outre-Mer

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6.38249pt chapter one 1. It builds on pioneering efforts to make such connections by Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Tyler Stovall, “Color-Blind France: Colonial Workers during the First World War,” Race and Class 35, no. 2 (1993): 35–55; and Stovall, “The Color Line behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France during the Great War,” American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 737–69. It is especially sympathetic to the approach in Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). See also Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Alice Bullard, Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific, 1790–1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); and James Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-Ruled West Africa, 1914– 1956 (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), which was published too late for me to engage directly but it promises to contain fruitful points of convergence with my study. 2. Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). My criticism is possible because I have the luxury of writing after Conklin, whose monograph will remain a useful reference for Third Republic colonialism. 3. Dominick LaCapra, “Is Everyone a Mentalité Case?” in History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 72. See also LaCapra, “History and Psychoanalysis,” in Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 35–41. 4. LaCapra, “History and Psychoanalysis,” 41; Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 204–24; and LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 20–24, 65–76, 141–53.

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5. See Gary Wilder, “Unthinking French History: Colonial Studies beyond National History,” in Beyond the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 6. Karl Marx, Capital (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1:932. 7. See, e.g., Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3–34, 200–239; Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 105–42; Bernard S. Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India” and “The Census, Social Structure, and Objectification in Colonial South Asia,” in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 632–82, 224–54; Cohn, “Law and the Colonial State in India,” in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 114–35; Frederick Cooper, “Colonizing Time: Work Rhythms and Labor Conflict in Colonial Mombassa,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 365–404; Rabinow, French Modern, 277–319. 8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 384–484; and Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 35–61. 9. Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 110–49, 128. 10. For a Marxian reading of the dual character of labor, value, and the commodity form under capitalism that also develops a sociohistorical framework for analyzing subjectivity and consciousness, see Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). My analysis is informed by Postone’s sophisticated reinterpretation of Marx. 11. Marx, Capital, 1:139–40, 137–38. 12. Ibid., 166, 152, 159, 160, 162, 156 . 13. See Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 26–52; Postone, Social Domination; and John Holloway and Sol Picciotto, eds., State and Capital: A Marxist Debate (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978). 14. See Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, 87–90 (London: Verso, 1991). 15. Cf. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 16. Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in Their Place (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 327–31, 358–60. 17. For other sophisticated Marxian attempts to theorize the capitalist state nonreductively but that nevertheless tend to privilege the logic of capital or the politics of class, see Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience, new ed. (London: Verso, 2001); Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984); Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, new

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ed. (London: Verso; 2000); and Robert Boyer, Regulation Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 18. On Kant’s attempt to ground objective normativity in subjectivity, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 16. See also Michel Foucault’s discussion of Kant’s particular universalism, or “empirico-transcendental doublet,” in Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 303–86. 19. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1951), 230, 291. 20. Ibid., 291, 231. 21. Arendt argues that “exception Jews” were accepted into European society precisely because they were Jews, not because they were abstract humans. Ibid., 11–88. See also Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974). 22. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 185–290. 23. Ibid., 126–27, 125, 128 . 24. For a different and compelling account of the nation as both universal and particular, see Manu Goswami, “Rethinking the Modular Nation Form: Toward a Sociohistorical Conception of Nationalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 4 (2002): 770–99. 25. Examples of illuminating but one-sided accounts include Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976); Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Pierre Nora, “The Nation,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Brian Jenkins, Nationalism in France: Class and Nation since 1789 (London: Routledge, 1990); Zeev Sternhell, “The Political Culture of Nationalism,” in Nationhood and Nationalism in France: From Boulangism to the Great War, 1889–1918, ed. Robert Tombs (New York: Routledge, 1992); Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Les citoyennetés en Révolution, 1789–1794 (Paris: PUF, 1992); and Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996). 26. On the internal relationship between republican universalism and particularizing systems of gender inequality, see Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Christine Fauré, Democracy without Women: Feminism and the Rise of Liberal Individualism in France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Geneviève Fraisse, Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). On the production of citizens and the gendering of the republican nation-state, see Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 377–413. 27. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen: L’histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); and Rosanvallon, L’état en France de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1990). 28. The same might be said of the revolutionary “nation.” 29. “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” in The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), 78. 30. See Rosanvallon, Sacre du citoyeen, 105–45, 185–95. 31. Rosanvallon refers to a contradiction between the politics of reason and number. Ibid., 149–80. 32. On the nation’s need to produce “the people ” as a fictive ethnicity, see Balibar, “Nation Form,” 93–100.

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33. Hence the early constitutional debates over the general will and political representation. See Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 224–51. 34. William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 114–42, 199–216, 242–79. 35. Jacques Donzelot, L’invention du social: Essai sur le déclin des passions politiques (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 21–72. 36. Ibid., 73–157. On solidarity, see Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1997); J. E. S. Harward, “Solidarity: The Official Social Philosophy of the French Third Republic: Léon Bourgeois and Solidarism,” International Review of Social History 6 (1961): 19–48; and William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 28–32. 37. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen; Rosanvallon, État en France, 96–134. 38. Noiriel, French Melting Pot, 54–90, 189–218; and Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 85–113. 39. Michael Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: The French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). 40. Ibid.; Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 11–88; Shmuel Trigano, “From Individual to Collectivity: The Rebirth of the ‘Jewish Nation’ in France,” in The Jews in Modern France, ed. Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985); Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 57–80. 41. Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, 163–285; Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 89–120; Paula Hyman, “The French Jewish Community from Emancipation to Dreyfus,” in The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 25– 36; Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus (New York: George Braziller, 1986); William Irvine, The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered: Royalism, Boulangism, and the Origins of the Radical Right in France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962); and Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France, 1904–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Zeev Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire, 1885–1914: Les origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978); and Sternhell, “Political Culture of Nationalism.” 42. On irrational philosophy and the avant-garde rejection of science, technology, and bourgeois society, see H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Vintage, 1977); Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the AvantGarde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage, 1968); Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930 (London: Penguin Books, 1976); and Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964). 43. See Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830– 1981 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 115–60; Jean Touchard, La gauche en France depuis 1900 (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 89–236; Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les nonconformistes des années 30: Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris: Seuil, 1969). For overviews, see William Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (New York: De Capo Press, 1994); Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: Norton, 1994); and Serge Bernstein La France des années 30 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1988). 44. See Lebovics, True France, 135–88. 45. Stovall, “Color Line behind the Lines.”

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46. See C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938; New York: Vintage Books, 1989); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), 161–264; and Carolyn E. Fick, “The French Revolution in Saint Domingue: A Triumph or a Failure?” in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 47. Laurent Dubois, “ ‘The Price of Liberty’: Victor Hugues and the Administration of Freedom in Guadeloupe, 1794–1798,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (April 1999): 363–92. 48. For other systemic inquiries into republican racism, see Maxime Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism, and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992); and Etienne Balibar, Masses Classes Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), chaps. 2, 3, 8, 9; Balibar, Les frontières de la démocratie (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1992); and Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” “Racism and Nationalism,” “Nation Form,” “Class Racism,” and “Racism and Crisis,” in Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class; and Balibar, “Citizen Subject,” in Who Comes after the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, P. Connor, and J.-L. Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991). 49. Postone, Social Domination, 10, 15, 66, 151, 366. Postone grounds the universality-particularity antinomy in the doubled character of commodity-producing labor under capitalism. 50. Ibid., 164, 368, 67, 369. 51. Joachim Hirsch, “The State Apparatus and Social Reproduction,” in Holloway and Picciotto, State and Capital, 82. 52. Cf. attempts by Rosanvallon (Sacre du citoyen; État en France) and Donzelot (Invention du social) to link French history to political theory and studies of political culture by Keith Michael Baker, introduction to The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 1: The Political Culture of the Old Regime, ed. K. M. Baker (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), xi–xxiii; and Baker, Inventing the French Revolution. 53. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 31–53. 54. On the social character of texts, see M. M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 103–31; and William F. Hanks, “Text and Textuality,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 95–127. For critiques of the opposition between text and context, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 157–65; Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 307–30; and Dominick LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” in Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 47–85; and LaCapra, “History, Language, and Reading: Waiting for Crillon,” American Historical Review 100, no. 3 (June 1995): 799–828. 55. On historical intelligibility, see Lucien Febvre, quoted in Roger Chartier, “Intellectual History of Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,” in LaCapra and Kaplan, Modern European Intellectual History, 20; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 42–48; Michel Foucault, “Questions of Method,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 13, 20. 56. For examinations of social categories thus understood, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Postone, Social Domination.

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57. For a masterful analysis of nègre and noir, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 20–38.

chapter two 1. For example, Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France de 1781 à 1962 (Paris: Table Ronde, 1972); and Charles-Robert Ageron, France coloniale ou parti colonial? (Paris: PUF, 1978). 2. A unified corps of colonial administrators was created in 1887, an École Coloniale in 1889, a Ministry of Colonies in 1894, and the large administrative federations of Indochina, West Africa, Equatorial Africa, and Madagascar and their Government Generals were established between 1891 and 1908. See William B. Cohen, Rulers of Empire: The French Colonial Service in Africa (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1971); Jacques Thobie, Gilbert Meynier, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, and CharlesRobert Ageron, eds., Histoire de la France coloniale, 1914–1990 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), 7–13; and C. W. Newbury, “The Formation of the Government General of French West Africa,” Journal of African History 1, no. 1 (1960): 111–28. 3. Denise Bouche, Histoire de la colonisation française: Flux et reflux (1815–1962) (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 53–95, 187–203, 234–73; Conklin, Mission to Civilize. 4. For a cultural historian’s use of the term imperial nation-state, see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 5. Jean Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 1900–1945 (New York: Pica Press, 1971), 155–304; Robert Cornevin, “La France d’outre-mer,” in Histoire économique de la France entre les deux guerres, ed. Alfred Sauvy (Paris: Fayard, 1972), 3:267–308. 6. Jacques Marseille, Empire colonial et capitalisme français: Histoire d’un divorce (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984), 35–156. 7. Suret-Canale, French Colonialism; Cornevin, “France d’outre-mer”; and Marseille, Empire colonial. 8. Suret-Canale, French Colonialism; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “French Colonization in Africa to 1920: Administration and Economic Development,” in Colonialism in Africa, 1970–1960, vol. 1: The History and Politics of Colonialism, 1870–1914, ed. L. H. Gann and Peter Duigan (London: Cambridge, 1969); and Coquery-Vidrovitch, “L’impact des interest coloniaux: S.C.O.A. et C.F.A.O. dans l’ouest Africain, 1910–1965,” Journal of African History 16, no. 4 (1975): 595–621. 9. See, e.g., A. I. Asiwagu, “Migrations as Revolt: The Example of the Ivory Coast and the Upper Volta before 1945,” Journal of African History 17, no. 4: 577–94; and Andrew W. Clark, “Internal Migrations and Population Movements in the Upper Senegal Valley (West Africa), 1890–1920,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 28, no. 3 (1994): 399–420. 10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 53–61, 113–40. 11. Marc Michel, L’appel à l’afrique: Contributions et reactions à l’effort de guerre en AOF (1914–1919) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1982); and Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857–1960 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991). 12. The minister of colonies estimated that 183,928 colonial workers had come to France during the war. Albert Sarraut, La mise en valeur des colonies françaises (Paris: Payot, 1923), 44. See also John Horne, “Immigrant Workers in France during World War One,” French Historical Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 57–88; Stovall, “Color Blind France?” and “The Color Line behind the Lines”; Elisa Camiscioli, “Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Reproduction, and National Identity

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in France, 1900–1939,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2000; and Clifford Rosenberg “Republican Surveillance: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Police in Interwar Paris,” PhD diss., Princeton University, 2000. 13. On the vogue nègre, see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 117–51; Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Brett A. Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz Age France (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Edwards, Practice of Diaspora. 14. Ageron, France coloniale; and Raoul Girardet, “L’apothéose de la ‘plus grande France’: L’idée coloniale devant l’opinion française (1930–1935),” Revue Française de Science Politique 18, no. 6 (December 1968): 1085–1113. 15. Girardet, Idée coloniale, 51–171. The most public defense of republican imperialism on economic, moral, and political grounds was elaborated by Jules Ferry. See Ferry, Le Tonkin et la mère patrie (Paris: Victor-Havard, 1890). 16. Marseille, Empire colonial, 154–56, 259–62, 367–70. 17. Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 1914–1924 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966); Judt, Marxism and the French Left; Soucy, French Fascism; Bernstein, France des années 30, 30, 53–77, 103–12; Weber, Hollow Years; Jackson, Popular Front in France. 18. Cf. Lebovics, True France, 51–97. 19. Sarraut, Mise en valeur, 20, 581. 20. Ibid., 581, 17, 88. 21. Henri Brenier, ed., La politique coloniale de la France (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1924), v–viii, 93, 159, 171. 22. Ibid., 171. On colonial family metaphors and la mere-patrie, see Richard D. E. Burton “ ‘MamanFrance Doudou’ Family Images in French West Indian Colonial Discourse,” Diacritics 23, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 69–90; and Francoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 23. Thobie et al., Histoire de la France coloniale, 153. 24. Octave Homberg, La France des cinq parties du monde (Paris: Plon, 1927), 2–3, 6–7. 25. Ibid., 294–95. 26. On the “phantasmatic” character of French colonial ideology between the wars, see Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 14–21. 27. Sarraut, Mise en valeur, 17. 28. Brenier, Politique coloniale, vi–vii, 183–85. 29. Léon Archimbaud, La plus grande France (Paris: Hachette, 1928), 36, 39–50. 30. Ibid., 7–36. This is the focus of Lebovics’s discussion of Greater France in True France. 31. Léon Barety, “Conférence,” in Brenier, Politique coloniale, 76, 79, 81. 32. Albert Duchène, “Les principes généraux de notre organisation coloniale,” in Brenier, Politique coloniale, 167–68. 33. Brenier, Politique coloniale, 90–91. 34. Sarraut, Mise en valeur, 102, 113. 35. Ibid., 122. Here Sarraut refers to them simply as “members of the same . . . human family.” 36. On fraternity as an occluded ground of liberal republicanism, see Pateman, Sexual Contract; and Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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37. Arthur Girault, Principes de colonisation et de législation coloniale, 5th ed. (Paris: Sirey, 1927), 389–92, 407–8, 556–57. 38. Ibid., 557, 657, 650. 39. A. Latron, “La place des colonies dans la nation: Leurs relations avec la metropole,” Outre-Mer 1, no. 4 (December 1929): 527–28. 40. Pierre Lampué, “Les relations d’ordre constitutionnel et administratif entre la métropole et les territoires d’outre-mer,” Outre-Mer 9, no. 2 (June 1936): 134–53. 41. Charles Michelet, “L’empire française et la constitution impériale,” Outre-Mer 4, no. 1 (March 1932): 30–48. 42. Similarly, Ralph Ellison insisted that “whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.” Ellison, Going to the Territory (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 111. 43. Robert Delavignette, Soudan–Paris–Bourgogne (Paris: Grasset, 1935), 232, 199, 10. 44. Ibid., 241–43. 45. Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM), École Coloniale (EC)-37/19, Robert Delavignette, Allocution de Rentrée, November 3, 1938. 46. CAOM EC-37/4, Robert Delavignette, Allocution, June 4, 1938. 47. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 24. 48. Charles-Robert Ageron, “L’Exposition coloniale de 1931: Mythe républicaine ou mythe impérial?” in Les lieux de mémoire I: La République, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1984), 561–91; Raoul Girardet, “Apothéose ”; Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, L’Exposition coloniale (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1991); Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, 14–71. 49. Governor-General Olivier, “Philosophie de l’Exposition coloniale,” Revue des Deux Mondes, November 15, 1931, 283. 50. Governor-General Olivier, “Les origines et les buts de l’Exposition coloniale,” Revue des Deux Mondes, May 1, 1931, 54. 51. Girardet, Idée coloniale, 125. 52. Paul-Émile Cadilhac, “Promenade à travers les cinq continents,” L’Illustration, May 23, 1931, 67, 68. 53. Henri Bonnamaux, “Rapport général,” Outre-Mer 3, no. 3 (September 1931): 379, 382. 54. Lebovics, True France, 51–97; Christopher Miller, Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 65–77; Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, 14–33. 55. See the novel written by Ousmane Socé Diop, Mirages de Paris (1937; Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1964); and Miller, Nationalists and Nomads, 55–65, 80–89. 56. Lebovics, True France, 98–110; and Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, 52–71. 57. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1991), 38–39, 100, 69, 306, 340, 402. 58. Cf. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 141–64. 59. See Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 279–86. 60. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 81. 61. See Carolyn J. Dean, The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 79–133; William Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 116–69; Soucy, French Fascism; Wohl, French Communism; Jay

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Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

chapter three 1. Raymond Leslie Buell, The Native Problem in Africa (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 1:983–1002, 2:77–91; Hubert Deschamps, Les méthodes et les doctrines coloniales de la France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953); Girardet, Idée coloniale, 253–54, 268; Cohen, Rulers of Empire, 83–142; Catherine CoqueryVidrovitch, “La colonisation française, 1931–1939,” in Thobie et al., Histoire de la France coloniale, 259–66; Cooper, Decolonization and African Society; Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 142–245. 2. Discussions of political rationality are presented in Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government,” British Journal of Sociology 43, no. 2 (June 1992): 178–81; Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Methods and Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 1994), 181–87; and Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, eds., Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 3. See Michel Foucault, “Interview with Actes,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954– 1984, vol. 3: Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: Free Press, 2000), 399; and Foucault, “The Political Technology of Individuals,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 162. 4. Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatum: Towards a Criticism of ‘Political Reason,’ ” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Sterling McMurrin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1981), 2:242. 5. The administrative state asked “how can one govern as much as possible and at the least cost possible?” and followed the principle that “one is governing too little,” whereas the liberal state asked “why must one govern?” and followed the principle that “one always governs too much.” Michel Foucault, “The Courses,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1: Ethics (New York: New Press, 1997), 74–75. 6. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 218– 19; Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954– 1984, vol. 2: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Methodology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1999), 448–51; and Foucault, “Political Technology of Individuals,” 161. 7. Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatum,” 242. 8. Foucault, “Political Technology of Individuals,” 161, 148. 9. Michel Foucault, “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault, October 25, 1982,” in Martin, Gutman, and Hutton, Technologies of the Self, 10. 10. Foucault, “Questions of Method,” 75. 11. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 48; and Foucault, “Questions of Method,” 78–79. 12. Foucault, “Courses,” in Essential Works, 1:75. 13. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1980), 1:95; Jessop, State Theory, 234–36; and Dean, Critical and Effective Histories, 157–58. 14. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, Foucault Effect, 89–93; Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatum,” 228–36, 246; and Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 214.

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15. Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatum,” 246, 248, 152; and Foucault, “Political Technology of Individuals,” 159. 16. Foucault, “Political Technology of Individuals,” 157–60. 17. Michel Foucault, “Faire vivre et laisser mourir: La naissance du racisme,” Temps Modernes (February 1991): 43; and Foucault, History of Sexuality, 145. 18. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 139–40. See also Foucault, “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 166–82; and Foucault, “The Birth of Social Medicine,” in Essential Works, 3:134– 56. 19. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 100–103. 20. Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 214–15, 224. 21. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 103. 22. Ibid. Cf. Timothy Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the State Effect,” in State/Culture: StateFormation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 76–97; and Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (March 1991): 77–96. 23. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 103. 24. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981), 233–337; and Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 22–78. 25. On linking up, see Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 26. See the following works by Foucault: History of Sexuality, 58–67, 95–96, 139, 141; “Subject and Power,” 211–13, 217–26; “Structuralism and Poststructuralism,” 450–51; “Political Technology of Individuals,” 147–48, 157, 160–62; and “The Risks of Security,” in Essential Works, 3:371; “Omnes et Singulatum,” 235, 239, 251–54; “Courses,” in Essential Works, 1:74–76; “Governmentality,” 97–102; “What Is Enlightenment?” 47–48; “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge, 133. 27. On relational theories of the state, see Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 123–60; and Jessop, State Theory, 220–47, 248–72, 363–67. 28. See Yves Saint-Jours, “France,” in The Evolution of Social Insurance, 1881–1981: Studies of Germany, France, Great Britain, Austria, and Switzerland, ed. Peter A. Kohler and Hans F. Zacher (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); Alain Barjot, “La securité sociale,” in Histoire économique de la France entre les deux guerres, ed. Alfred Sauvy (Paris: Fayard, 1972), 365–93; Francois Ewald, L’état providence (Paris: Grasset, 1986); Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, Foucault Effect, 198–99; Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 59–78; Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer, 90–124; Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 648–76; Sylvia Schafer, Children in Moral Danger and the Problem of Government in Third Republic France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Andrew Aisenberg, Contagion: Disease, Government, and the “Social Question” in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Populations, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Ian Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” Humanities and Society 5 (1982): 279–95; and Hacking, “How Should We Do the History of Statistics?” in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, Foucault Effect; Daniel Defert, “ ‘Popular Life ’ and Insurantial Technology,” in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, Foucault Effect; Peter O’Malley, “Risk and Responsibility,” in Barry, Osborne, and Rose, Foucault and Political Reason; Jacques Donzelot, “The Mobilization of Society,” in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, Foucault Effect; Giovanna Procacci, Gouverner la misère: La question sociale en France, 1789–1848 (Paris: Seuil, 1993); Procacci, “Social Economy and the Government of Poverty,” in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller,

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Foucault Effect; and Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage Publications, 1999), 176–97. 29. Richard Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1–30. 30. Ibid., 31–48; Thierry Bonzon, “The Labour Market and Industrial Mobilization, 1915–1917,” 164–95; Bonzon, “Transfer Payments and Social Policy,” 286–302; Susanna Magri, “Housing,” 374– 417; and Catherine Rollet, “The ‘Other War’ I: Protecting Public Health,” 421–55, all in Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, ed. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Sanford Elwitt, The Third Republic Defended: Bourgeois Reform in France, 1880–1914 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 17–23, 185–203; Horne, “Immigrant Workers”; Stovall, “Color Blind France ”; Jean-Louis Robert, “Women and Work in France during the First World War,” in The Upheaval of War: Family, Work, and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918, ed. Richard Wall and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 251– 66; Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 107–19. Labor’s cooperation with capital unraveled by 1917–18, and a wave of strikes and antiwar demonstrations ensued. Wohl, French Communism, 1–113. 31. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State, 51–76; Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 135–225; and Joshua Cole, “The Transition to Peace, 1918–1919,” in Winter and Robert, Capital Cities at War, 196–226. 32. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State, 76–78, 83–85. 33. Ibid., 60–68, 76–92; Charles Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 5: 27–52; Paul Devinat, Scientific Management in Europe (Geneva: International Labor Office, 1927); Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 84–119; and Marjorie Beale, The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 71–164. Scientific management in interwar France was linked to both conservative and progressive projects. See Charles Maier, “The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Twentieth-Century Western Europe,” American Historical Review 86, no. 2 (April 1981): 327–62; and Jacques Julliard, “Le mouvement syndical,” in Sauvy, Histoire économique, 175–203. On postwar anticapitalism, see Judt, Marxism and the French Left, 115–126; and Wohl, French Communism. 34. Barjot, “Securité sociale.” Conversely, the private insurance industry was regulated by the state and charged with public responsibilities. André Laleuf, “L’assurance,” in Sauvy, Histoire économique, 234–65. 35. Susan Pedersen brilliantly demonstrates how multiple sociopolitical agendas were condensed within a single policy that restrained wages, imposed labor discipline, undermined syndicalism, promoted Fordism, policed workers’ private lives, improved social hygiene, and valorized the nuclear family—all through a seemingly apolitical bureaucracy that appeared to be autonomous from industrial or state control. Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 224–88, 357–411. 36. Schneider, Quality and Quantity, 55–145; Sian Reynolds, France between the Wars: Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), 132–55; Rabinow, French Modern, 320–51. Donzelot identifies the family as a “relay” in a “tutelary complex” that mediated the law and social norms, public and private spheres, repression and assistance, the state and the individual. Donzelot, Policing of Families, 96–168. 37. Reynolds, France between the Wars, 132–55. 38. This perspective transcends debates about the ultimate motivation for welfare policies. Cf. T. H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964); Barjot, “Securité sociale,” 380–83; Peter Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Press, 1990); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “Womenly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (October 1990): 1076–1108; Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Politics: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare State (London: Routledge, 1991); Philip Nord, “The Welfare State in France, 1870–1914,” French Historical Studies 18, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 821–38. 39. Michel, Appel à l’Afrique, 179–87. 40. See Claude Liauzu, Aux origines des tiers-mondismes: Colonisés et anticolonialistes en France, 1919–1939 (Paris: Harmattan, 1982). 41. Sarraut, Mise en valeur, 19, 88. 42. On milieu, see Rabinow, French Modern, 126–67. 43. Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Martin Demming Lewis, “One Hundred Million Frenchmen: The ‘Assimilation’ Theory in French Colonial Policy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 4 (1961– 62): 129–53; M. M. Knight, “French Colonial Policy—The Decline of ‘Association,’ ” Journal of Modern History 5, no. 2 (June 1933): 208–25. 44. Jules Harmand, Domination et colonisation (Paris: Flammarion, 1910), 13. 45. Ibid., 152, 158–63. 46. Louis Vignon, Un programme de politique coloniale: Les questions indigènes (Paris: Plon: 1919), 548–50, i, 212, 192, 191, 212–14, 257, 275. 47. Hubert Deschamps, Roi de la broussse: Mémoires d’autres mondes (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1975), 96–98. 48. Cohen, Rulers of Empire, 64–65, 108–9; Rabinow, French Modern, 142–50, 106–25, 277–312; Alan Scham, Lyautey in Morocco: Protectorate Administration, 1912–1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); Oscar Salemink, “Mois and Maquis: The Invention and Appropriation of Vietnam’s Montagnards from Sabatier to the CIA,” in Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, ed. George Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Lyautey was a mythologized figure of cultish devotion among republicans during the interwar years, despite his antipathy to parliamentary democracy. 49. See Buell, Native Problem, 1:986–1001; Henri Labouret, A` la recherche d’une politique indigène dans l’ouest africain (Paris: Éditions du Comité de l’Afrique Française, 1931), 33–42; Cohen, Rulers of Empire, 74–79, 115–18; Michael Crowder, “Indirect Rule: French and British Style” and “West African Chiefs,” in Colonial West Africa: Collected Essays (London: Frank Cass, 1978); James F. Searing, “Accommodation and Resistance: Chiefs, Muslim Leaders, and Politicians in Colonial Senegal, 1890–1934,” PhD diss., Princeton University, 1985, 86–273, 435–48; Jean Suret-Canale, “The End of Chieftaincy in Guinea,” in Essays on African History: From the Slave Trade to Neo-Colonialism (London: C. Hurst, 1988); Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 110–18, 182–202; Martin Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 126–40. 50. For attempts to rehabilitate colonial ethnography, especially Delafosse’s, as legitimate science and to emphasize the colonial heritage of French anthropology, see Jean-Loup Amselle and Emanuelle Sibeud, eds., Maurice Delafosse. Entre orientalisme et ethnographie: L’itinéraire d’un africaniste (1870– 1926) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1998); and Emanuelle Sibeud, “La naissance de l’ethnographie africaniste en France avant 1914,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 34 (4), no. 136 (1994): 639–58. On the colonial genealogy of anthropological categories and methods, see Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, eds., Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 51. Fran¸cois-Joseph Clozel and Roger Villamur, eds., Les coutumes indigènes de la Côte d’Ivoire (Paris: A. Challamel, 1902); and Roger Villamur and Maurice Delafosse, Les coutumes Agni: Rédigées

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et codifies (Paris: Augustin Challamel, 1904). For an overview of Clozel’s career, see Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 176–80. 52. G. G. Clozel, preface to Haut-Sénégal-Niger, by Maurice Delafosse (Paris: Larose, 1912); “La vie de Maurice Delafosse ” Outre-Mer 1, no. 3 (September 1929): 263–69; Georges Hardy, “Une vocation coloniale,” Outre-Mer 1, no. 3 (September 1929): 270; Henri Labouret, “Maurice Delafosse,” Africa 1, no. 1 (January 1928): 112–13; Labouret, preface to The Negroes of Africa: History and Culture, by Maurice Delafosse (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1931), v; Louise Delafosse, Maurice Delafosse, le berrichon conquis par l’Afrique (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 1976); Searing, “Accommodation and Resistance,” 435–48; Timothy C. Weiskel, French Colonial Rule and the Baule Peoples: Resistance and Collaboration, 1889–1911 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 112–22; Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 176–87. 53. Delafosse, Delafosse, 343–400. 54. Deschamps, Roi de la brousse, 96, 103. 55. Notes confidentielles, Henri Labouret, CAOM EEII-1058/2; and Notes confidentielles, Robert Delavignette, EEII-6581. 56. Labouret to Ministre des Colonies, August 1, 1919, EEII-1058/2. 57. Labouret to Ministre des Colonies, November 14, 1918, EEII-1058/2. 58. Labouret to Ministre des Colonies, August 1, 1919, EEII-1058/2 59. Notes 1919 and 1927, EEII-1058/2. 60. William Cohen, introduction to Robert Delavignette on the French Empire: Selected Writings, by Robert Delavignette and ed. W. Cohen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 5–6. 61. Notes 1928, 1929, 1930, 1922–24, EEII-6581. 62. Notes confidentielles, George Hardy, EEII-3513/6. 63. Notes 1920, 1922, 1924, EEII-1058/2. 64. Notes 1926, 1927, EEII-1058/2. 65. Cohen, Rulers of Empire, 94–95. 66. Labouret participated in scholarly associations such as the International Institute of Ethnography, the International Colonial Institute, and the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. In 1944 he was accused of anti-French activities for having maintained professional contacts with German colonial intellectuals during the war. After a hearing in which Delavignette testified against him, Labouret was fired from his job at the École Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer and stripped of his title as Gouverneur des Colonies. EEII-1058/2. 67. Notes 1926, EEII-6581. 68. Notes 1926, 1931, 1932, 1935, EEII-6581; and Robert Delavignette, Afrique Occidentale Française (Paris: Editions Géographique, Maritimes, et Coloniales, 1931). 69. Girardet, Idée coloniale, 175–273. 70. Examples include Maurice Delafosse, Broussard ou les états d’ame d’un colonial (Paris: Larose, 1923); Jules Brévié, L’Islamisme contre “naturisme” au Soudan français: Essai de psychologie politique coloniale, with a preface by Maurice Delafosse (Paris: Ernest Laroux, 1923); Georges Hardy, Ergaste ou la vocation coloniale (Paris: Larose, 1929); Labouret, A` la recherche; and Robert Delavignette, Service africain (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). The latter was originally published in 1939 as Les vrais chefs de l’empire and then censored by Vichy authorities. 71. This committee was a colonial pressure group established in 1890 by a center-right deputy associated with the Parti Colonial lobby. It was composed of legislators, former colonial soldiers, government officials, university professors, and agents of the major economic interests in Africa. Girardet, Idée coloniale, 114–15. 72. “Notre programme,” Outre-Mer 1, no. 1 (March 1929): 7–8. 73. Notable among the many governmental, scholarly, and popular periodicals composing this

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network was the Bulletin du Comité des Études Historiques et Scientifiques de l’AOF because it was a direct organ of the administration. The Comité de l’Afrique Française had its own publishing imprint, the Institut d’Ethnologie published monographs under its Travaux et Mémoires series, and Éditions Larose specialized in colonial writing. Learned societies included the Comité des Études Historiques et Scientifiques de l’AOF, the Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, the Académie des Sciences Coloniales, the Institut Ethnographique International de Paris, the Société Française d’Ethnographie, and the Institut Français d’Anthropologie. Delafosse, Maurice Delafosse, 318, 376. Colonial reformers were also affiliated with the Institut Colonial International (Brussels) and the International African Institute (London), reminding us that circuits of ethnological and administrative expertise were transimperial. Cf. John Hargreaves, “The Africanist International and the Popular Front,” in French Colonial Empire and the Popular Front: Hope and Disillusion, ed. Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 74–87; and Partha Chatterjee, “The Disciplines in Colonial Bengal,” in Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal, ed. P. Chatterjee (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 1–29. Notable interwar conferences included the Congrès de l’Organisation Coloniale (1922), the Congrès International et Intercolonial de la Société Indigène (1931), the Congrès International de l’Enseignement Colonial (1931), the Congrès de Litérature Coloniale (1931), the Congrès International de l’Evolution Culturelle des Peuples Coloniaux (1937), and the Congrès International de la Population (1937). 74. A chair in Dialectics and Customs of French West Africa was created for Maurice Delafosse in 1920, who had taught courses at the school since 1909. Dossier, Maurice Delafosse, CAOM EC-127/1; and Rapports généraux du conseil du perfectionnement 1927, EC-10/4. 75. Cohen , Rulers of Empire, 40–48. 76. Rapports généraux du conseil du perfectionnement 1930, 1934, EC-10/4. 77. Commission de l’enseignement, June 26, 1930, EC Régistre 9 P.V. 78. Dossier, Henri Labouret, EC-129/32. 79. Labouret to the Director of the EC, June 17, 1934, EC-129/32. Delavignette later institutionalized summer field trips to colonial posts. Rapport général au conseil de perfectionnement 1937, EC-14; Rapport sur le fonctionnement de l’école 1938, EC-15/3; Conseil de Perfectionnement, May 27, 1938, EC Régistre 11 P.V.; Réné Barthes, Chef de Cabinet du Ministre des Colonies to GGs de l’AOF, AEF, et Cameroun, July 18, 1937, EC-37/10. 80. Ernest Roume, “Discours de M. Ernest Roume,” Outre-Mer 5, no. 1, (March 1933): 80–81. 81. Rapport sur le fonctionnement de l’école 1938, EC 15/3. In addition to the future novelist and ethnographer Paul Hazoumé, who spoke on “the psychology of Dahomeans,” the école invited Indochinese intellectuals to lecture and employed native elites as language instructors, including Hamani Diori, the future nationalist leader from Niger, and, after World War II, Léopold Senghor. 82. See Richard Gringeri, “Twilight of the Sun Kings: French Anthropology from Modernism to Postmodernism, 1925–1950,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1990, 162–67. 83. These included Governors-General Olivier, Roume, and Brévié, and Albert Duchène, Charles Régismanset, Gaston Joseph, Albert Charton, Hubert Deschamps, Paul Rivet, Jacques Soustelle, Maurice Leenhardt, and the legal scholar Henri Solus. 84. École Colonial aux Proviseurs des Lycées, September 9, 1937, EC-16/5. 85. Robert Delavignette, Allocution de rentrée, November 3, 1938, EC-37/19; Delavignette, Allocution, June 4, 1938, EC-37/4. See also Hardy, Ergaste, 145–46; Hardy, “Vocation coloniale”; Albert Sarraut, “Discours de M. Albert Sarraut, séance de réouverture, EC, 15 November 1932,” Outre-Mer 5, no. 1 (1933), 87–88. 86. Delavignette, Allocution 1937, EC-37/4. 87. Delavignette, Allocution, June 4, 1938, EC-37/4. 88. On the history of French ethnology, see Jean Jamin, “L’ethnographie mode d’inemploi: De

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quelques rapports de l’ethnologie avec le malaise dans la civilization,” in Le mal et la douleur, ed. Jacques Hainard and Roland Kaehr (Paris: Musée d’Ethnographie, 1986); Jamin, “Aux origines du musée de l’homme: La mission ethnographique et linguistique Dakar-Djibouti,” Cahiers Ethnologiques: Revue du Centre d’Études Ethnologiques, no. 5 (1984): 7–86; and Gringeri, “Twilight of the Sun Kings.” 89. L. Lévy-Bruhl, “L’Institut d’Ethnologie de l’Université de Paris,” Revue d’Ethnographie, nos. 23–24 (1925): 235, 233–34. 90. This new generation included Alfred Métraux, Jacques Soustelle, Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris, Germaine Dieterlen, André Schaeffner, Denise Paulme, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Gringeri, “Twilight of the Sun Kings,” 162–71. 91. Lévy-Bruhl, “Institut d’Ethnologie,” 236. 92. On this mission, see Michel Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme (1934; Paris: Gallimard, 1981); Jamin, “Musée de l’homme”; Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 55–91, 165–74; and Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 26–33. Another early collection mission was led by Métraux to Easter Island in 1934. Lebovics, True France, 153. 93. On Leenhardt, colonialism, and the institute, see James Clifford, Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992): 138–39, 151–57. 94. Paul Rivet and Georges-Henri Rivière, “La réorganisation du Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro,” Outre-Mer 2, no. 2 (June 1930): 138–48. On the old museum, see Nélia Dias, Le Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, 1878–1908: Anthropologie et muséologie en France (Paris, CNRS, 1991). On Rivière, see Michel Leiris, C’est-à-dire: Entretien avec Sally Price et Jean Jamin (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1992), 30; and Lebovics, True France, 149–56. 95. Rivet and Rivière, “Réorganisation,” 148. 96. Marcel Mauss, Manuel d’ethnographie (1947; Paris: Payot, 1989), 9–21. 97. Ibid., 14, 7, 21, 16, 14. 98. Leiris, Entretien, 38. 99. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (1926; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 5. 100. Ibid., 15, 27–28, 43, 35–136. It is as if Lévy-Bruhl has simply displaced Bergson’s epistemology onto so-called primitive societies (see chap. 8). 101. Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification (1903; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963); Marcel Mauss, “Real and Practical Relations between Psychology and Sociology” (1924), in Sociology and Psychology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 9. 102. Mauss, Manuel d’ethnographie, 23. 103. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification. 104. See, e.g., Marcel Mauss, “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of ‘Self ’ ” (1938), in Sociology and Psychology; and Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925; New York: Norton, 1967). 105. Marcel Mauss, “Les civilisations: Élements et formes” (1930), in Essais de sociologie (Paris: Minuit, 1968), 249–52. 106. Marcel Mauss, “La nation” (1920), in Oeuvres, vol. 3: Civilisation sociale et divisions de la sociologie (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 584. 107. Marcel Mauss, “La nation et l’internationalisme ” (1920), in Oeuvres, 3:626. 108. Mauss, “Nation,” 588, 584, 594. 109. Similarly, Mauss argues that the morality and economy of the gift is present in all societies, yet he distinguishes between the reciprocal and collectivist morality of gifting societies and the economism, individualism, and utilitarianism of industrial and commercial societies. Mauss, Gift, 2. 110. Ibid., 80, 66. Colonial humanism was also preoccupied with collectivity and individuality. 111. Ibid., 75, 67.

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112. For an interesting discussion of Lévy-Bruhl’s relation to Durkheimian sociology and the Third Republic’s moralizing project, see Bullard, Exile to Paradise, 285–90. But she reads cultural relativism as a redemptive alternative to a universalizing republican racism rather than its particularizing counterpart. 113. Mauss, “Division concrète de la sociologie ” (1927), in Essais de sociologie, 68–74, quotations at 74. 114. Ibid., 75. Mauss also warned that social science must remain relevant to present concerns and could not restrict itself to studying “that which is facile, amusing, curious, bizarre, past, and without danger” in dead or faraway societies. 115. Ibid., 76, 77. On the (cultural) politics of conservative ethnology under the Third Republic, see Lebovics, True France, 12–50. 116. On the nexus between ethnography and colonial government in French Africa, see Christopher Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa, 1860–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); David Robinson, “Ethnography and Customary Law in Senegal,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 32 (2), no. 126 (1992): 221–37; Jean-Loup Amselle, Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Amselle, “Maurice Delafosse: Un africaniste ambigu,” in Amselle and Sibeud, Maurice Delafosse; Alice Conklin, “ ‘On a semé la haine’: Maurice Delafosse et la politique du gouvernement general en AOF,” in Amselle and Sibeud, Maurice Delafosse. My approach is closer to that of Benoit de l’Estoile, “The ‘Natural Preserve of Anthropologists’: Social Anthropology, Scientific Planning, and Development,” Social Science Information 36, no. 2 (1997): 343–76; and de l’Estoile, “Science de l’homme et ‘domination rationelle’: Savoir ethnologique et politique indigene en Afrique coloniale française,” Revue de Synthèse 4, nos. 3–4 (2000): 292–323. 117. Henri Labouret, “Le Gouverneur Général Brévié,” Afrique Française (1930): 531–33. 118. Brévié, Islamisme contre “naturism”; and personnel dossier, Jules Brévié, CAOM EE-II 3022/5. On the relation between Delafosse’s and Brévié’s views of African Islam, see Harrison, France and Islam, 144–50. 119. Jules Brévié, Discours prononcé par M. J. Brévié, gouverneur général de l’AOF à l’ouverture de la session du conseil de gouvernement, décembre 1930 (Gorée: Imprimerie du Gouverneur Général, 1930), 87–88. Georges Hardy made a similar pronouncement in “La France aujourd’hui et le problème colonial,” Nouvelle Revue des Jeunes (July 1931): 18, 33. 120. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 12–13. 121. Delavignette, Service africain, 115–16, 179, 178. 122. GG Brévié, circulaire, August 23, 1932, in Circulaires de M. le Gouverneur Général J. Brévié sur la politique indigène et l’administration des indigènes en Afrique Occidentale Française (Gorée: Imprimerie du Gouvernement Général, 1935), 19. 123. Delavignette, Service africain, 86. 124. Cf. Foucault’s discussion of confessional practices in History of Sexuality, 57–73. 125. Brévié, circulaire, August 23, 1932, in Circulaires, 22–23. 126. Jules Brévié, Trois études de M. le Gouverneur Brévié (Gorée: Imprimerie du Gouverneur Général, 1936), 41. 127. Hardy, Nos grands problèmes coloniaux (Paris: Armand Colin, 1933), 12. 128. Delavignette, Service africain, 33. 129. Brévié, Trois études, 43. 130. Interwar colonial administration also deployed geography, agronomy, tropical medicine, public health, urbanism, demography, and political economy. 131. GG Brévié, “Circulaire du 2 mai 1935: Documents et recherches historiques en AOF,” Éducation Africaine 90–91 (April–September 1935): 131–33.

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132. Theodore Monod, “L’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire,” Information d’Outre-Mer 1 (January–February 1939): 33–34. 133. Brévié, Trois études, 42, 43. 134. Hardy too embraced the emergence of a “colonial science” by metropolitan researchers such as Réné Maunier, who wrote the two-volume Sociologie coloniale (1932–36). Hardy, “Sociologie coloniale,” Outre-Mer 9, no. 1 (March 1937): 55–62. 135. Delafosse, Broussard, 107. 136. Georges Hardy, “L’histoire coloniale et psychologie ethnique,” Revue de l’Histoire des Colonies Françaises 18 (1925): 161–72; and Hardy, Nos grands problèmes, 196–98. 137. Hardy contrasted this conference to the complacent Colonial Exposition. Georges Hardy, “Rapport général,” in Congrès International et Intercolonial de la Société Indigène (Paris: Exposition Coloniale Internationale, 1931), 1:605–6. Hosted by the École Coloniale and inaugurated by Lyautey, Sarraut served as its president and Hardy as the secretary-general. The organizing committee included representatives from the United States, Belgium, Great Britain, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands, as well as prominent French reformers such as R. Aupiais, Léon Geismar, Henri Labouret, and Maurice Leenhardt. Congrès International, 2:5–6. 138. Robert Delavignette, “Connaissance des mentalités indigènes en AOF,” in Congrès International, 1:553–56, 562–63. 139. Labouret was an active member of trans-imperial scholarly associations such as the International Institute of Ethnography, the International Colonial Institute, and the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. He was an original member of the International African Institute, which promoted British colonial anthropology, and a frequent contributor to its journal Africa. See Jack Goody, The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918–1970 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995), 7–25; Henrietta Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 56–57, 207–15; Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 105–9. 140. Henri Labouret, “A` la recherche d’une politique coloniale,” Monde Colonial Illustré 82 (June 1930): 133. 141. Henri Labouret, “Ethnologie coloniale,” Outre-Mer 4, no. 1 (1932): 49, 51. 142. Henri Labouret, Plan de monographie régionale (Paris: Larose, 1933), 2–3. 143. Ibid. This text can be read as a French imperial combination of Mauss’s Manuel d’ethnographie and the British Notes and Queries originally published in 1874 and designed to direct nonprofessional anthropologists in the collection of ethnographic data. An updated 1912 version incorporated new ethnographic field methods for the “intensive study” of indigenous societies. See Kuklick, Savage Within, 90; and George Stocking, “The Ethnographer’s Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Taylor to Malinowski,” in The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). Labouret’s professional affiliation with academic anthropology was indicated by his bibliography, which referred to ethnography (Lowie, Rivers, Kroeber, Malinowski), linguistics (Cohen), Notes and Queries, publications by the Musée d’Ethnographie, the AIA, the Année Sociologique, and Mauss’s courses. On anthropology’s “classical period,” see George Stocking, “The Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s and the Dualism of the Anthropological Tradition” and “Paradigmatic Traditions in the History of Anthropology,” both in Ethnographer’s Magic. 144. Henri Labouret, “Recommendations pour l’étude de la famille,” Outre-Mer 1, no. 2 (June 1929): 221–28. 145. Henri Labouret, Les tribus du rameau lobi (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1931). The manuscript

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was edited by Mauss and published in 1931 by the Institut d’Ethnologie when Labouret was a professor at the École Coloniale and Langues Orientales. 146. Ibid., v–viii. 147. Ibid., 495. 148. Henri Labouret, Les mandingues et leur langue (Paris: Larose, 1934), 50, 60. 149. Ibid., 62, 64. 150. Ibid., 7. 151. See, e.g., Maurice Delafosse, Les nègres (Paris: Éditions Rieder, 1927), 38–51. 152. Maria Grosz-Ngate, “Power and Knowledge: The Representation of the Mande World in the Works of Park, Caillié, Monteil, and Delafosse,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 18 (3–4), nos. 111–12 (1988): 485–511; Ed Van Hoven, “Representing Social Hierarchy: Administrators-Ethnographers in the French Sudan: Delafosse, Monteil, and Labouret,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 30 (2), no. 118 (1990): 179–98; Stephen Wooten, “Colonial Administration and the Ethnography of the Family in the French Soudan,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 23 (3), no. 131 (1993): 419–46. 153. Mauss and Durkheim identified in “primitive classification” a correspondence between systems of logic and social systems. This insight could have been self-reflexively applied to interwar anthropologists (and administrators), for whom there also existed an underlying relation between the scientific and social categories that characterized their practice of classifying primitives. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification. 154. Cf. “the tutelary complex” in Donzelot, Policing of Families, and “colonial intelligence” in Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, “Introduction: Locating Colonial Subjects of Anthropology,” in Pels and Salemink, Colonial Subjects. 155. This type of dynamic is illuminated in Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria (London and New York: I. B. Tauris.1995); Salemink, “Mois and Maquis” (which maintains that professional ethnology’s growing independence from colonial government actually increased its political authority); Salemink, “Ethnography as Martial Art: Ethnicizing Vietnam’s Montagnards, 1930–1954,” in Pels and Salemink, Colonial Subjects, 313; Mamdani, Subjects and Citizens, 72–82; Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:365–404; Henk Schulte Nordholt, “The Making of Traditional Bali: Colonial Ethnography and Bureaucratic Reproduction,” in Pels and Salemink, Colonial Subjects; Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and George Steinmetz, “ ‘The Devil’s Handwriting’: Precolonial Discourse, Ethnographic Acuity, and Cross-Identification in German Colonialism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 3 (2003): 41–95. 156. Officials in AOF often complained that local administrators could not speak local languages, did not understand adequately the native milieu in which they were posted, and were unable to maintain regular, productive contact with local populations. Especially after the introduction of the automobile into West Africa, rural tournées were often intermittent, brief, and superficial. 157. This is Conklin’s approach in her otherwise useful discussion of Delafosse’s underimplemented policy recommendations. Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 175–97. 158. In Gérard Leclerc’s provocative if undeveloped assertion: “between the wars, colonial policy . . . can be defined as a scientific policy and anthropology as a political science.” Leclerc, Anthropologie et colonialisme: Essai sur l’historie de l’africanisme (Paris: Fayard, 1972), 95. His primary focus is British anthropology.

chapter four 1. Girardet, Idée coloniale, 272. See also Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Colonisation française,” 265. Although I disagree with her restriction of colonial humanism to the Popular Front and her focus on

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realization, I endorse her summary: “the promotion of the population guaranteed economic expansion, not the contrary.” 2. Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Colonisation française,” 265; Cohen, Rulers of Empire,108–43; William B. Cohen, “The Colonial Policy of the Popular Front,” French Historical Studies 7, no. 3 (Spring 1972): 368–93; Hubert Deschamps, “France in Black Africa and Madagascar between 1920 and 1945,” in Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960, ed. L. H. Gann and Peter Duigan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 2:232; Jean Suret-Canale, Afrique noire, l’ére coloniale (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1962), 199; Nicole Bernard-Duquenet, Le Sénégal et le Front Populaire (Paris: Harmattan, 1985). 3. Timothy Mitchell argues that the very distinction between plan and reality is ideological. Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 27–31. 4. Recall Marx’s observation that if industrialization increased structural unemployment rather than creating jobs as classical political economy claimed, this did not signal the failure of capitalism The industrial reserve army, he explains, was both a condition and consequence of capital accumulation. Marx, Capital, 1:762–94. Foucault’s analysis of humanizing prison reforms focuses not on their failure (to realize their rhetoric) but on how successful they were at producing delinquents. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), 264–92. Donzelot demonstrates that whether or not social workers successfully corrected deficient mothers and deviant children, the system created an enduring “tutelary complex” through which the welfare state effectively normalized families. Donzelot, Policing of Families, 96–168. 5. In fact, the rhetoric vs. reality paradigm presupposes a narrative of progress against which reformers’ failure and success may be easily evaluated. 6. Cf. the “analytic of finitude ” in Foucault, Order of Things, 312–18; and Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 26–32. 7. See, e.g., Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979); Frederick Cooper, “Africa in the World Economy,” African Studies Review 24, nos. 2–3 (1981): 1–86; Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Terence O. Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerilla War in Zimbabwe (London: James Currey, 1985); James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1516–45; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Remaking Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Peter Pels, “The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 163–83. 8. Exemplary analyses of structural contradictions as simultaneously functional and crisis-inducing may be found in Marx, Capital, 1:429–38, 635–38, 762–99; 3:317–75. 9. On interwar discourse about human capital, see Camiscioli, “Reproducing the French Race,” 74–114.

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10. For a discussion of a more developed colonial welfare state, see Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 11. E.g., Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 65–115; Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 8–12; Cooper, “Conflict and Connection”; Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 63–80; Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 173–96. 12. See Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986); Rabinow, French Modern; Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Cohn, “Census, Social Structure”; Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Dirks, “Introduction: Colonialism and Culture,” in Dirks, Colonialism and Culture; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (Summer 1995): 191–220; Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Modernity at Large; Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2; Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Dirks, Castes of Mind. 13. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, 18–21. 14. See Betts, Assimilation and Association, 165–73; Knight, “French Colonial Policy,” 208; Stephen Roberts, History of French Colonial Policy, 1870–1925 (London: P. S. King, 1929), 64–75, 95–123; Lewis, “One Hundred Million Frenchmen,” 153; Cohen, Rulers of Empire, 44–51, 117–18, 133–42; Ageron, France coloniale, 189–234. 15. Jessop, State Theory, 327–31, 358–60. 16. The proposal is reprinted in Sarraut, Mise en valeur, 579–96. For useful overviews see Buell, Native Problem, 1:937–38; Roberts, French Colonial Policy, 612–16; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Colonisation ou impérialisme: La politique africaine de la France entre les deux guerres,” Mouvement Social 107 (June 1979): 53–57; Cornevin, “France d’outre-mer,” 281–90; Marseille, Empire colonial, 322–28; Gilbert Meynier, “La France coloniale de 1914 à 1931,” in Thobie et al., Histoire de la France coloniale, 127, 136–39. Roberts point out that Sarraut’s plan was part of a more general shift by the Millerand government away from parliament and toward bankers, businessmen, and economic technicians. 17. Quoted in Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Colonisation ou impérialisme,” 54, 57. 18. See Agathe Larcher, “La voie étroite des réformes coloniales et la ‘Collaboration FrancoAnnamite’ (1917–1928),” Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 82, no. 309: 387–420. 19. Marseille, Empire colonial, 326–28. 20. Ibid., 118–21, 150–52, 260–62, 367–70. Successive global economic crises (the 1860s cotton shortage, the 1873 and 1930 depressions) led the French state to become more actively involved in promoting its imperial economy in order to protect French business and labor interests from volatile global markets. See Richard L. Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton: Colonialism an the Regional Economy in the French Soudan, 1800–1946 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 21. Samir Amin, “Underdevelopment and Dependence in Black Africa: Origins and Contemporary Forms,” Journal of Modern African Studies 10, no. 4 (December 1972): 503–24; A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 124–236; Suret-Canale,

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French Colonialism, 3–17, 42–48, 59–70; and Claude Meillassoux, ed., The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 22. Roberts, French Colonial Policy, 318–37; Richard L. Roberts, Warriors, Merchants, and Slaves: The State and the Economy in the Middle Niger Valley, 1700–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 161–84; Patrick Manning, Slavery, Colonialism, and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 141–53, 178–82; Michel, Appel à l’Afrique, 139–49; Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 38–65. 23. Michel, Appel à l’Afrique, 41–134, 152–74, 223–64, 179–87. Roberts points out a chronic tension between the administration’s need for labor and the metropole’s need for soldiers. Roberts, French Colonial Policy, 332. 24. Michel, Appel à l’Afrique, 187–94; and Gouverneur Général (GG) de l’AOF to Ministre des Colonies, Voeux de la Conférence Coloniale, November 21, 1917, CAOM 1AP-525. 25. Michel, Appel à l’Afrique, 194–218. 26. Suret-Canale, Afrique noire, 204. 27. Ibid., 204, 199, 204–5, 221–25, 251. Marseille also argues that the mercantilist structure of the imperial economy did not change substantially between 1880 and 1929. Marseille, Empire colonial, 260–64. See also Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Impact des interest coloniaux.” 28. Cf. Amin, “Underdevelopment and Dependence.” 29. Henri Cosnier, L’Ouest africain français: Ses resources agricoles, son organisation économique (Paris: Emile Larose, 1921). 30. Jules Carde, “Discours de M. J. Carde,” in Discours prononcés par les gouverneurs généraux des colonies à l’ouverture des sessions des conseils de gouvernement et conseils généraux en 1923 (Melun: Imprimerie Administrative, 1924), 20, 25. Carde uses the term economic development; ibid., 23. 31. AOF Commerce et Navigation 1923 and 1924, Centre d’Acceuil et de Recherche des Archives Nationales (CARAN), Paris, Archives de l’AOF (AAOF) 2G-23/30. 32. Rapport économique 1929, AAOF 2G-29/8. 33. Le coton en culture sêche en AOF, n.d. (ca. 1924), CAOM 1AP-854. 34. Carde, “Discours,” 25–26. 35. Ministre des Colonies to Gouverneurs Généraux, March 27, 1929, CAOM 7AE-46. On economic development and free peasant agriculture in AOF, see Roberts, French Colonial Policy, 318–37. Family agriculture was also believed to protect Africans from volatile world markets. 36. Carde, “Discours,” 25, 19. 37. La production agricole et pastorale en Afrique Occidentale Française, November 1930, CAOM 7AE-46. According to this report, Carde created a federation-wide system of agricultural stations in 1924 and a corps of field-based agricultural instructors in 1930. 38. Rapport économique 1929, AAOF 2G-29/8. 39. Jules Carde, Discours prononcé par M. J. Carde, Gouverneur Général de l’AOF à l’ouverture de la session du Conseil du gouvernement 1924 ( Melun: Imprimerie Administrative, 1925). On Carde’s social initiatives, see also Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 218–23. 40. Carde, Discours prononcé 1924, 219. Conklin suggestively interprets Carde’s concern with racial regeneration in terms of metropolitan depopulation fears. But rather than derive the former from the latter, we should locate both within a broader welfarist reorientation of political rationality and political economy. Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 213–14, 244–45. 41. Carde, Discours prononcé 1924. 42. This summary is drawn from Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton, 66–133, 145–91. Roberts points out that colonial irrigation ventures were plagued by labor shortages, workplace abuses, and recourse to forced labor. On imperialism and cotton protectionism, see Jacques Marseille, “L’industrie

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cotonnière française et l’imperialisme colonial,” Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 53 (1975): 386– 412. 43. See Marcel Boyer, Les sociétés de prévoyance, de secour, et de prets mutuels agricoles en Afrique Occidentale Française (Paris: Domat-Montchrestien, 1935); and Buell, Native Problem, 2:44–46. 44. See Suret-Canale, Afrique noire, 299–305. 45. Ibid., 299; Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton, 256–57; Catherine Coquery- Vidrovitch, “La politique économique coloniale,” in L’Afrique occidentale ou temps des français: Colonisateurs et colonisé (ca. 1860–1960), ed. C. Coquery-Vidrovitch (Paris: La Découverte, 1992), 124; Marseille, Empire colonial, 302–21. 46. Gregory Mann and Jane Guyer, “Imposing a Guide on the Indigène: The Fifty-Year Experience of the Sociétés de Prevoyance in French West and Equatorial Africa,” in Credit, Currencies, and Culture: African Financial Institutions in Historical Perspective, ed. Endre Stiansen and Jane I. Guyer (Stockholm: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999). 47. This quote is from a decree granting SIPs a degree of commercial autonomy from the monopoly companies. “Arrêté promulgant en AOF le décret du 9 novembre 1933 réorganisant les sociétés indigènes de prévoyance,” Journal Officiel de l’AOF (JOAOF ) December 16, 1933, 1055. 48. See Amos Hongla, “La caisse d’épargne en Afrique Occidentale Française de 1920 à 1945,” Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 86 (1999): 291–330. In 1933, GG Brévié created a network of “public establishments possessing financial autonomy” charged with making small loans to SIPs, agricultural cooperatives, and mutual aid societies in order to “further agricultural development in the colonies.” “Arrêté promulgant en AOF le dècret du 26 juin 1931 réorganisant le Crédit Agricole Mutual en AOF,” JOAOF, July 25, 1931, 593–94; and GG Brévié, “Circulaire relatative à la reorganization du Crédit Agricole Mutual en AOF,” JOAOF, October 10, 1931, 791–94. 49. Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton, 223–42. 50. “Arrêté promulgant en AOF le décret du 5 janvier 1932 instituant un Office du Niger en AOF,” JOAOF, January 30, 1932, 102–4. Its director reported directly to the governor-general. 51. Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton, 223–42; and Suret-Canale, Afrique noire, 354–60. 52. Monica M. van Beusekom, “Colonisation Indigène: French Rural Development Ideology at the Office du Niger, 1920–1940,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 30, no. 2 (1997): 299–323. 53. Roberts, French Colonial Policy, 337; Meynier, “France coloniale,” 127, 138. 54. Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Colonisation ou impérialisme,” 61. 55. Rapport économique 1930, AAOF 2G-30/5. 56. Président de la Chambre de Commerce de Dakar to Président du Conseil Colonial, October 30, 1930, CAOM 1AP-2535; Union Coloniale Française to M. Pietri, Ministre des Colonies, November 7, 1930, 1AP 2535; GG de l’AOF Carde to Président de l’Union Coloniale Française, September 15, 1930, 1AP 2535; Union Coloniale Française to M. Steeg, Ministre des Colonies, La crise en AOF, January 19, 1931, 1AP 2435. 57. GG de l’AOF Brévié to Ministre des Colonies, Crise économique en AOF, January 16, 1931, 1AP-624. Brévié argues that state funding would allow Africans to participate in “metropolitan economic life,” win their trust, and secure their commitment to defend the nation in future crises. 58. Rapport annuel situation économique général 1932, AAOF 2G-32/2. My account of economic decline also draws on Suret-Canale, Afrique noire, 360–84; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “L’Afrique et la crise de 1930,” Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 63 (1976): 390–424; Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Colonisation française,” 227–43; Marseille, Empire colonial, 285–99. 59. Scholars have rightly drawn our attention to the prevalence of forced labor in AOF after World War I. See Buell, Native Problem, 1:1037–45, 2:23–34; Babacar Fall, Le travail forcé en Afrique Occidentale Française, 1900–1946 (Paris: Karthala, 1993); Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton, 126–62; Cooper,

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Decolonization and African Society, 31–43; Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 37–61, 148–68; and Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 223–43. Although my intent is not to minimize the topic, I am less interested in explaining how labor coercion was justified by the colonial state than in exploring how seemingly archaic forms of colonial production became integrated into an advanced colonial capitalism informed by postliberal conceptions of economic rationalization. From this perspective, forced labor was less a failure of modern republicanism than a feature or consequence of colonial development initiatives, whether or not intended. 60. Suret-Canale, Afrique noire, 355–66; and Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Colonisation française,” 238– 41. 61. Rapport annuel situation économique général 1932, AAOF 2G-32/2. 62. Rapport de M. Giscard d’Estaing, April 18, 1932, CAOM 1AP-539. See also Marseille, Empire colonial, 220–25. 63. “Avant la Conference,” in “La Première Conference économique metropolitaine et de la France d’outre-mer,” documents coloniaux, publication addressé en supplément aux abonnés et lectures de L’Illustration, December 1934; and Conference économique de la France metropolitaine et d’outremer: Résumé des voeux des commissions générales et conclusions d’ensemble, 1934, CAOM 1AP2522. See also Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Colonisation ou impérialisme,” 61–62. 64. Marseille, Empire colonial, 159–279, 332–37, 367–73. Marseille argues that colonial capitalists accepted statist solutions to the crisis after they were unable to agree on a strategy for economic development. The program for autarchy led to the 1933 law on oleaginous products that protected colonial producers from depressed market prices. But he shows that as profits declined during the thirties, more modern industries reoriented themselves to a growing European market revitalized by guaranteed minimum wages and mass consumption, thus initiating the divorce between French capitalism and colonialism. Coquery-Vidrovitch emphasizes the coexistence of “archaism and modernism” in 1930s development proposals. See Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Colonisation française,” 246–52; and CoqueryVidrovitch, “Colonisation ou impérialisme,” 58–76. Both scholars focus on the gap between interwar plans for change and structural inertia. 65. Cf. Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Colonisation française,” 245. 66. Cf. Suret-Canale, Afrique noire, 369–80. 67. On the “virtuous circle ” of economic growth envisioned under post–World War II Fordism, see Bob Jessop, “Post-Fordism and the State,” in Post-Fordism: A Reader, ed. Ash Amin (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), 253. 68. A liberal strategy would have forced African producers to compete on the global free market in the hope that doing so would depress prices for colonial products and lower production costs for more competitive metropolitan industries. 69. GG Brévié to Ministre des Colonies, Crise économique en AOF, January 16, 1931, CAOM 1AP-624. See also Note sur la situation de l’Afrique Occidentale Française, February 12, 1932, 1AP 624. 70. Michael Crowder, “Blaise Diagne and the Recruitment of African Troops for the 1914–1918 War,” in Crowder, Colonial West Africa; Michel, Appel à l’Afrique, 50–57, 100–112; Searing, “Accommodation and Resistance,” 400–34; Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 143–51. 71. Policymakers sought to balance the need to control unruly tirailleurs with the need to reward them for their wartime service. See Gabriel Combrouze, “Un peu de politique indigène: Les tirailleurs libérés, leur situation et ses consequences [1918],” CAOM 1AP-3037; and Maurice Delafosse, “Le point noir de l’armée noire: Tirailleurs libérés,” La Dépêche Coloniale, November 4, 1919, 1. For a detailed study of the demobilization and reintegration of colonial soldiers into AOF after World War I, see Gregory Mann, “The Tirailleur Elsewhere: Military Veterans in Colonial and Post-Colonial Mali, 1918–1968,” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2000, 70–141.

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72. GG de l’AOF to Ministre des Colonies, Application en AOF de la loi du 21 mars 1884, December 1918, AAOF 18G-148. 73. See, e.g., Lt. Governor of Haute-Volta, circulaire, Commandant indigène, June 28, 1932, AAOF 10G-19. On interwar labor unrest, see Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Africa: Endurance and Change South of the Sahara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 262–67. 74. See Jean Suret-Canale, “An Unrecognized Pioneer of the Democratic and National Movement in Africa: Louis Hunkarnin (1887–1964), in Suret-Canale, Essays on African History; James Spiegler, “Aspects of Nationalist Thought among French-Speaking West Africans, 1921–1939,” PhD diss., Oxford University, 1968, 17–49; G. Wesley Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal: The Struggle for Power in the Four Communes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971); Manning, Slavery, Colonialism, 261–75; Searing, “Accommodation and Resistance,” 452–543. 75. GG de l’AOF to Ministre des Colonies, Incidents à Dakar, September 11, 1922, CAOM 1AP-539. 76. “Décret du 29 mars 1923 portant repression du vagabondage en A.O.F.,” cited in Designation des moyens reglementaires susceptibles de limiter la population de Dakar, n.d. (ca. 1934), AAOF 21G-49. 77. Lt. Governor of Dahomey to Commandant du Cercle de Djougou, August 12, 1923, AAOF 8G-53. 78. Lt. Governor of Dahomey to Commandant du Cercle du Mono, September 24, 1923, AAOF 8G-53. 79. Rapport politique et administratif 1931, AAOF 2G-32/25. 80. Commission d’enquête d’information sur la famine au Niger en 1931, November 12, 1932, CAOM 1AP-592. 81. Ministre des Colonies to Gouverneurs Généraux, July 25, 1933, CAOM 1AP-592. 82. Labouret, A` la recherche, 23. 83. Rapport politique et administratif 1931, AAOF 2G-32/25, 13–14. 84. Rapport politique et administratif 1932, AAOF 2G-31/17, 6. 85. Sarraut, Grandeur et servitudes coloniales (Paris: Éditions du Sagitaire, 1931), 219. This may be read as an anxious footnote to the 1931 Colonial Exposition. 86. Ibid., 197, 221. 87. Ibid., 192, 193–95. 88. Brévié’s superiors regularly praised “his profound knowledge of native milieux and of AOF.” Personnel dossier, Jules Brévié, Notes du secrétaire général du gouvernement général, 1921, CAOM EEII-3022/5. 89. Maurice Delafosse, “Étude préparatoire d’un programme de measures à prendre en vue d’améliorer la situation des indigènes au double point de vue administrative et social,” May 1919, 317. Reprinted in Marc Michel, “Un programme réformiste en 1919: Maurice Delafosse et la ‘politique indigène’ in AOF,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 15 (2), no. 58 (1975): 313–27. 90. Ibid., 324. A parallel ethnographic discussion in a welfarist idiom is presented by Robert Randau, a colonial administrator who characterizes magic as an African form of prévoyance against bad “luck, probability, risk,” in order to “ensure [assurer] security, prosperity, and health.” Randau, preface to Les secrets des sorciers noir, by Dim Delobsom (Paris: Librairie Émile Nourry, 1934), 5–28. 91. Maurice Delafosse, “Sur l’orientation nouvelle de la politique indigène dans l’Afrique noire,” Renseignements Coloniaux 6, supplement to Afrique Française, July 1921, 145, 146. 92. Ibid., 147, 149. 93. Jules Brévié, Discours prononcé par M. J. Brévié, gouverneur général de l’AOF à l’ouverture de la session du conseil de gouvernement, décembre 1931 (Gorée: Imprimerie du Gouverneur Général, 1931), 56–79. 94. Brévié, Trois études, 20.

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95. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 40. 96. Jules Brévié, “Un cinquantenaire: L’AOF hier, aujourd’hui, demain,” Monde Colonial Illustré, no. 124 (December 1933): 179. 97. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 28. 98. Brévié, circulaire, August 23, 1932, in Circulaires, 20. In return, local officials in Dahomey attributed that colony’s political stability to the fact that “native masses . . . are particularly aware of the care we bring to their children, their sick, their fields, their herds.” Rapport politique 1933, AAOF 2G-33/7, 17–18. 99. Directeur de la Sureté Générale to Directeur des Affaires Politiques et Administratives, May 10, 1934, AAOF 21G-49. 100. Brévié, note, April 16, 1934; and Directeur des Affaires Politiques et Administratives to Directeur de la Sureté Générale, Limitation de la population de Dakar, July 12, 1934, AAOF 21G-49. 101. Directeur des Affaires Politiques et Administratives Berthet to Directeur de la Sureté Générale, July 2, 1934, AAOF 21G-49. 102. Designation des moyens reglementaires susceptibles de limiter la population de Dakar, n.d. [ca. 1934], AAOF 21G-49. 103. Ibid. On the interwar reconstruction of Dakar as a segregated city, see Raymond F. Betts, “Dakar: Ville Impériale (1857–1960),” in Colonial Cities, ed. Robert J. Ross and Gerard Telkamp (Boston: Leiden University Press, 1985), 198–200. 104. Contribution à l’exposé du programme de mise en valeur de l’AOF: Politique sociale, October 7, 1932, AAOF 17G-160. 105. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 16–17. 106. Brévié, circulaire, September 18, 1932, in Circulaires, 28, 46–47. 107. Henri Labouret, “Les siècles obscurs,” Monde Coloniale Illustré, no. 124 (December 1933): 186–90. 108. Labouret, A` la recherche, 24, 28, 32. 109. Hardy, Nos grands problèmes, 58–59. 110. Hardy, “Rapport général,” in Congrès International, 1:614–17. 111. Robert Delavignette, Les paysans noirs (Paris: Stock, 1931), 42. 112. Ibid., 256–57. 113. On the management of family practices by colonial states, see Stoler, Carnal Knowledge; Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:218–322; Lata Mani, “Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eyewitness Accounts of Widow Burning,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 392–405; Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, 116–34. 114. Delavignette, Service africaine, 200, 232. 115. For an assimilationist approach to promoting monogamous bourgeois families in West Africa, see the report of Mme. Savineau on the family in AOF, “La condition de la femme, 1937,” AAOF 17G-381, 46. Lydon accepts Savineau’s description of herself as a liberal advocate of African women’s emancipation, rather than recognizing her intervention as consistent with a governing strategy. Ghislaine Lydon, “Women, Children and Popular Front’s Missions of Inquiry in French West Africa,” in Chafer and Sackur, French Colonial Empire and the Popular Front 116. Chef du Service Judiciaire de l’AOF, Jugements supplétifs d’état civil, November 22, 1915, AAOF 23G-13. 117. GG de l’AOF Clozel, État civil des indigènes non citoyens français, December 6, 1916; and GG Carde, Lois du 17 février 1924, May 3, 1924, both at AAOF 23G-6. 118. GG Brévié, arrêté, État civil indigène, May 29, 1933, AAOF 23G-6; GG Brévié to Ministre des Colonies, April 31, 1932, AAOF 23G-6.

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119. GG de l’AOF, February 13, 1931, AAOF 23G-13. 120. Ibid.; GG Brévié to Ministre des Colonies, April 31, 1932, AAOF 23G-6; GG Brévié, arrêté, État civil indigène, May 29, 1933, AAOF 23G-6. 121. Ministre des Colonies to GG de l’AOF, August 23 1932, AAOF 23G-6. 122. Rapport sur le fonctionnement de l’État civil indigène en AOF en 1934, AAOF 23G-6. 123. GG de l’AOF Fournier, circulaire, État civil indigène, June 2, 1934, CAOM 1AP-541. 124. Brévié, circulaire, August 23, 1932, in Circulaires, 13. 125. Lt. Governor of Haute-Volta, circulaire, État civil indigène, February 14, 1921, AAOF 23G-6. 126. Mayor of Saint-Louis to Lt. Governor of Senegal, État civil, July 15, 1921, AAOF 23G-13. 127. Chef du Service Judiciaire de l’AOF to GG de l’AOF, État civil, September 8, 1921; Ministre des Colonies to GG de l’AOF, État civil, AAOF 23G-6. 128. Mayor of Saint-Louis to Lt. Governor of Senegal, État civil, July 15, 1921, AAOF 23G-13; GG Carde, circulaire, Abus de nom patronymique, AOF, April 30, 1930, AAOF 23G-15; Ministre des Colonies Sarraut, Proposition de loi, francisation de noms, April 29, 1933, AAOF 23G-19; GG Brévié to Ministre des Colonies, Francisation du nom des étrangers et indigènes naturalisés, July 11, 1933, AAOF 23G-19. 129. Chef du Service Judiciaire de l’AOF, Jugements supplétifs d’état civil, November 22, 1915, AAOF 23G-13; Directeur des Affaires Politiques to Chef du Service Judiciaire, État civil indigène; Mayor of Saint-Louis to Lt. Governor of Senegal, État civil, July 15, 1921, AAOF 23G-13; GG de l’AOF to Chef du Service Judiciaire, Abus des jugements supplétifs en matière d’état civil, February 15, 1922, AAOF 23G-13; GG Carde, Lois du 17 février 1924, May 3, 1924, AAOF 23G-6; Lt. Governor of Dahomey to GG de l’AOF, Adjovi, August 20, 1926, AAOF 23G-9; Rapport sur le fonctionnement de l’état civil en AOF 1934, AAOF 23G-6. 130. Officials later produced ethnographic descriptions of African marriages as part of a directive to regulate and transform them. Le statut juridique de la femme dans les colonies françaises, and Note sur la circulaire du GG relative aux marriages indigènes en AOF, both in CAOM 1AP-541; GG de l’AOF de Coppet to Ministre des Colonies, June 14, 1938; Ministre des Colonies Mandel to GG de l’AOF, June 19, 1939; GG de l’AOF, circulaire, Décret sur la mariages indigènes, June 24, 1939; Governor of Senegal to GG de l’AOF, November 29, 1939, AAOF 23G-12. 131. Bernard Sol, Inspecteur des Colonies, Rapport concernant la situation administrative de la Haute-Volta, July 10, 1932; and Governor Fournier, Note au sujet de la situation administrative, August 13, 1932, AAOF 10G-19. On census polling, tax collection, the état civil, African family practices, and population management, see Lt. Governor of Dahomey to Commandant du Cercle du Mono, September 24, 1923; and Lt. Governor of Dahomey to Commandant du Cercle de Savalou, August 16, 1923, AAOF 8G-53. On the “failure ” to collect accurate census statistics in Haute-Volta, see Raymond Gervais, “Recensements en A.O.F.: Genèse et signification des exemples de la Haute-Volta coloniale,” Annales de Démographie Historique (1994): 339–54. 132. Buell, Native Problem, 1:1021–34. 133. Ibid. On the colonial property politics, see Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Martin Chanock, “Paradigms, Policies, and Property: A Review of the Customary Law of Land Tenure,” in Law in Colonial Africa, ed. Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991); Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 138–48; and Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 54–79. 134. Buell, Native Problem, 1:1021–34. 135. Carde required administrators to conduct field investigations of Africans requesting land titles according to customary usage and for property disputes to be settled in native courts. Decree of October 8, 1925, “Constation des droits fonciers des indigènes en Afrique Occidentale Française,” published in Buell, Native Problem, 2:151–54. Brévié later allowed the state to supersede customary

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land tenure arrangements. “Arrêté promulgant en AOF le décret du 26 juillet 1932 portant reorganization du régime de la propriété foncière en AOF,” JOAOF, April 29, 1933. For historical context see, Manning, Slavery, Colonialism, 198–205. 136. This decree is reprinted in Villamur and Delafosse, Coutumes Agni, 137–72. 137. For overviews of native justice in AOF, see Henri Labouret, “La justice indigène en Afrique occidentale,” Outre-Mer 2, no. 1 (1930): 58–64; Labouret, “Le respect des coutumes indigènes,” in Compte rendu de la XXI session tenus à Paris les 5–8 mai 1931, ed. Institut Colonial International (Brussels: Établissements Généraux d’Imprimerie, 1931), cxvi–cxlvi; and Buell, Native Problem, 2:131–50, 1002–20; A. I. Asiwagu, “Control through Coercion: A Study of the Indigénat Regime in French West African Administration, 1887–1946,” Bulletin de l’I.F.A.N. 41, no. 1 (1979): 35–71; and Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 86–94. 138. GG Merlin to Ministre des Colonies, Projet de refonte du décret du 16 août 1912 portant reorganization de la justice indigène en AOF, January 17, 1923, CAOM 1AP-1645; GG Carde to Ministre des Colonies, June 26, 1923, CAOM 1AP-1645; “Arrêté promulgant en AOF le décret du 22 mars 1924 réorganisant la justice indigène en AOF,” JOAOF, May 24, 1924; “Arrêté promulgant en AOF le décret du 3 décembre 1931 réorganisant la justice indigène en AOF,” JOAOF, February 6, 1932. 139. J. Carde, “Circulaire sur la réorganization de la justice indigène, 22 mai 1924,” JOAOF, May 24, 1924, 398. 140. Bernard Sol, Inspecteur des Colonies, Rapport concernant le fonctionnement de la justice indigène, Haute-Volta, May 30, 1932, AAOF 10G-19. 141. GG de l’AOF to Ministre des Colonies, Réforme de l’organisation judiciaire et du statut de la magistrature coloniale, AAOF 17G-327. 142. Chef du Service Judiciaire de l’AOF to GG de l’AOF, August 10, 1929, AAOF 17G-327. 143. Chef du Service Judiciaire de l’AOF, circulaire, August 9, 1929, AAOF 17G-327. 144. Response to Lt. Governor (Bernard Sol), AAOF 10G-19. 145. I am not suggesting that native justice was impartial but that it was driven by a rationalizing impulse. This point has been neglected by an otherwise valuable literature of colonial customary law. See Martin Chanock, Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Richard Roberts and Kristin Mann, “Law in Colonial Africa,” in Roberts and Mann, Law in Colonial Africa; Cohn, “Law and the Colonial State,” in Colonialism; Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 49–52, 115–22. Here I diverge from Mamdani, who, despite his incisive analysis, treats native justice as a separate domain of arbitrary administrative and chiefly power. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 72–90 109–15, 122–28. My analysis extends efforts by Comaroff and Comaroff to explore the interdependence of liberal and customary legal regimes within a framework of colonial power, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2:365–404. On conflicts between French and native courts in West Africa, see Dominique Sarr and Richard Roberts, “The Jurisdiction of Muslim Tribunals in Colonial Senegal, 1857–1932,” in Mann and Roberts, Law in Colonial Africa. 146. Delafosse was on this commission, whose results were published as Clozel and Villamur, Coutumes indigènes de la Côte d’Ivoire. Villamur was a colonial judge. 147. Quoted in Bernard Maupoil, “L’étude des coutumes juridique de l’AOF,” in Coutumiers juridiques de l’Afrique Occidentale Française (Paris: Larose, 1939), 4. 148. A commission synthesized this information into what became Delafosse, Haut-Sénégal-Niger, in which Clozel’s “Circulaire relative à l’étude des coutumes indigènes” as well as the questionnaire (1909) is reprinted (18–27). Delafosse also coauthored the results of a 1910 survey on African family practices, initiated by missionaries affiliated with the French Anti-Slavery League. Delafosse and Dr. Poutrin, Enquête coloniale dans l’Afrique Française Occidentale et Équatoriale sur l’organisation de la famille indigène, les fiancailles, le mariage (Paris: Société d’Éditions Géographiques, Maritimes, et Coloniales, 1930), xx–xxii.

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149. Carde, “Circulaire sur la réorganisation de la justice indigène,” 396. 150. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 26. 151. Brévié, circulaire, March 19, 1931, in Circulaires, 63. 152. Jules Brévié, “Circulaire relative à la codification des coutumes indigènes, 19 mars 1931,” JOAOF, April 11, 1931, 314; and Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 26–27. 153. Brévié, “Circulaire relative à la codification,” 315; and Brévié, Discours prononcé 1931, 51. Brévié instructed local administrators to maintain regional monographs that were to be updated every five years because each “district is a permanent, homogenous, living, entity.” Brévié, circulaire, August 23, 1932, in Circulaires, 17–18. 154. Maupoil, “ Étude des coutumes,” 6–27, 40–41. The 1939 meeting was under the auspices of the Comité d’Études Historiques et Scientifiques de l’AOF. 155. Léon Geismar, Recueil des coutumes civils des races du Sénégal (Saint-Louis: Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1933), 7–8, 217. According to Geismar, most rural Africans settled disputes through local chiefs instead of colonial tribunals. Labouret made the exact opposite point in “Justice indigène,” 64. 156. Maupoil, “Étude des coutumes,” 26, 33–37. Henri Labouret made similar accusations; he claimed that indigenous assessors were chosen more for their political loyalty than juridical knowledge. Labouret, A` la recherche, 61–62, 71–72; and Labouret, “Respect des coutumes,” cxlvi, cxxvii. Elsewhere Geismar maintained that the survey would promote civic life among natives. Léon Geismar, “L’action gouvernementale et les coutumes indigènes,” Outre-Mer 6, no. 2 (June 1934): 159–60, 164. 157. Henry Solus, Traité de la condition des indigènes en droit privé (Paris: Sirey, 1927), 196. He surveys the codification debate at 188–96. 158. Delavignette observed that “when we say that we are judging according to Custom, it is understood that we are beginning to judge Custom in terms of our Code.” Delavignette, Service africaine, 145. 159. Girault, Principes de colonisation, 388. On the dangers of codification, see 387–88. 160. Carde, “Circulaire sur la reorganization de la justice indigène,” 395. 161. Sol, Rapport concernant le fonctionnement de la justice indigène, 4. 162. Brévié, “Circulaire relative à la codification,” 315–16. He also warned against fixing custom, in Discours prononcé 1930, 27. See also Labouret, A` la recherche, 65, 70–71; Labouret, “Respect des coutumes indigènes,” cxxviii; Geismar, “Action gouvernementale,” 160–63; and Geismar, Recueil des coutumes, 5–11. 163. Cf. Cohn, “Law and the Colonial State,” in Colonialism. 164. Quoted in Maupoil, “Étude des coutumes,” 4. 165. Geismar, Recueil des coutumes, 218–19. 166. Geismar, “Action gouvernementale,” 164. 167. Quoted in Maupoil, “Étude des coutumes,” 28–29. 168. Delavignette believed that protecting customary law would serve to encourage individuality, private property, and independent households. Delavignette, Service africaine, 147. 169. For pre–World War I policies, see chap. 3, n. 49. 170. GG Ponty, Sur la politique indigène, September 22, 1909, AAOF 18G-62. See also Weiskel, French Colonial Rule, 215–21. 171. J. Van Vollenhoven, “Circulaire au sujet des chefs indigènes, 15 août 1917,” JOAOF, August 18, 1917, 1–19. 172. Ibid., 17. 173. Quoted by Brévié in circulaire, August 23, 1932, in Circulaires, 27. 174. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 16. Brévié noted that a growing public works program had created a demand for more administrative personnel, which could only be met by turning to native

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chiefs, who needed to be “educated, not broken.” Ibid., 12, 15. He also hoped that indigenous rulers would prevent local rebellions like the one in 1931, led by a dissident marabout in the Western Sahara. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1931, 42–43, 45. 175. GG Carde, Circulaire au sujet du commandement indigène, October 11, 1929, AAOF 18G62; Brévié, Réponse du Gouverneur Général, May 1934, AAOF 18G-62; Brévié, “Circulaire sur l’administration indigène, 27 septembre 1932,” JOAOF, October 15, 1933, 903–6. 176. Lt. Governor of Niger to GG de l’AOF, Réorganisation du commandement indigène dans la colonie du Niger, November 20, 1930; and Lt. Governor of Niger to GG de l’AOF, April 22, 1933, both at AAOF 18G-61. 177. Inspecteur des Affaires Administratives, note, Akpogan, 1923; Chef de la Subdivision, Banlieu 104, to Commandant du Cercle de Porto-Novo, Rapport, June 16, 1925; Notes au sujet des dignitaries de l’entourage des Chefs de Porto-Novo, 1931; Note pour completer les renseignements généalogiques sur les Akpologans, June 26, 1931, all at AAOF 8G-50; Inspecteur des Affaires Administratives, Rapport concernant le Colonie du Soudan Français, September 5, 1935, AAOF 18G-61. 178. Rapport sur les incidents du quartier Agbokomé, December 9, 1931; Compte rendu de la palabre tenue au government au sujet de la nomination de l’Akplogan, March 10, 1932; Lt. Governor of Dahomey to GG de l’AOF, March 25, 1932, all at AAOF 8G-50. 179. Rapport politique 1931, AAOF 2G-32/25, 38–42; Rapport politique 1932, AAOF 2G-31/17, 12–13; Brévié, Réorganisation du commandement indigène, May 30, 1934, AAOF 18G-62; Lt. Governor of Niger to GG de l’AOF, Rémuneration des chefs, September 14, 1934; Lt. Governor of Niger, Des chefs indigènes, July 30, 1935, AAOF 18G-61; M. Bernard Sol, Inspecteur des Colonies, Rapport concernant la situation administrative de la Haute-Volta, July 10, 1932; Response from Lt. Governor, p.i., Chesse, July 23, 1932; and Lt. Governor of Niger, p.i., Chesse, circulaire, Commandement indigène, June 28, 1932, AAOF 10G-19. On the ways in which native chiefs were deliberately invested with unrestricted arbitrary powers that mirrored those of local administrators within a system of “decentralized despotism,” see Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 52–61. 180. See Brévié, Arrêté local réorganisant le commandement indigène au Dahomey, March 5, 1931, AAOF 8G-52; Lt. Governor of Niger, Projet d’arrêté portent réorganisation de l’administration indigène au Niger, September 28, 1932, AAOF 18G-61. 181. Cf. Weiskel, French Colonial Rule, 215–21; Searing, “Accommodation and Resistance,” 86– 273, 306–24. 182. Brévié, “Circulaire sur l’administration indigène, 27 septembre 1932,” 903–6. See also Delavignette, Service africaine, 120–39. 183. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 12, 15, 16; Brévié, Discours prononcé 1931, 42–43; Brévié, “Circulaire sur la politique indigène II, 23 août 1932,” JOAOF, September 3, 1932, 808–13. See also Labouret, A` la recherche, 38–39, 42–43. 184. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1931, 48–49; Brévié, “Circulaire sur l’administration indigène, 27 septembre 1932.” Delavignette pointed to the contradictory policy of making customary chiefs responsible for modern administrative orders but allowing them to execute them according to “feudal” methods of rule. He also wrote: “we believe that . . . we conduct our native policy through him, when in fact we impose subaltern tasks on him and treat him like a sub-European.” Delavignette, Service africaine, 134–35. 185. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1931, 38–39, 43. Labouret also called for the “discreet and trained surveillance” of customary chiefs. Labouret, A` la recherche, 84. 186. Brévié, “Circulaire sur l’administration indigène, 27 septembre 1932.” For Brévié’s reforms, see Rapport politique 1933, AAOF 2G-33/7; Rapport politique 1934, AAOF 2G-34/12, 44; Notes documentaires sur la situation politique et administrative de l’AOF Novembre 1936–Novembre 1937, AAOF 2G-37/2, 10; Rapport politique 1936, AAOF 2G-36/25, 50.

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187. Rapport politique 1934, AAOF 2G-34/12, 7. 188. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1931, 45, 46. 189. Rapport politique 1936, AAOF 2G-36/25, 4–15, 53. 190. Ibid., 45–46. 191. Brévié, “Circulaire sur l’administration indigène, 27 septembre 1932.” 192. Rapport politique 1933, AAOF 2G-33/7, 37. 193. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1931, 49, 48. 194. Brévié envisioned restricting the pool of chiefs to those who knew how to speak and write French. Brévié, “Circulaire sur l’administration indigène, 27 septembre 1932.” 195. These citizen-chiefs would presumably have access to French courts. Rapport politique 1936, AAOF 2G-36/25, 53. 196. Rapport politique 1937, AAOF 2G-37/1, 11. 197. Brévié, “Circulaire sur l’administration indigène, 27 septembre 1932.” 198. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1931, 35. 199. Recall that Delavignette was a primary advisor to the Popular Front Ministry of Colonies. Reformist programs initiated by Marius Moutet and Governor-General Marcel de Coppet in AOF extended colonial humanist projects. See La politique indigène, n.d. (ca. 1936) and Programme d’action sociale, February 21, 1937, both in CAOM 17G-160; the documentation in Papiers Moutet, CAOM PA28; Robert Delavignette, “La politique de Marius Moutet au ministère des colonies,” in Léon Blum: Chef du Gouvernement, 1936–37, ed. Pierre Renouvin and René Rémond (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1967); Cohen, “Colonial Policy of the Popular Front”; Marseille, Empire colonial, 334–37; Bernard-Duquenet, Front populaire; Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 73–107; and Chafer and Sackur, French Colonial Empire. On post–World War II development, see Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Daniel Hemery, and Jean Piel, eds., Pour une histoire du développement (Paris: Harmattan, 1988); Cooper, Decolonization and African Society; and Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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[332], (30 chapter five 1. Jules Carde, “Circulaire sur la réorganisation de l’enseignement, 1 mai 1924,” JOAOF, May 10, 1924, 310–47. For overviews, see Buell, Native Problem, 2:49–64; Olatunji Oloruntimehin, “Education for Dominance in French West Africa from 1900 to the Second World War,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 7, no. 2 (June 1974): 347–56; Denise Bouche, L’Enseignement dans les territories de l’Afrique occidentale de 1817 à 1920: Mission civilisatrice our formation d’une elite? 2 vols. (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1975); Peggy Sabatier, “Did Africans Really Learn to Be French? The Francophone Elite of the École William Ponty,” and David E. Gardiner, “The French Impact of Education in Africa,” both in Double Impact: France and Africa in the Age of Imperialism, ed. G. Wesley Johnson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 179–87, 333–44; and Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 75–86. 2. Carde, “Circulaire sur la réorganisation,” 309–10, 316, 330–31, 339. On Hardy’s school reforms, African teachers, and cultural nationalist consciousness, see François Manchuelle, “Assimilés ou patriots africains? Naissance du nationalisme culturel en Afrique française (1853–1931),” Cahiers d’Études Africaines, nos. 138–39 (1995): 351–61. 3. See Albert Charton, “Les études indigènes à l’École William-Ponty,” Bulletin de l’Enseignement de l’Afrique Occidentale Française 84 (July–December 1933): 199. 4. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 35, 36.

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5. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1931, 53–54, 57–58. 6. “Circulaire au sujet de l’enseignement populaire en AOF, 20 janvier 1932,” JOAOF, January 30, 1932, 105–6; and “Circulaire sur l’enseigement populaire en AOF, 8 avril 1933,” JOAOF, August 13, 1933, 395–98. On popular education as an instrument of social improvement, agricultural development, and cultural preservation, see Albert Charton, “Role social de l’enseignement en Afrique Occidentale Française,” Outre-Mer 6, no. 2 (June 1934): 188–202; GG Jules Brévié, “L’enseignement en A.O.F. en 1934 et l’oeuvre sociale,” Éducation Africaine, no. 87 (July–December 1934): 135–44; René Fil, “L’école rurale: Essai de definition,” Éducation Africaine, no. 89 (January–March 1935): 59– 66; and Fily Dabo Sissoko and Cheze, “Essai sur la nouvelle orientation scolaire,” Éducation Africaine, nos. 90–91 (April–September 1935): 201–8. 7. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 40. 8. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1931, 58–59. 9. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 40. 10. Robert Delavignette, “L’appel de l’Europe: Une afrique nouvelle,” Monde Colonial Illustré, no. 124 (December 1933): 194. 11. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1931, 59. 12. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 36. 13. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1931, 54. 14. Ibid., 56. 15. Contribution à l’exposé du programme de mise en valeur de l’Afrique Occidentale Française, October 7, 1932, AAOF 17G-160. 16. Labouret, A` la recherche, 72–73, 118; Delavignette, Service africaine, 226. 17. Barety, “Conférence,” 85. 18. Sarraut, Grandeur et servitudes, 158, 153. 19. Ibid., 154. 20. Rapport politique 1931, AAOF 2G-32/25, 27, 36; Rapport politique 1932, AAOF 2G-31/17, 2–4, 7; Rapport politique 1933, AAOF 2G-33/7, 8; Rapport politique 1934, AAOF 2G-34/12, 6, 15, 22, 29, 40; Rapport politique du GG 1936, AAOF 2G-36/25, 42–48, 66. 21. Rapport politique 1932, AAOF 2G-31/17, 4, 6. 22. Rapport politique 1933, AAOF 2G-33/7, 19–20. 23. Rapport politique 1934, AAOF 2G-34/12, 15, 19–20. 24. Rapport politique 1933, AAOF 2G-33/7, 30–32; Rapport politique 1931, AAOF 2G-32/25, 20. 25. Rapport politique 1934, AAOF 2G-34/12, 25. In 1936, the administration prosecuted editors of La Voix de Dahomey. Rapport politique du GG 1936, AAOF 2G-36/25, 14–18. 26. Rapport politique du GG 1937, AAOF 2G-37/1, 6. They also reported that elites in Dakar “demonstrate . . . hostility toward nationalist propaganda.” Dakar et dépendances: Rapport politique 1937, AAOF 2G-37/3, 6. 27. Delavignette, Service africaine, 234. Delavignette compared this new tribal mentality to that of Nazis and slave traders. 28. Rapport politique 1933, AAOF 2G-33/7, 30–32. During the Voix de Dahomey crisis, administrators assured Dakar that political dissent never reached the native masses. See also Manning, Slavery, Colonialism, 261–75. 29. Côte d’Ivoire, Rapport politique 1937, AAOF 2G-37/5, 140, 143, 146, 147, 161. 30. Rapport politique 1931, AAOF 2G-32/25, 22. 31. Rapport politique 1934, AAOF 2G-34/12, 27. 32. Rapport politique du GG 1936, AAOF 2G-36/25, 37. On the strikes, see Bernard-Duquenet, Front Populaire.

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33. Rapport politique du GG 1936, AAOF 2G-36/25, 34–38. 34. Rapport politique 1931, AAOF 2G-32/25, 13–14; Rapport politique 1932, AAOF 2G-31/17, 7, 10. 35. Cf. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 85–92; and Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 79–111. 36. Brévié, Trois études, 21. 37. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1931, 59–60; and Brévié, circulaire, August 18, 1932, in Circulaires, 10. 38. On racial formations, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1986), 1–86. On racism as a historically specific process that articulates with existing social relations, see Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980). 39. Sarraut, Mise en valeur, 100. 40. Delavignette, Service africaine, 240–41, 235, 242. 41. Maurice Delafosse, Les noirs de l’Afrique (Paris: Payot, 1921), 156–160; and Delafosse, Nègres, 5–13. 42. See Delafosse, Broussard. 43. Sarraut, Mise en valeur, 100, 163, 96–97. 44. Brévié, circulaire, September 27, 1932, in Circulaires, 36. 45. Brévié, Trois études, 33–34. 46. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 18. 47. Brévié, circulaire, August 18, 1932, in Circulaires, 7. 48. Réponse du GG, May 1934, AAOF 18G-62. 49. Brévié, circulaire no. 415, in Circulaires, 29–30. Brévié thus resurrected a discourse that circulated in post-emancipation colonial societies. See Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1838 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); and Dubois, “Price of Liberty.” 50. Sarraut, Mise en valeur, 100–101. 51. Ibid., 102–3. 52. Hardy, Nos grands problèmes, 142. 53. Labouret, A` la recherche, 115. 54. Henri Labouret, “Citoyenneté d’empire,” in L’homme de couleur, ed. Cardinal Verdier (Paris: Plong, 1939), 354. 55. Ibid., 354, 350. 56. Labouret, A` la recherche, 115. 57. Brévié, circulaire, September 28, 1932, in Circulaires, 45–47. 58. Girault, Principes de colonisation, 392. 59. Solus, Traité de la condition des indigènes, 135. 60. Brévié, circulaire, August 1932, in Circulaires, 9. 61. Sarraut, Mise en valeur, 98–99; Sarraut, Grandeur et servitudes, 153–61. 62. Labouret, “Citoyenneté d’empire,” 351–52. He argued that the administration should reward elites’ longtime loyalty to France by granting them access to jobs reserved for citizens. Ibid., 357. 63. Labouret, A` la recherche, 122–23. 64. Sarraut, Mise en valeur, 98–99. 65. See Lamine Guèye, De la situation politique des sénégalais originaires des communes de plein exercice (Paris: Éditions de la Vie Universitaire 1921); Buell, Native Problem, 1:947–52; Michael Crowder, Senegal: A Study of French Assimilation Policy (London: Methuen, 1967), 9–28. 66. See Johnson, Black Politics in Senegal, 178–91; and Searing, “Accommodation and Resistance,” 452–543. These texts discuss political struggles by the originaires.

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67. It extended a May 20, 1857, decree. Guèye, De la situation politique, 15–32; Buell, Native Problem, 1:948; Johnson, Black Politics in Senegal, 183–91. 68. Johnson, Black Politics in Senegal, 40. 69. GG Angoulvant, Proposition de loi tendant à accorder la qualité de citoyen français aux natifs des communes de plein exercice du Sénégal, September 3, 1916, CAOM 1AP-539. Others criticized legal dualism as well. Valude, Chambre des Deputés, Proposition de loi, April 4, 1922; and GG de l’AOF to Ministre des Colonies, Statut des originaires des 4 communes du Sénégal, June 1924, both in 1AP-539. Others were alarmed that originaires who retained their customary civil status continued to use the French état civil. Directeur des Affaires Politiques to Chef du Service Judiciaires, État civil indigène, July 28, 1934, AAOF 23G-15. 70. Décret réglant les conditions d’accession des indigènes de l’AOF à la qualité de citoyen français, May 25, 1912, CAOM 1AP-1638. 71. The Government General conceded that local administrators enjoyed too much discretionary power to reject eligible applicants. Goston Domergue, Projet de loi sur l’accession des indigènes des colonies à la qualité de citoyen français, November 19, 1924, CAOM 1AP-1638; GG de l’AOF to Lt. Governor of Dahomey, Demandes de naturalization et d’accession, January 26, 1934, AAOF 23G-9. In 1936 Senegalese functionaries eligible for citizenship complained to the ministry that their applications were being ignored by Dakar. Un groupe des sujets français to Ministre des Colonies, September 27, 1936, AAOF 23G-9. 72. Between 1914 and 1922 only 88 citizenship requests were approved for the whole federation. Tableau de demandes de naturalizations formulées pare les indigènes de 1912 à 1925, September 12, 1925, AAOF 23G-24. In 1932 citizenship was granted to 7 of the 41 who applied, in 1933 to 9 of the 50, in 1934 to 7 of the 54, in 1935 to 6 of the 47, in 1936 to 3 of the 22, and in 1937 to none of the 56 who applied. Rapport politique et administratif annuel 1932, AAOF 2G-31/7; Rapport politique 1933, AAOF 2G-33/7; Rapport politique 1934, AAOF 2G-34/12; Rapport politique du GG 1936, AAOF 2G-36/25; Rapport politique du GG 1937, AAOF 2G-37/1. 73. Décret 1912, CAOM 1AP-1638. 74. Citizenship requests were also rejected if they were made by anyone deemed to have a dubious political attitude, to associate with known political activists, or to encourage workers to strike. Evaluations of citizenship applications between 1929 and 1932 are contained in CAOM 1AP-148, 149, 150, 151, 151. 75. On restrictive interpretations of the 1912 decree, see AAOF 23G-9. 76. In contrast to the 1889 nationality law, which presumed that second-generation immigrants would assimilate French culture, administrators recognized that in a colonial context, legal, territorial, and cultural identities did not necessarily map onto one another. 77. GG de l’AOF, Circulaire: Statut des indigènes de l’AOF, October 8, 1922; and Carde, Naturalisation des indigènes, June 1923, both in AAOF 23G-9. 78. On family citizenship and nationality politics, see Elisa Camiscioli, “Intermarriage, Independent Nationality, and the Individual Rights of French Women: The Law of 10 August 1927,” French Politics, Culture, and Society 17, nos. 3–4 (Summer/Fall 1999): 52–74; and Jean Pedersen, “ ‘Special Customs’: Paternity Suits and Citizenship in France and the Colonies, 1870–1912,” in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). 79. Ministre des Colonies Sarraut to GG de l’AOF, Interprétation du décret du 25 mai 1912, July 31, 1922, AOF 23G-9. 80. “Accession des indigènes de l’AOF aux droits de citoyen français, 21 août 1932,” JOAOF, August 25, 1932, 9291. 81. GG Brévié, Circulaire: Accession des indigènes à la qualité de citoyen français, January 1933,

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CAOM 1AP-1549. Brévié advised investigators to interview a wife separately in order to determine if she were “sincerely disposed to renounce her [civil] status.” 82. Revision des actes réglementant l’accession des indigènes à la qualité de citoyen français, August 1931; GG de l’AOF to Ministre des Colonies, Refonte des texts relatifs à l’accession des indigènes originaires de l’AOF à la qualité de citoyens français, October 6, 1931; GG de l’AOF, Circulaire: Constitution des dossiers de naturalization, April 16, 1932; GG Brévié, Circulaire: Délivrance de certificates de bonnes view et moeurs, February 15, 1933, all in AAOF 23G-8. 83. Cf. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge. 84. Galandou Diouf, Proposition de loi, October 9, 1936, AAOF 23G-9. 85. GG de l’AOF to Ministre des Colonies, Accession des indigènes anciens combatants, AAOF 23G-9. The revised citizenship decree of July 23, 1937, again required applicants to subject themselves to French civil law and specified that candidates “cannot have ever demonstrated any hostility to France by their acts, writing, or words.” “Conditions dans lesquelles les indigènes de l’AOF peuvent être admis à la qualité de citoyen français, 23 juillet 1937,” JOAOF, July 27, 1937, 8476–77. 86. Procureur Général du Service Judiciaire de l’AOF to GG de l’AOF, September 28, 1923, AAOF 23G-15. A memo from the mid-1920s affirms that naturalization laws don’t apply to natives because they have French nationality: Note to Directeur des Affaires Politiques, n.d. [mid-1920s], CAOM 1AP1638. 87. On mixed-race policies in AOF, see Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 88. Germain Crespin, Avocat-défenseur, July 31, 1923; Lt. Governor of Dahomey to GG de l’AOF, Application décret 26 mai 1912 sur naturalization indigène, August 26, 1923; Chef du Service Judiciaire to GG de l’AOF, September 28, 1923, all in AAOF 23G-15. The administration attempted to clarify the impact on colonial mixed marriages of the revised 1927 nationality law (which allowed wives to retain their nationality upon marrying foreigners) in response to an inquiry from an international feminist organization. Doris Stevens, Chairman, Inter-American Commission on Women, to J. Carde, GG de l’AOF, Condition des femmes, April 30, 1929; Ministre des Colonies, Nationalité: Effets de la loi du 10 août 1927 sur les mariages mixtes, September 7, 1931; GG de l’AOF, Projet de décret: Mariages entre français ou étrangers et indigènes, December 11, 1931; Ministre des Colonies, Effets de la loi du 10 août 1927, July 19, 1932, all in AAOF 23G-15. On the 1927 law’s presumption that French women are bearers of national values and agents of assimilation, see Camiscioli, “ Intermarriage.” For overviews of French nationality law, see Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 85–113; and Noiriel, French Melting Pot, 45–90. 89. Lt. Governor of Dahomey to GG de l’AOF, August 26, 1923, AAOF 23G-15. 90. Chef du Service Judiciaire to GG de l’AOF, September 28, 1923, in AAOF 23G-15. 91. Rapport presenté par M. P. Jacomet au Conseil de Législation Coloniale, séance du 8 novembre 1926, AAOF 23G-15. 92. Sarraut, Mise en valeur, 96–104. 93. Note to Directeur des Affaires Politiques Girault, n.d. [ca. 1923]; Ministre des Colonies Sarraut to Ministre des Affaires Étrangères, June 19, 1923; note, October 15, 1925, all in CAOM 1AP-1638. 94. Rapport sur la condition légale des sujets français dans les colonies et les prerogatives qui resultant de la qualité de sujet, présenté par M. Tesseron, n.d. [ca. 1925], CAOM 1AP-1638. 95. Ministre des Colonies to Président de la République, n.d. [ca. 1928], CAOM 1AP-1638. 96. Projet de décret présenté par M. Bernard Lavergne, annexe au P.V. [Procès Verbal] du 15 juin 1927, CAOM 1AP-1638. The proposal was modeled on the Roman edict of Caracalla (212 AD). 97. Séance du 30 mars 1927; and Conseil de Législation Coloniale, P.V. de la séance du 13 juin 1928, both at CAOM 1AP-1638.

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98. Conseil de Législation Coloniale, séance du 15 juin 1927; and Conseil de Législation Coloniale, P.V. de la séance du 13 juin 1928, both at CAOM 1AP-1638. 99. GG de l’AOF to Ministre des Colonies, Rapport: Indigènes d’elite, October 30, 1930, CAOM 1AP-1638. 100. Brévié, Discours prononcé 1930, 17–18. Carde had opened access to better administrative jobs for “deserving natives” on May 10, 1928. 101. Officials argued that participation in local assemblies and municipal councils would provide natives with the gradual political education necessary for a future citizenship. Sarraut, Mise en valeur, 104–5; and Sarraut, Grandeur et servitudes, 164; Labouret, A` la recherche, 118, 122–23. On colonial councils and assemblies, see Buell, Native Problem, 1:958–82. 102. Brévié characterized councils as instruments of political education, cultural preservation, and social control, in “Circulaire sur l’administration indigène: Les conseils, 28 septembre 1932,” JOAOF, October 22, 1932, 938–41. 103. A partial list would include rightless subjects; notable subjects exempt from the indigènat or enjoying access to French tribunals or allowed to sit on advisory councils; urban subjects who participated in elections for local assemblies; nominal citizens by virtue of birth in one of the Four Communes or service in the military, who could elect national legislators but maintained a customary civic status and were not free to travel to the metropole; and those who had “advanced to the status of citizens” and lived under the French civil code but were still subject to the administrative rule of the Government General. To this we can add mixed-race subjects, Africans temporarily residing in the metropole, nonEuropeans from other French or foreign colonies living in AOF, and non-French foreign nationals living there. 104. Mayor of Saint-Louis B. Camara to Lt. Governor of Senegal, État civil, July 15, 1921, AAOF 23G-13; Carde, GG de l’AOF, Loi du février 17, 1924, May 3, 1924, AAOF 23G-6; Lt. Governor of Dahomey to GG de l’AOF, Adjovi, August 20, 1926, AAOF 23G-9; Buell, Native Problem, 1:952–53. 105. Carde, GG de l’AOF, Abus de nom patronymique, AAOF 23G-15. 106. GG de l’AOF, Circulaire: Statut des indigènes de l’AOF, October 8, 1922, AAOF 23G-9; Observations du GG, Naturalisation des indigènes, June 20, 1923, CAOM 1AP-1638; GG de l’AOF Carde to Ministre des Colonies, November 1923, CAOM 1AP-1638; Affaires Politiques et Administratives, Révision des actes réglementant l’accession des indigènes à la qualité di citoyen français, August 8, 1931, AAOF 23G-8. 107. Lt. Governor of Dahomey to GG de l’AOF, Application décret 26 mai 1912 sur naturalisation indigène, August 26, 1923; Chef du Service Judiciaire to GG de l’AOF, September 28, 1923, AAOF 23G-15. 108. Nationalité française en AOF et a Madagascar, October 8, 1933, AAOF 23G-8. 109. GG de l’AOF to Ministre des Colonies, Accession des indigènes de l’AOF à la qualitéde citoyen français, May 17, 1934, AAOF 23G-8. 110. The long conflict between the Adjovi family in Dahomey and the colonial state from the conquest until decolonization began with an intrafamily property dispute, which led to struggles over chiefly succession, then to social upheaval, and finally to anticolonial nationalism. See AAOF 8G-41. On the broader context of this drama, see Manning, Slavery, Colonialism, 187–216, 261–75. For an account of the Lebou people’s protracted conflict with the government of Senegal over land rights, see Buell, Native Problem, 2:1024–29. 111. Rapport politique 1933, AAOF 2G-33/7, 16–17. 112. Côte d’Ivoire, Rapport politique 1937, AAOF 2G-37/5, 141. 113. GG de l’AOF to Ministre des Colonies, Application en AOF de la loi du 21 mars 1884: Syndicats professionnels, December 1918, AAOF 18G-148.

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114. Brévié, Note sur la promulgation en AOF de la loi du 21 mars 1884 sur les syndicats professionnels et la loi du 12 mars 1920 sur l’extension de la capacité civile des syndicats professionnels, August 23, 1920, AAOF 18G-148. 115. Brévié, Étude sure le régime des associations en AOF, August 10, 1920, AAOF 18G-148. 116. This decree also prohibited the emigration of married women without the consent of their husbands, unmarried women without the consent of their family heads, unaccompanied minors under the age of fifteen, and men eligible for military recruitment. “Décret réglement de l’émigration et de la circulation en AOF, 24 avril 1928,” Journal Officiel de la République Française (JORF), April 28, 1928, 4834–35; Arrêté portent réglementation de l’émigration et de la circulation des indigènes en AOF, May 13, 1928, AAOF 21G-37. This decree also regulated the recruitment by private companies of African labor for work outside of the federation. 117. Rapport: Projet de réglementation de l’émigration et de la circulation des indigènes de l’AOF, November 12, 1925, AAOF 21G-37. 118. Designation des moyens réglementaires susceptibles de limiter la population de Dakar, 1934, AAOF 21G-49. 119. Approbation d’un arête du Lt. Gouverneur du Dahomey concernant une carte d’identité pour les indigènes déplacant à l’intérieur de la colonie, June 18, 1936, AAOF 21G-37. 120. Gouverner de la Côte d’Ivoire to GG de l’AOF, July 18, 1939, AAOF 21G-37. 121. The Government General used naturalization dossiers to “track the candidate in his peregrinations across the national territory.” GG de l’AOF, Dossiers de naturalization, December 17, 1932, AAOF 23G-8. 122. “Arrêté promulgant en AOF le décret du 20 septembre 1933 rendant applicable aux colonies l’article premier de la loi du 27 décembre 1916 concernant la repression du vagabondage special,” JOAOF, October 21, 1933, 910–11. 123. “Arrêté promulgant en AOF le décret du 12 janvier 1932 réglementant les conditions d’admission et de séjour des français et étrangers en AOF, 29 février 1932,” JOAOF, March 26, 1932, 297– 301. 124. GG de l’AOF, Circulaire a/s décret du 27 mars sur le régime de la press, May 8, 1928, AAOF 21G-44. On the range of local colonial publications, see Marguerite Boulège, “La presse au Sénégal avant 1939: Bibliographie,” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, nos. 3–4 (1965): 555–74. 125. “Arrêté promulgant en AOF le décret du 22 juillet 1933,” JOAOF, August 26, 1933, 777–78; and “Arrêté promulgant en AOF le décret du 8 mars 1934,” JOAOF, April 7, 1934, 252–53. 126. On civil society in colonial and postcolonial Africa, see John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, eds., Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 127. See Manning, Slavery, Colonialism, 261–75. 128. See Pierre André Taguieff, The Force of Prejudice: Racism and Its Doubles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Taguieff, despite an idealist neo-Kantian approach, makes careful distinctions between universalist and differentialist racisms and their corresponding antiracisms. See also Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 54–62; and Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, 191–204. There were strong parallels between the doubled dynamic of racial exclusion in colonial AOF and the mechanisms of gender exclusions in metropolitan France as analyzed by Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 129. See Artem Letnev, “L’assimilation culturelle vue par les assimilés (d’après les Cahiers William Ponty),” Geneve-Afrique 17, no. 2 (1979): 19–26; Gail P. Kelly, “Interwar Schools and the Development of African History in French West Africa,” History in Africa 10 (1983): 163–85; Gail P. Kelly, “Learning

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to Be Marginal: Schooling in Interwar French West Africa,” Proceedings of the French Colonial Historical Society 11 (1983): 299–311. 130. Henri Labouret, “Questions de politique indigène africaine: Protectorat ou administration directe?” Outre-Mer 1 (1929): 93. 131. Henri Labouret, “L’accession des indigènes à la citoyenneté française,” Afrique Française (1935): 724–25. 132. Labouret, “Citoyenneté d’empire,” 357. 133. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957; Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 123–25; Albert Memmi, Le libération du juif (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 227–29. See also Gary Wilder, “Irreconcilable Differences: A Conversation with Albert Memmi,” Transition 71 (Fall 1996): 158–62.

chapter six 1. I use a broad definition of Panafricanism that is not restricted to the self-conscious international political movement known as Pan-Africanism. See Sidney Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelly, “Imagining Home: Pan-Africanism Revisited,” in Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, ed. S. Lemelle and R. Kelley (New York: Verso, 1994). 2. I borrow the concept of Negritude as a “cultural project” from A. James Arnold, introduction to Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946–1982, by Aimé Césaire (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), xvii. 3. On Senghor’s youth, see Janet Vaillant, Black, French, and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 4. Georges Ngal, Aimé Césaire: Un homme à la recherche d’une patrie (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1994), 300. 5. Daniel Racine, Léon-Gontran Damas: L’homme et l’oeuvre (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983), 25. 6. Léopold Sédar Senghor, La poésie de l’action: Conversations avec Mohamed Aziza (Paris: Stock, 1980), 34–50. 7. Ibid., 52, 55–56; James Bruce-Benoit, “Témoignage,” in Hommage à Léopold Sédar Senghor: Homme de la culture (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1976), 219–20; Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 58– 63. According to Vaillant, Senghor’s half-scholarship required him to serve in the colonial government for ten years after his studies. 8. René Depestre, “An Interview with Aimé Césaire ” (Havana, 1967), in Discourse on Colonialism, by Aimé Césaire (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 73. 9. Racine, Damas, 25–28; and Damas, “Entretien avec Léon-Gontran Damas” (May 1977), in Racine, Damas, 197. 10. Quoted in Ngal, Césaire, 19. 11. Racine, Damas, 25–28; and Damas, “Entretien,” 197. 12. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Paris” (1961), in Liberté 1: Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Stock, 1964), 312. 13. Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 56–57. 14. Racine, Damas, 25–28; and Damas, “Entretien,” 197. 15. See Jean-Francois Sirinelli, “La Khagne,” in Les lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 2: La nation (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 589–624. 16. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Lycée Louis-le-Grand, haut lieu de culture française” (1963), in Senghor, Liberté 1, 403–4; Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 58–59. 17. Ngal, Césaire, 43–46, 80. 18. Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 59–60.

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19. Ngal, Césaire, 43–46, 80. 20. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 53–61, 113–40. 21. Senghor, “Lycée Louis-le-Grand,” 405; Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 64–65. Senghor arrived in Paris as a self-professed monarchist before joining the Socialist student movement in 1929–30. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Comments on the Thesis of Martin Steins,” 1980, typescript provided by Michel Fabre, 20. 22. Ngal, Césaire, 43–46, 80. 23. Depestre, “Interview with Césaire,” 69. 24. Philip Decraene, interview with Aimé Césaire, December 6, 1981, in Le Monde, Entretiens avec Le Monde 4: Civilisations (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1984), 194; Ngal, Césaire, 46, 303. 25. , Soulèye Diagne, “A` la mémoire de Léon-Gontran Damas,” in Hommage posthume à LéonGontran Damas (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1979), 123–24. 26. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “La mort de Léon-Gontran Damas,” in Hommage posthume à Damas, 10–11. 27. Damas, “Entretien,” 195; Léopold Sédar Senghor, preface to Racine, Damas, 9. 28. Senghor, “Mort de Damas,” 11. 29. Jenny Alpha Villard, “Damas,” in Hommage posthume à Damas, 149, 151. 30. Albert Rakoto-Ratsimamanga, “Hommage à L. S. Senghor,” in Hommage à Léopold Sédar Senghor, 143, 144. 31. Birago Diop, La plume raboutée: Mémoires (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1978), 52–61, 76–77. After veterinary training in Toulouse, Birago was in Paris waiting for assignment to the colonial service. His meager scholarship had prevented him from attending medical school. 32. Vaillant makes this comparison in Black, French, and African, 94–95. See also Fabre, Harlem to Paris; Stovall, Paris Noir; Jules-Rosette, Black Paris. For an insightful and complementary account of interwar black Paris that focuses on diasporic internationalism and illuminates the lives and work of René Maran in relationship to Alain Locke, the Nardal sisters, Claude McKay, Lamine Senghor, and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté in relation to George Padmore, see Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 25–38, 105–15, 16–20, 119–29, 147–58, 198–225, 228–30, 245–305. 33. Rakoto-Ratsimamanga, “Hommage à Senghor,” 143. 34. Philippe Decraene, “Léon-Gontran Damas n’est plus,” in Hommage posthume à Damas, 180– 81. 35. Mercer Cook, “In Memoriam Léon-Gontran Damas,” ibid., 20. 36. Gabriel Lisette, “Hommage à Léon-Gontran Damas,” ibid., 211. 37. Bruce-Benoit, “Témoignage,” 220. 38. Vaillant Black, French, and African, 102–7. 39. Césaire quoted in Ngal, Césaire, 79, 80. 40. Senghor, “Comments,” 47. 41. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “L’apport de la poésie nègre au demi-siècle” (1952), in Liberté 1, 136. 42. Senghor lived at the Cité Universitaire while Damas, Césaire, and Birago Diop lived in Latin Quarter residential hotels. Bruce-Benoit, “Témoignage,” 220; Diop, Plume raboutée, 76–78; Racine, Damas, 26; Lisette, “Hommage à Damas,” 209; Ngal, Césaire, 79, 91, 303. 43. Senghor, “Paris,” 313. 44. Ibid., 313–14. Césaire writes: “in Paris, at the same time that I discovered culture . . . I became conscious of my belonging to la condition originale du Nègre.” Quoted in Ngal, Césaire, 82. 45. Damas, “Entretien,” 197. Fellow students included Michel Leiris and the Haitian writer Jacques Roumain. Racine, Damas, 28. 46. Racine, Damas, 29. 47. Damas, “Entretien,” 197–98; and Racine, Damas, 29.

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48. He became a naturalized citizen in 1933 so that he could be eligible for the agrégation, which he obtained in 1935. Léopold Sédar Senghor (exhibition catalog) (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1978), xii. 49. Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 60. 50. Senghor, “Comments,” 71, 96. 51. Ibid., 44. Delavignette wrote the preface for the edition of Ousmane Socé Diop’s 1935 novel that was reprinted after the war, Karim: Roman sénégalais (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1948). 52. Senghor, “Comments,” 74. 53. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Les leçons de Leo Frobenius” (1973), in Liberté 1, 398–99. 54. Ibid., 87. 55. Senghor mythologized his early immersion in customary African society, which he had experienced through women relatives and his maternal uncle Waly, a peasant cultivator. Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 34. Césaire mythologized his relationship to Africa by claiming as his ancestor a Césaire who had led a Martinican slave insurrection in 1833 and by describing his grandmother as “a woman who visibly came from Africa.” Quoted in Ngal, Césaire, 300. 56. Damas, “Entretien,” 194. 57. V. Y. Mudimbe, “Entretien avec L.-G. Damas,” in Hommage posthume à Damas, 357–58. 58. Damas, “Entretien,” 196. 59. Depestre, “Interview with Césaire,” 72–76. 60. Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 184. 61. See Philippe Dewitte, Les mouvements nègres en France, 1919–1939 (Paris: Harmattan, 1985); Spiegler, “Aspects of Nationalist Thought.” 62. Senghor quoted in Lilyan Kesteloot, Les écrivains noirs de langue française (Brussels: Éditions de l’Institut de Sociologie, 1963), 207. According to one estimate there were only 25 African students in the metropole in 1926 and 21 in 1932. J. Dion, “Historique du SLOTFOM,” in CAOM Inventaire du Service de Liaison avec les Originaires des Terrritoires Français d’Outre-Mer (1915–1954) (SLOTFOM). 63. Dion, “Historique du SLOTFOM”; Stovall, “Color-Blind France”; and Rosenberg, “Republican Surveillance,” 148–211. 64. CAI reports often elided social, ethnic, and ideological distinctions between black anticolonial groups; their diverse expressions were crudely lumped together as “anti-French,” often erroneously conflated with communism, and thought to have been provoked by outside agitators. 65. The conjunction of surveillance and assistance was consistent with postliberal political logic. It was not the cynical betrayal of republicanism that Rosenberg suggests in his illuminating account of the Paris police. Rosenberg, “Republican Surveillance,” 180–285. 66. A small steady flow of native noncitizens contravened colonial travel restrictions and moved to France with false identity cards or without any papers. SLOTFOM-VI/15. 67. On Kant’s regulative idea and republicanism, see Luc Ferry and Alain Renault, Political Philosophy 3: From the Rights of Man to the Republican Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 124–25. On Kant’s reformist notion of republicanism, see Wolfgang Kersting, “Politics, Freedom and Order: Kant’s Political Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 358–61. For a crypto-Kantian conception of democracy to-come, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994), 59–75. 68. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3–6. 69. See Claude Nicolet, La république en France: État des lieux (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 397. 70. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 148–49 (emphasis in original).

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71. See Claude Nicolet, L’idée républicaine en France, 1789–1924 (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 11, 31, 331; and Nicolet, République en France, 53, 71. See also Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 1–40, 221–28; and Arendt, Human Condition, 22–58, 192–207. 72. On colonial politics in the French Antilles, see Henri Bangou, La Guadeloupe 1848–1939, ou les aspects de la colonisation après l’abolition de l’esclavage (Aurillac: Éditions de Centre, 1963); Pierre Pluchon and Lucien-René Abénon, eds., Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyane (Toulouse: Privat, 1982); Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery; Armand Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique de 1848 à 1939, vol. 2 (Paris: Harmattan, 1996); and Henriette Levillain, ed., La Guadeloupe, 1875–1914: Les soubresauts d’une société plur-ethnique ou les ambiguities d’assimilation (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1994). 73. M. Benga, “Le problème de naturalization,” Dépêche Africaine 2 (April 1928): 2. Benga pointed out that the 1927 nationality law allowed foreigners to become citizens after only three, rather than ten, years of residence. 74. On the relationship between civil society and the public sphere, see Jürgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 452–57; and Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press 1992), 211–31. 75. SLOTFOM-III, V. 76. On alternative public spheres, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 121–28. 77. After passing African citizenship laws (1915–16), Diagne organized the recruitment of African soldiers during the war, supported shifting power in AOF away from urban elites and toward rural chiefs (1921), signed an agreement favorable to Bordeaux merchants who were trading in West Africa (1923), represented France in voting against an international convention that would outlaw colonial forced labor (1931), and was named undersecretary of colonies. See Johnson, Black Politics in Senegal, 154–77; G. Wesley Johnson, “African Political Activity in French West Africa, 1900–1940,” in History of West Africa, ed. J. F. A. Ajay and Michael Crowder (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Michael Crowder, “Blaise Diagne and the Recruitment of African Troops for the 1914–18 War,” in Crowder, Colonial West Africa, 104–19; Searing, “Accommodation and Resistance,” 416–34, 452–567; Amady Dieng, Blaise Diagne, premier député africain (Paris: Éditions Chaka, 1990), 79–103, 125, 127, 130–35; and Buell, Native Problem, 2:81. For critiques of Diagne, see “Grandeur et decadence!” Race Nègre 1, no. 6 (October 1928): 1; T. Garan Kouyaté, “ ‘La France coloniale’ ou la poubelle diagniste,” Race Nègre 2, no. 2 (April 1929): 1; and T. Garan Kouyaté, “M. Diagne s’est suicide,” Race Nègre 4, no. 1 (July 1930): 1; W. E. B. DuBois, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out” (1925), in The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Athenaeum, 1992), 397. 78. Senghor, “Comments,” 16; Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 71–72, 102, 89. The correspondence between Diagne, Brévié, and the inspector of education about Senghor’s scholarship in 1931–32 is contained in AAOF 17G-470. 79. Guèye was the first black African to obtain a law degree in France. Although he lost the 1934 election, he was elected to the assembly in 1945 after the death of Galandou Diouf. Johnson, “African Political Activity,” 551–62. 80. Senghor (exhibition catalogue), xii. 81. Mudimbe, “Entretien avec Damas,” 363; Diop, Plume raboutée, 79. Guèye served as Senghor’s mentor in institutional politics, inviting him to speak to his Senegalese Socialist Party and persuading him in 1945 to run for a seat in the national assembly. Johnson, “African Political Activity,” 560; Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 106. 82. On the use of Antillean administrators in French Africa, see Véronique Hélènon, “Les administrateurs coloniaux originaires de Guadeloupe, Martinique et Guyane dans les colonies françaises d’afrique, 1880–1939,” PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris 1997.

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83. On Maran’s early life, colonial career, and writing, see John Alfred Dennis Jr., “The René Maran Story: The Life and Times of a Black Frenchman, Colonial Administrator, Novelist and Social Critic, 1887–1960,” PhD diss., Stanford University, 1986; Keith Cameron, René Maran (Boston: Twayne, 1985); and Femi Ojo-Ade, René Maran, the Black Frenchman: A Bio-Critical Study (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1984). For an insightful reading of Batouala, see Berliner, Ambivalent Desire, 77–83. 84. René Maran, Batouala: Véritable roman nègre (1921; Paris: Albin Michel, 1938), 9. Hereafter this volume is cited in the text in parentheses. 85. On Maran’s unstable subject-position, see Christopher Miller, “Nationalism as Resistance and Resistance to Nationalism in the Literature of Francophone Africa,” Yale French Studies 82 (1993): 62–100. 86. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 87. The administration was outraged over the publication of Batouala, and Maran, feeling persecuted and plagued by fever, felt compelled to flee his post, although he feared that French officials would assassinate him on his voyage home for treatment. Dossier Personnel, René Maran, EEII6/75/35. In contrast, other critics of colonial abuses, including Delavignette, Labouret, and Gide, advanced in their careers. 88. Hommage à René Maran (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1965), 21, 26, 29, 66, 204, 226. Dewitte, Mouvements nègres, 72–80. 89. René Maran, “Réflexions,” Les Continents 1, no. 1 (May 15, 1924), 1; Maran, “Lettre ouverte au professeur Alain-Leroy Locke,” Les Continents 1, no. 3 (June 15, 1924), 1; and Maran, “Au pied du mur,” Les Continents 1 no. 5 (July 15, 1924), 1. On this journal, which was founded by the Dahomean critic and Garveyist nationalist Kojo Tovalou-Houénou, see Spiegler, “Aspects of Nationalist Thought,” 50–80; and DeWitte, Mouvements nègres, 74–93. 90. Maran to Charles Kunsler, February 6, 1922; Maran to René Violaines, November 5, 1922; Maran to Charles Kunsler, September 4, 1922, all in Hommage à Maran, 61–62, 19, 63, 91. Maran to René Violaines, April 6, 1925, in Hommage à Maran, 24, 27. 92. Maran to René Violaines, December 17, 1927, ibid., 27. 93. Quoted in P. Tuffrau, “Hommage,” ibid., 261. 94. René Maran, Un homme pareil aux autres (Paris: Albin Michel, 1947), 35–36, 12. Maran finished writing this book in 1923. 95. Senghor, “René Maran, précurseur de la Négritude,” in Hommage à Maran, 13. Senghor later acknowledged that “out of friendship for René Maran, I made him more nègre than he was.” Senghor, “Comments,” 50. 96. On the interwar recuperation of the category nègre, see Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 25–38. 97. Jacques Louis Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), 34; Senghor, “Comments,” 43; Césaire, quoted in Ngal, Césaire, 48; Cook, “In Memoriam,” 21. After Maran’s death, Mercer Cook and Damas took care of the funeral arrangements. Damas, “The Last Public Statement of L.-G. Damas,” in Hommage posthume à Damas, 253. Cook recounts Maran calling Senghor “profound.” Cook, “Afro-Americans in Senghor’s Poetry,” in Hommage à Senghor, 151. On Maran’s relation to Negritude, see Michel Fabre, “René Maran, critique de la littérature africaine francophone,” Afrique Littéraire et Artistique 50, no. 4 (1978): 30–35. 98. Inscription in Senghor (exhibition catalogue), 48. 99. Ousmane Diop to René Maran, May 25, 1935, ibid., 51. 100. Damas to René Maran, April 16, 1938, ibid., 56. Aimé Césaire, envoi autograph, 1939, ibid., 80. 101. Fabre, Harlem to Paris, 148–49. 102. Locke, New Negro, 392, 50–51.

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103. Fabre, Harlem to Paris, 70–71, 77, 90. 104. Mercer A. Cook, “Some Literary Contacts: African, West Indian, Afro-American,” in The Black Writer in Africa and the Americas, ed. Lloyd W. Brown (Los Angeles: Hennessy and Ingalls, 1973), 120; Ngal, Césaire, 51; Fabre, Harlem to Paris, 150. 105. Dépêche Africaine 1, no. 1 (February 1928): 1. 106. Maurice Satineau, a graduate of the École des Hautes Études, also wrote a full-length monograph on colonial slavery and political liberty, Histoire de la Guadeloupe sous l’ancien régime (1635– 1789) (Paris: Payot, 1928). 107. “Notre but, notre programme,” Dépêche Africaine 1, no. 1 (February 1928): 1. 108. Ibid. 109. See the extensive police reports in SLOTFOM-V/ 2. 110. “Notre but, notre programme,” 1. 111. Dépêche Africaine, March 1930, 4. 112. Dépêche Africaine, April 1930, 1. 113. Dépêche Africaine, May 1930, 1. 114. Rapport au President, June 6, 1930, Inini, CAOM 1AP-379. The plan was to turn Inini into a large-scale agricultural development project through the use of Indochinese penal labor imported for this purpose. “Décret portent creation d’établissements penitentiaries dans le Territoire autonome de l’Inini,” January 22, 1931, Bulletin Official du Ministère des Colonies. See 1AP-2975. 115. For background, see Rodolphe Alexandre, Gaston Monnerville et la Guyane, 1897–1948 (PetitBourg, Guadeloupe: Ibis Rouge Éditions, 1999), 23–44. 116. Dépêche Africaine, August–September 1930, 1. 117. Dépêche Africaine, October–November 1930, 1; and August–September 1930, 1. 118. Dépêche Africaine, May 1931, 1–3. 119. Galmot was a French journalist and colonial capitalist committed to economic development in Guiana who was elected in 1919 to the national assembly. The rioters that Monnerville defended were acquitted, and the attention he received from defending them led to his being elected deputy from Guiana in 1932. See Alexandre, Gaston Monnerville, 44–83; and Jacques Mange, Jean Glamot: L’homme des tropiques (Paris: Éditions Caribéennes, 1990). For parallel events in Martinique, see Richard Price, The Convict and the Colonel: A Story of Colonialism and Resistance in the Caribbean (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 1–48. 120. Dépêche Africaine, May 1931, 1–3. 121. Ibid., 3. 122. Jane Nardal, “L’internationalisme noir,” Dépêche Africaine, February 1928, 5. 123. Paulette Nardal, “Éveil de la conscience de race,” Revue du Monde Noir, no. 6 (1932): 29. This complete journal has been republished in La Revue du Monde Noir/The Review of the Black World, 1931–1932: Collection complète, nos. 1 à 6 (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1992). 124. W. E. B. DuBois, “The Talented Tenth” (1903), in W. E. B. Dubois: A Reader, ed. Andrew Paschal (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 31–51; Locke, New Negro. 125. “Our Aim,” Revue du Monde Noir, no. 1 (1931): 2. 126. Nardal, “Éveil de la conscience,” 31. 127. “Our Aim,” 2. 128. Nardal, “Éveil de la conscience,” 31. 129. “Nos enquêtes,” Revue du Monde Noir, no. 2 (1931): 60. 130. “Notre enquête,” Revue du Monde Noir, no. 4 (1932): 51–52. 131. “Our Aim,” 2. 132. “La page de correspondance,” Revue du Monde Noir, no. 4 (1932): 59.

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133. Paulette had a degree in English literature and often translated at gatherings. Ngal, Césaire, 50. On the Nardals’ importance, see T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 38–79. 134. They included Sajous, the Nardals, the Achilles, René Maran, Félix Eboué, Paul Morand, Pierre B. Salzmann, Gilbert Gratient, Étienne Léro, René Ménil, Jules Monnerot, and Daniel CenacThaly. Louis Thomas Achille, preface to Revue du Monde Noir/Review of the Black World, xvi. 135. Ibid., xv, viii. 136. “Our Aim,” 2. 137. Damas, “Entretien,” 200. 138. Quoted in Ngal, Césaire, 51–52. 139. Senghor, “Comments,” 21, 24. 140. Louis Thomas Achille, whose father had taught Damas and Césaire in Martinique, was a classmate of Senghor’s at Louis-le-Grand. Damas later married Achille’s sister Isabelle. Racine, Damas, 36. Another of their former teachers from Martinique was Gilbert Gratient, who also contributed to La Revue. Daniel Racine, “La fortune de Léon Damas aux États-Unis,” in Hommage posthume à Damas, 384; Racine, Damas, 26; Ngal, Césaire, 32. Senghor credits Louis Thomas Achille with introducing him to African American writers. Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 59. 141. Damas, “Entretien,” 201–2. See also Ngal, Césaire, 51; Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 91; and Cook, “Some Literary Contacts,” 121. 142. These included Alain Locke, Carter Woodson, Langston Hughes, Walter White, Rayford Logan, Countee Cullen, and Sterling Brown. Cook, “Some Literary Contacts,” 120; Cook, “In Memoriam,” 21; Damas, “Last Public Statement,” 249–52; Racine, Damas, 31. During this period, Damas even met Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Louis Armstrong. Damas, “Entretien,” 201. In 1939 Cook published an article that introduced Damas and his circle of colonial poets to black Americans. Mercer Cook, “The Race Problem in Paris and the French West Indies,” Journal of Negro Education 8, no. 4 (October 1939): 673–80. See also Michel Fabre, “African Americans and French-Speaking Black Literature (1930–1950): Discovering the Negritude Movement,” Regards Européens sur le Monde Anglo-Américain , no. 3 (1992). 143. Damas, “Last Public Statement,” 249; Senghor, “Comments,” 21. 144. Senghor, “Comments,” 31–32; Cook, “Some Literary Contacts,” 121. 145. Cook, “Some Literary Contacts,” 122. 146. Ngal, Césaire, 52. Although he denied that the Harlem Renaissance influenced his work, Césaire acknowledges that it was “indispensable for a very clear coming to consciousness.” Depestre, “Interview with Césaire,” 71. 147. Damas, “Last Public Statement,” 252; Racine, Damas, 30; Léon Damas, “La negritude en question,” Jeune Afrique, no. 532 (March 16, 1971): 59. When Damas died, he was in the process of writing a biography of Hughes; Damas, “Last Public Statement,” 253. Senghor was inspired by Hughes’s poetry but did not meet him until 1966. Cook, “Some Literary Contacts,” 123. 148. Damas, “Last Public Statement,” 252; Racine, Damas, 30. 149. Léon Damas, Retour de guyane (Paris: José Corti, 1938), 158–59. 150. Senghor, “Apport de la poésie nègre,” in Liberté 1, 136. On the African American community in Paris at this time, see Josephine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Josephine (New York: Paragon House, 1988), 42–94; Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Vintage, 1989), 3–177; Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1940), 144–86. 151. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artists and the Racial Mountain” (1926), in Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Viking, 1994), 95. 152. Locke, New Negro, 6–7.

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153. Ibid., xxv, xxvii, 4–5. 154. Ibid., 12, 14–15. 155. Revue du Monde Noir, no. 1 (1931): 38. 156. On McKay’s stay in France, see Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (1937; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), 243–91. 157. Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), 259–60. Cf. Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1997), 167–81. 158. Cf. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 72–110. 159. Léon Damas, Pigments/Névralgies (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1972), 11. 160. McKay, Banjo, 200; Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Le problème culturel en A.O.F.,” in Liberté 1, 21. 161. Depestre, “Interview with Césaire,” 71. 162. Léon Damas, “Naissance et vue de la négritude,” in Racine, Damas, 185. 163. Damas, “Entretien,” 200. Césaire recalled that “the Revue du Monde Noir was superficial.” Quoted in Ngal, Césaire, 52. 164. Although Damas did not contribute an article to the new journal, he belonged to the circle that published it. Damas, “Entretien,” 200. The single issue of this polemical journal quoted the same passage from Banjo about native roots. Légitime Défense (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1979), 13–14. 165. Légitime Défense, 2. 166. Jules-Marcel Monnerot, “Note touchant la bourgeoisie de couleur française,” ibid., 4. 167. René Ménil, “Généralités sur “l’écrivain” de couleur antiallais,” ibid., 8. 168. Étienne Léro, “Misère d’une poésie,” ibid., 10. 169. Senghor and Monnerot had been classmates at Louis-le-Grand. Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 68. 170. Senghor, “Comments,” 37. 171. Depestre, “Interview with Césaire,” 69–70; Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 87–88. 172. Ménil, “Légitime Défense,” in Légitime Défense, n.p. 173. Senghor quoted in Kesteloot, Écrivains noirs, 92, 94. Early Negritude thought also sought an accommodation between Western and African culture. 174. Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 87. 175. Senghor included Léro’s poems in his landmark collection of Francophone black poetry. Damas discovered these poems after Léro’s untimely death while preparing an agrégation in philosophy. Léopold Sédar Senghor, ed., Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Paris: PUF, 1948), 49. 176. Senghor credits Légitime Défense with directing Césaire to Rimbaud, Lautréaumont, and vernacular literatures. Légitime Défense, 55. 177. Senghor, “Comments,” 13. 178. These political reports are collected in SLOTFOM-V/2. 179. Ministre de la Guerre chargé de l’intérim du Ministère des Colonies to GG de l’AOF, September 17, 1931, AAOF 21G-44. 180. “Renseignements,” Cabinet du Directeur de la Sureté Générale, August 26, 1931; and Rapport du Desire, September 10, 1931, both in AAOF 21G-44. 181. These were local members of the League for the Defense of the Black Race and the newspaper Périscope Africain. Jean-Louis was a Guadeloupean lawyer who had worked in colonial courts in French Equatorial Africa. GG P.I. de l’AOF to Ministre des Colonies, August 29, 1931, AAOF 21G-44. 182. Damas, “Entretien,” 200.

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183. Ménil, “Légitime Défense,” n.p. The group survived at least until 1935, when Monnerot spoke in its name at the Congrès des Écrivains pour la Défense de la Culture. Kesteloot, Écrivains noirs, 91. 184. For overviews of these groups, see Spiegler, “Aspects of Nationalist Thought”; and DeWitte, Mouvements nègres. 185. Paris had been the host of the international Pan-African Congresses in 1919 and 1921. Here I am discussing less formal Panafricanism. See Colin Legum, Pan-Africanism: A Short Political Guide (New York: Praeger, 1962); J. Ayodele Langley, Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900– 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); P. Olisanwuche Esedebe, Pan-Africanism: The Idea and the Movement, 1776–1991, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1994); and Lemelle and Kelley, Imagining Home. 186. Dewitte, Mouvements nègres, 95–102. 187. Ibid., 130, 137. On Lamine Senghor, see Spiegler, “Aspects of Nationalist Thought,” 117–24; Miller, Nationalists and Nomads, 21–46. 188. Lamine Senghor, “Ce qu’est notre Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre,” Voix des Nègres 1, no. 1 (January 1927): 1. Copies of this and the journals discussed below may be found in SLOTFOM-V. 189. Le Comité, “Le mot ‘nègre,’ ” Voix des Nègres 1, no. 1 (January 1927): 1. 190. Dewitte, Mouvements nègres, 150–54; Rapport de Desiré, January 12, 1929, and Rapport de Paul, October 25, 1929, SLOTFOM-V/3. Rapports de Desiré, August 31, September 10, October 13, October 22, and November 28, 1927; February 28, 1928; January 12, 1929; and Rapport de “Coco,” August 10, 1929. SLOTFOM-V/3. 191. Governor-General Carde interdicted the paper. “La générosité française sous la IIIème république,” Race Nègre 1, no. 3 (September 1927): 1. Police infiltration is documented in SLOTFOM-V/3. 192. Rapport, November 5, 1927, SLOTFOM-V/3. 193. Rapport, November 19, 1927, SLOTFOM-V/3. 194. “La Ligue est en deuil: Son très dévoué président Senghor Lamine est mort,” Race Nègre 1, no. 5 (May 1928): 1. Rapport de Joe, November 2, 1929, SLOTFOM-V/3. 195. Quoted in Préfet de Police de Paris to Ministre des Colonies, February 28, 1928, SLOTFOMV/3. 196. “Vers l’élaboration d’un programme,” Race Nègre 2, no. 1 (March 1929): 1, SLOTFOM-V/3. In 1929, they resolved to block the arrival of blacks scheduled to be imported from the colonies for the colonial exposition. Rapport de Joe, November 2, 1929, SLOTFOM-V/3. 197. Kouyaté to W. E. B. DuBois, April 29, 1929, AAOF 21G-44. 198. Doralie, “Expliquons-nous,” Race Nègre 1, no. 3 (September 1927): 1. 199. “Ordre du jour,” Race Nègre 1, no. 5 (September 1927): 1. 200. Rapports de Paul, May 25, 1930, and February 24, 1931; Rapports de Joe, March 22, April 5, May 5, 1931. SLOTFOM-V/3. 201. Kouyaté to W. E. B. DuBois, April 29, 1929; and Kouyaté to Lt. Gouverneur du Senegal, November 28, 1927, AAOF 21G-44. 202. Rapport de Paul, June 28, 1930, SLOTFOM-V/3. 203. Rapport de Paul, October 11, 1929, SLOTFOM-V/3. 204. Rapports de Paul, January 16, and June 28, 1930. Lack of funds kept him from also organizing black unions in Le Havre and Dunkerque. Rapport de Paul, April 17, 1930, SLOTFOM-V/3. 205. Rapports de Paul, June 28, November 12, 1930, SLOTFOM-V/3. 206. Rapport de Desiré, November 18, 1930; Rapport de Joe, November 20, 1930, SLOTFOMV/3. 207. Rapport de Paul, October 25 1929, SLOTFOM-V/3. 208. Rapport de Paul, January 16, 1930; Rapport de Paul, April 17, 1930. SLOTFOM-V/3.

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209. Rapport de Désiré, September 17 1930; Rapport de Paul, November 12, 1930. SLOTFOMV/3. 210. Syndicat Nègre de Marseille, Statuts, February 23, 1930, AAOF 21G-44. 211. Ministre des Colonies to GGs de l’A.O.F., A.E.F., Madagascar, March 2, 1930, SLOTFOMIII/112. 212. Rapport de Desiré, December 6, 1927; Rapports de Joe, November 2 and December 22, 1929; May 15 and July 14, 1930; and December 27, 1931. SLOTFOM-V/3. Rapport de Desiré, March 15, 1930, SLOTFOM-III/112. 213. Rapport de Desiré, March 15, 1930, SLOTFOM-III/112. “Contre le communisme: Un institut revolutionnaire nègre en plein Paris,” L’Ami du Peuple, May 26, 1930, SLOTFOM-III/112. Sajous presented himself to the préfet de police and insisted that he no longer belonged to the group. Rapport de Joe, May 5, 1931, SLOTFOM-V/3. 214. Rapports de Paul, November 25 and December 11, 1930; Rapport de Joe, March 15 1931; Rapport de Claude, June 15, 1931; “A` tous nos abonnés, membres, et lecteurs,” Race Nègre 4, no. 4 (April 1931) [Kouyaté ed.]: 1; Rédaction, “Avis,” Race Nègre 4, no. 4 (April 1931) [Faure ed.]: 1. 215. Kouyaté created the UTN in May 1932 with promises of financial support from the Colonial Commission of the PCF. Dewitte, Mouvements nègres, 284–304. 216. Participants at the first meeting included African, Antillean, and Malagasy communists from the UTN. Also present were Léonard Sainville from the Guadeloupe Student Association, Megrone from the Martinique Student Association, and Léopold Sédar Senghor from the African Student Association. At least two police informants attended the meeting. Note sur la propagande révolutionnaire interessant les pays d’outre-mer, June 30, 1933, SLOTFOM-III/61; Rapport de Joe, June 23, 1933, and Rapport de Paul June 23, 1933, SLOTFOM-III/73. 217. He hoped this would lead to a multiracial conference in Paris that would include all the peoples colonized by France. Note sur la propagande révolutionnaire interessant les pays d’outre-mer, July 31, 1933, SLOTFOM-III/61. In May 1934, Kouyaté organized a meeting that included blacks, Indochinese, and North Africans with the hope of creating an intercolonial committee that would “work for the national liberation and social emancipation of French colonies.” On the importance of Schoelcher for the Negritude project, see Gaston Monnerville, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire, Commémoration du centenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage: Discours prononcés à la Sorbonne le 27 avril 1948 (Paris: Presses Universitaires des France, 1948); and Gary Wilder, “Race, Reason, Impasse: Césaire, Fanon, and the Legacy of Emancipation,” Radical History Review 90 (September 2004): 31–58. 218. Note sur la progagande révolutionnaire interessant les pays d’outre-mer, July 31, 1933, SLOTFOM-III/61; Rapport de Joe, June 23, 1933, and Rapport de Paul, June 23, 1933, SLOTFOMIII/73. 219. Rapport de Joe, June 23, 1933, and Rapport de Paul, June 23, 1933, SLOTFOM-III/73; Note sur la propagande révolutionnaire interessant les pays d’outre-mer, July 31, 1933, SLOTFOM-III/61. Senghor’s name is not listed in the police account of that discussion, so he was either silent or not present. 220. Notes sur la propagande révolutionnaire interessant les pays d’outre-mer, October 31, 1933, November 3, 1933, February 28, 1934, and April 30, 1934, SLOTFOM-III/61. 221. Bureau Politique du Parti Communiste, Section Coloniale, September 3, 1935; Note, Réunion de la Section Coloniale du Parti Communiste, October 10, 1935, SLOTFOM-III/73. 222. Réunion de la Section Coloniale du Parti Communiste, October 10 and 11, 1935, SLOTFOMIII/73. 223. Réunion de la sous-section nègre du Parti Communiste, December 18, 1935, SLOTFOMIII/73.

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224. Réunion de la sous-section nègre du Parti Communiste, October 11, 1935, SLOTFOM-III/73. 225. Senghor, “Comments,” 22, 30–31, 36, 52. 226. Ibid., 17–18. 227. Ngal, Césaire, 68–70. Ngal reports that L’Étudiant Martiniquais did not endorse the letter protesting the murder of André Aliker in 1934 that was signed by Ménil, Damas, Monnerot, and Léonard Sainville among others. Aliker was a Martinican communist journalist who was killed after uncovering corruption scandals among colonial officials. See “L’assasinat de notre camarade André Aliker,” Cri des Nègres 3, no. 5 (April–May 1934): 1; and Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique, 2:218–29. According to police reports, Aliker’s brother was affiliated with the founding of L’Étudiant Noir. Note de L.S., May 3, 1935, SLOTFOM-III/73. 228. Quoted in Ngal, Césaire, 68–69. 229. “Association des étudiants ouest-africains,” Cri des Nègres 3 (August 1934): 2. 230. Nadine Dormay Savage, “Entretien avec Léopold Sédar Senghor,” French Review 47, no. 6 (May 1974): 1065. Ngal, Césaire, 69. 231. Diop, Plume raboutée, 53, 76, 79. In 1947, Birago Diop published a collection of indigenous folk tales for which Senghor later wrote a preface. Diop, Les nouveaux contes d’Amadou Koumba (Paris: Présence Africaine 1958). Diop remembers gathering with Antilleans and Senegalese at the home of Marthe Lamine Guèye, where he met the Nardal sisters, whose Revue du Monde Noir he had read in Toulouse. 232. Bruce-Benoit, “Témoignage,” 221. 233. J. Bourgarel, “Pour une association unique des étudiants nègres,” Cri des Nègres (November– December 1933): 1. 234. Diop, Plume raboutée, 77–78. 235. Léonard Sainville, “Témoignage,” in Hommage à Senghor, 127–30. 236. Diagne, “Mémoire de Damas,” 123–25; Diop, “Nos retrouvailles,” in Hommage posthume à Damas, 129; Sainville, “Témoignage,” 127–30. They report that Socé Diop and Damas first met when the former confronted the latter in order to criticize his poem “Et Cetera.” 237. Diop, Plume raboutée, 76–79. 238. Ngal, Césaire, 70. 239. Ibid., 129. 240. Quoted in Racine, Damas, 29–30. 241. Aristide Maugée, “La question des bourses,” and André Charpentier, “Puisse-t’on nous entendre!” Étudiant Noir: Journal de l’Association des Étudiants Martiniquais en France 1, no. 1 (March 1935): 1. References that follow are to this issue. 242. André Midas, “A` propos de l’association,” Étudiant Noir, 2; “Réflexions sur une réunion d’étudiants martiniquais,” Étudiant Noir, 3. 243. Midas, “A` propos,” 2. 244. Paulette Nardal, “Guignol Oulouf,” Étudiant Noir, 4. 245. Henri Eboué, “Language et musique chez les nègres du Congo,” Étudiant Noir, 4. Henri was the son of Félix Eboué, the Guadeloupean colonial administrator and heroic de Gaulle supporter during World War II. Senghor later married Félix’s daughter Ginette. Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 210–11. 246. Aimé Césaire, “Nègreries: Jeunesse noire et assimilation,” Étudiant Noir, 3. All Césaire quotations in the next few paragraphs are from this article. 247. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “L’humanisme et nous: René Maran,” Étudiant Noir, 4. All Senghor quotations in the next few paragraphs are from this article. 248. On Césaire’s neologisms, see Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 175–81. 249. Léonard Sainville, “Un livre sur la Martinique,” Étudiant Noir, 5.

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250. Gilbert Gratient, “Mulatres . . . pour le bien et le mal,” Étudiant Noir, 5–6. All Gratient quotations in the next few paragraphs are from this article. 251. This challenge to Antillean nativism anticipates post-Negritude conceptions of antilleanité and créolité. Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989); Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant, Éloge de la créolité/In Praise of Creoleness (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). 252. Léonard Sainville, “Simples questions à Je Suis Partout,” Étudiant Noir, 8. 253. In contrast to the accepted belief that there was only one issue of the journal, this report noted that five hundred copies of its second issue were published. However, it might be referring to L’Étudiant Martiniquais. Rapport de L.S., May 3, 1935, SLOTFOM-III/73. 254. Réunion de la sous-section nègre du Parti Communiste, October 10, 1935, SLOTFOM-III/73. Again, it is unclear whether Sainville is referring to L’Étudiant Noir. 255. Probably collapsing them with Légitime Défense, she described their group as “Marxially sound” and “organized out of . . . formerly . . . reactionary elements by two young comrade student intellectuals, the brothers Monnerot.” Cunard clearly doesn’t understand the genesis of L’Étudiant Noir, but her familiarity with the journal indicates its public profile at this time. Nancy Cunard, “Tricolor with International,” July 14, 1935, SLOTFOM-III/73. On Cunard and the black community, see William Wiser, The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1983), 160–65. On Rivet’s anticolonial politics, see Paul Rivet, Paul Langevin, Alain, and Marc Casati, La France en face du problème colonial (Paris: Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes, 1936). On this demonstration, see Jackson, Popular Front in France, 7, 42–51. 256. Spiegler, “Aspects of Nationalist Thought,” 246–63. 257. Note confidential, Ministre de l’Intérieur to Ministre des Colonies, October 28, 1935, SLOTFOM-III/73. 258. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “A` l’appel de la race de Saba,” in Poèmes (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 59–60. 259. Notes de L.S., January 11 and 25, 1935, SLOTFOM-III/73. Although Faure was a member of this collective, which promoted cooperation, his LDRN responded to the invasion with calls to “vomit out the dregs” and “purge the race ” of all blacks willing to collaborate with any whites or agents of French colonial authority. “Epurons notre race,” Race Nègre 9, no. 1 (January–February 1936): 1. 260. Other members included colonial notables such as Joseph Lagrossillière (deputy and president of the Conseil Général of Martinique), Galandou Diouf (from Senegal), and Marius Moutet. The UTN warned its members not to collaborate with this nonrevolutionary association. La Féderation des Peuples Colonisés et Nguyen The Truyen, March 11, 12, and 13, 1935; Lettre de la Federation des Peuples Colonisés; Note d’un Agent, March 21, 1935; all in SLOTFOM-III/119. 261. Lettre de la Federation des Peuples Colonisés, SLOTFOM-III/119. 262. Note sur la propagande revolutionnaire, February 28, 1935, SLOTFOM-III/61. 263. T. Garan Kouyaté, “A` nos lecteurs!” Africa 1, no. 1 (1 December 1935): 1. 264. The first issue of Africa was selling so well on the boulevard Saint-Michel that Parisian police seized the inventories of Kouyaté’s vendors. Note de L.S., December 18, 1935, SLOTFOM-III/73. 265. “Alliance France-Outremer,” in Note de L.S., November 27, 1935, SLOTFOM-III/73. Kouyaté later published this plan as “Programme du rassemblement colonial Français: Principes directeurs d’une transformation de l’outremer,” Africa 2, no. 11 (June 1937): 3. 266. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 64. 267. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society, 1–26. Unlike them, I do not derive this possibility from communicative rationality. 268. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1: 49–50, 85–89.

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269. Birago Diop remembers Ousmane Socé taking notes during visits to the Cuban Cabana. Diop, Plume raboutée, 78, 76. 270. Diop, Mirages, 30. Hereafter this volume is cited in the text in parentheses. 271. Socé Diop later broke with Senghor by challenging Negritude’s antiassimilation stance (1942) and aligning himself with Sengor’s political rival Lamine Guèye (1951). Vaillaint, Black, French, and African, 186, 238. 272. Miller, Nationalists and Nomads, 65. Miller reads Mirages de Paris as advocating métissage rather than as staging the tension between cosmopolitan and nativism that Negritude confronted.

chapter seven 1. Holt, Problem of Freedom. See also Dubois, Colony of Citizens; and Wilder, “Race, Reason, Impasse.” 2. Examples include Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée noir,” in Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie, ix–xliv; Janheinz Jahn, Neo-African Literature: A History of Black Writing (New York: Grove Press, 1968); and Kesteloot, Écrivains noirs. 3. Examples include Spiegler, “Aspects of Nationalist Thought”; Irving Leonard Markowitz, Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Politics of Negritude (New York: Athenaeum, 1969); Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor; Martin Steins, “Les antécédents et la genèse de la Négritude senghorienne,” doctoral diss., Université de Paris III—Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1980; Dewitte, Mouvements nègres. 4. See, e.g., Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (London: Heinemann, 1981), 67–88; V. Y. Mudimbe, The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Jules-Rosette, Black Paris. 5. I use cultural nationalism here because, first, Negritude’s interwar interventions revolved around questions of biocultural identity and civilization, and second, the movement did not advocate political independence until the 1950s. 6. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 30, 50–51. 7. In later work, he displaces this argument about the tension between the modern and the national onto that between capital and community. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, 13, 220–39. On Chatterjee’s failure to link the contradictions of anticolonial nationalist thought to the sociopolitical field of late colonialism and global capitalism as well as a brilliant critique of “methodological nationalism” in social thought, see the introduction to Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 8. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 2–29; Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 69, 158, 167; Partha Chatterjee, “Beyond the Nation? Or Within?” Social Text 56/16, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 57–69. 9. Although Gilroy recognizes that post-emancipation Panafrican politics have synthesized national and transnational approaches, he ultimately submerges the former within the latter by emphasizing diasporic cultural politics. Gilroy, Black Atlantic. 10. Senghor, “Comments,” 86, 24–25. 11. Senghor, “Apport de la poésie nègre,” in Liberté 1, 135–36. 12. Although Jacques Chevrier suggests that Negritude avoided censorship through poetry, he explains its members’ use of poetry in terms of orality in African culture and as a medium for subjective expression. Chevrier, Littérature nègre (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), 53–56, 97–98. 13. L. G. Damas, Poètes d’expression française, 1901–1945 (Paris: Seuil, 1947), 16, 9–10, 8. 14. Senghor (exhibition catalogue), xii–xiii. The war allowed Senghor to demonstrate black patriotism. After being taken prisoner by the Germans, he recalls, S.S. officers decided to shoot the

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black soldiers. Senghor maintains, “we remained loyal until the end. . . . when they raised their rifles, we shouted: Long live France! Long live black Africa.” Their lives were spared. Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 83. 15. Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 102–4. 16. Senghor, “Apport de la poésie nègre,” in Liberté 1, 136, 139. 17. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Comme les lamantins vont boire à la source” (1954), in Poèmes, 160. 18. Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie, 5. 19. Quoted in Ngal, Césaire, 85. 20. Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 130–42; Senghor, Selected Poems of Léopold Sédar Senghor, ed. Abiola Irele (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 12–13; Kesteloot, Écrivains noirs, 128, 175–200; Racine, Damas, 58–59. 21. Several critics have emphasized the need to analyze Negritude as historically specific, a form of engagement, and a radical imaginative politics. Michel Hausser, Pour une poétique de la Négritude (Paris: Silex, 1988), 1:18, 21; Ronnie Leah Scharfman, Engagement and the Language of the Subject in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1980). 22. Damas, Pigments/Névralgies, 73. Hereafter this volume is cited in parentheses in the text as Pigments. For my translations from Pigments I consulted those in Ellen Conroy Kennedy, The Negritude Poets (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1975). 23. This poem is dedicated to Aimé Césaire. 24. Senghor, Léopold Sédar Senghor: The Collected Poetry, ed. Melvin Dixon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 577. For my translations of Senghor’s poetry I have consulted Dixon’s translations. 25. Senghor, Poèmes, 219. Hereafter this volume is cited in parentheses in the text. 26. Senghor, Collected Poetry (Dixon ed.), 584. 27. Half of Hosties noires was written before World War II, and half during the war, while Senghor was a prisoner. 28. Banania was a popular French breakfast cereal whose ubiquitous advertising campaign featured a racialized Senegalese soldier grinning comically and speaking pidgin French. 29. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Language et poésie négro-africaine” (1954), in Liberté 1, 171. 30. Sainville, “Témoignage,” 131. 31. Rakoto-Ratsimamanga, “Hommage à Senghor,” 144. 32. Bernard Dadié, “Senghor, mon parrain,” in Hommage à Léopold Sédar Senghor, 208–10. Dadié would become a distinguished member of the post–World War II generation of Présence Africaine writers. See Jules-Rosette’s interview in Black Paris, 140–46. 33. Mark Sankalé, “L’ainé du Quartier Latin ou déja la passion de la culture,” in Hommage à Léopold Sédar Senghor, 189. 34. They met at the Foyer des Étudiants Réunionnais, 62 boulevard Saint Michel. Other participants included Azango and Apithy, contributors to Kouyaté’s journal Africa, and Pinto, Diane, Buity, Santos, Yammissou, Ramanjato, and Jean David (vice president of the National Union of French Students). Association des Étudiants Ouest-Africains, October 3, 1938, SLOTFOM III/119. On Azango and Apithy, see Spiegler, “Aspects of Nationalist Thought,” 267–68. 35. Association des Étudiants Ouest-Africain, October 7, 1938, SLOTFOM III/119. 36. Jean Coker, Treasurer, Association des Étudiants Ouest-Africain, to Gaston Joseph, Directeur des Affaires Politiques, Ministère des Colonies, May 5, 1939, SLOTFOM III/119. 37. Association des Étudiants Ouest-Africain, October 7, 1938, SLOTFOM III/119. 38. Ministre des Colonies to GG de l’ AOF, October 11, 1938, SLOTFOM III/119. 39. Senghor’s name does not appear in the reports on future meetings held by the organization.

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Bureau des Affaires Politiques, Ministère des Colonies, to Marius Moutet, May 15, 1939, October 30 1938, and April 10, 1939, SLOTFOM III/119. 40. Sankalé, “Ainé du Quartier Latin,” 190–94. Sankalé describes Senghor as a “methodical” man who exercised daily, ate carefully, managed his time rigorously, dressed neatly, looked serious, and reasoned with intensity. Their group included Alioune Diop, Louis Béhanzin, François Amorin, Victor Diatta, Abdoulaye Ly, Jacques Senghor, Suzanne Diop, Christiane Diop, Solange Faladé, Jacques Rabémananjara, André Anguillé, Pham Van Ky, Guy Tirolien, Sidney Pelage, Albert Béville, Gabriel Lissette, and older figures such as Damas, Birago Diop, and François Dieng. 41. Ibid. 42. Senghor, “Comments,” 20, 23, 41. 43. Senghor (exhibition catalogue), xii. 44. Senghor, “Comments,” 56. 45. Senghor denies ever being connected to the Vichy regime and reports that “as a prisoner of war I spent several months in a retaliation camp in the South-West, for having helped prisoners from Breton escape.” He then recalls that after being freed because of poor health, he joined the Resistance as part of the Front Nationale Universitaire. “After the liberation I still had a case of nitroglycerine bombs. . . . I was awarded a Medaille de la Reconnaissance Franco-Alliée. . . . during the Occupation, I hid in my apartment Mme. Ella d’Andurain, née Raitz, who had committed the triple crime of being communist, Jewish, and of Russian origin. In this way, with her small child that she had with her, she could find someone to lead her into the unoccupied zone. All these facts are verifiable.” Ibid., 14. 46. “A` la mort” and “Nuit dans Sine ” appeared in Cahiers du Sud in 1938; “In Memoriam,” Héritage,” and “Aux tirailleurs sénégalais morts pour la France ” appeared in Volontés in 1939; “Neige sur Paris” appeared in Charpentes in 1939. Senghor (exhibition catalogue), xiii. Senghor was introduced to Georges Pelerson, editor of Charpentes, by an old friend from Louis-le-Grand. Senghor, 101. 47. Racine, Damas, 29–30. 48. Damas, “Entretien,” 199, 200, 30, 198. 49. Ibid., 198. The colonial state in Côte d’Ivoire promoted “native theater,” which usually performed folktales, in order to foster a new “Franco-African culture ” and thereby contain uprooted elite students. Charles Béart, “Le theater indigène en A.O.F.,” Information d’Outre-Mer, nos. 3–4 (May– September 1939): 128–39. 50. Damas, “Entretien,” 198–99, 199. 51. Ibid., 199. 52. Racine, Damas, 29. 53. Ibid.; and Damas, “Entretien,” 198. Londres was a famous anticolonial journalist in France. 54. Racine, Damas, 29. 55. Damas, “Entretien,” 198. 56. Damas, Retour de Guyane, 8. Hereafter this volume is cited in parentheses in the text as Retour. 57. On French colonial penal colonies see Price, Convict and the Colonel, 79–109; and Bullard, Exile to Paradise, 121–62. 58. At the time that Retour de Guyane was written, Félix Éboué from Guiana was governor of Guadeloupe, the first Antillean to serve in that position. He was involved in an intense power struggle with its elected colonial deputies, Gratien Candace and Maurice Satineau, in the context of a militant strike wave and accusations of electoral fraud. Moutet to Éboué, August 24, 1937, CAOM Papiers Moutet PA-28/4/94; Éboué to Moutet, September 8. 1937, PA-28/1/6; Éboué to Ministère, July 18, 1938, dossier personnel, Adolphe Félix Sylvestre Eboué, EEII-4094/1. 59. On these celebrations see Alexandre, Gaston Monnerville, 102–13. 60. “La parole est aux réprouvés . . . ,” Esprit 7, no. 81 (June 1, 1939).

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61. Léon Damas, “Misère noire,” Esprit 7, no. 81 (June 1, 1939): 333–34. 62. Léon Damas, “89 et nous, les noirs,” Europe, no. 139 (July 15, 1939): 511. 63. Damas, “Misère noire,” 334, 336. 64. This irreverent personal attack on a deputy undersecretary of state and ally of Minister Moutet likely contributed to the government’s decision to burn the stocks of Retour de Guyane. After its publication in 1938, extracts of Retour were printed in the Guianese newspaper L’Observateur in order to foment local opposition to Monnerville. Alternatively, Damas was attacked in the pages of Le Petit Guyanais. Alexandre, Gaston Monnerville, 66, 162–71. 65. Damas, “89 et nous,” 347–49. 66. Ibid., 515. 67. Cf. Lukács, “Reification,” in History and Class Consciousness, 149–222; and Sartre, “Orphée noir.” However, this peasant fetish was a departure from Leninist orthodoxy and anticipated later positions adopted by Mao and Fanon. 68. Damas, “89 et nous,” 337. 69. Ibid., 338, 340. 70. Cf. Aimé Césaire, Lettre à Maurice Thorez (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956). 71. Damas, “89 et nous,” 343, 344. 72. On the limitations of such a position, see Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination. 73. Cf. Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries, 72–122; and Fred Constant and Justin Daniel, eds., 1946–1996: Cinquante ans de départmetalisation outré-mer (Paris: Harmattan, 1997). 74. See Jules-Rosette, Black Paris, 70–74, 90–98, 244–49. 75. Notes 1913, dossier personnel, de Coppet, EEII-4682/1. 76. Notes 1914 and 1916, dossier personnel, de Coppet, EEII-4682/1. 77. Notes 1928 and 1929, dossier personnel, de Coppet, EEII-4682/1. 78. Notes 1931, dossier personnel, de Coppet, EEII-4682/1. 79. Notes 1933, dossier personnel, de Coppet, EEII-4682/1. 80. Marcel de Coppet, Discours prononcé par le gouverneur général de l’AOF à l’ouverture de la session du Conseil de gouvernement, novembre 1937 (Gorée: Imprimerie de Gouvernement Général de l’AOF, 1937), 9. 81. Causerie de M. Moutet sur le Comité d’étude des coutumes indigènes, PA28–5/132. 82. Inspecteur de l’Enseignement de l’AOF to Ministère des Colonies Delavignette, December 18, 1936, PA28–4/121; and de Coppet, Discours, 16. 83. Renseignements, September 10, 1937, AAOF 21G-141; and Senghor, “Comments,” 105. 84. “Avec M. Léopold Sédar Senghor,” Paris-Dakar, September 3, 1937, 3. 85. Renseignements, July 19, August 10, and August 27, 1937, AAOF 21G-141. On the power struggle between Diouf and Guèye, see G. Wesley Johnson, “The Impact of the Senegalese Elite upon the French, 1900–1940,” in Johnson, Double Impact, 166–75; and Johnson, Black Politics in Senegal, 144–51. 86. Renseignements, August 9, 1937, AAOF 21G-141. Socé Diop’s speech was published in ParisDakar, August 4 and 5, 1937. 87. Renseignements, August 9, 1937, AAOF 21G-141. 88. Renseignements, August 5, 10, and 27, 1937, AAOF 21G-141. 89. “Avec M. Léopold Sédar Senghor,” Paris-Dakar, September 3, 1937, 3. 90. Ibid.; and “Le problème culturel en AOF,” Paris-Dakar, September 4, 1937, 1. Senghor would not comment on his disagreements with Socé Diop. 91. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Le problème culturel en AOF,” Paris-Dakar, September 7, 1937, 1–2. “Le problème culturel en AOF” was published serially in Paris-Dakar on September 7, 8, 10, and 11,

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1937. Hereafter this article is cited in parentheses in the text by date; the page numbers for all cites are 2. 92. These comments anticipate his later conception of “universal civilization.” 93. Dadié, “Senghor, mon parrain,” 209, 210. 94. De Coppet, Discours, 19. 95. Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 163–64. She also discusses how Senghor’s ideas were extended during the war by younger Africans in Dakar Jeunes, the Vichyist newspaper established by Governor-General Boisson. Ibid., 183–89. 96. Congrès International de l’Évolution Culturelle des Peuples Coloniaux, 26, 27, 28 septembre 1937: Rapports et compte rendu (Paris: Exposition Internationale de Paris, 1938), 21–25. Participants included Paul Rivet, Marcel Griaule, Marcel Mauss, Marcel Cohen, Michel Leiris, Jacques Soustelle, Maurice Leenhardt, Theodor Monod, Denise Paulme, Melville Herskovitz, Labouret, Delavignette, Charton, Monnerville, Paul Hazoumé, Fily-Dabo-Sissoko, and Léopold Senghor. Ibid., 13, 17, 23–35, 122, 125. 97. “Programme,” in Congrès International, 6. 98. Denise Blanche, preface to Congrès International, 13–15. She specifically criticizes Senghor’s antiassimilationist ideas as well as his formulation of “an other humanism” for Africans. 99. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “La résistance de la bourgeoisie sénégalaise à l’École Rurale Populaire,” in Congrès International, 42–44. 100. Ibid., 44. 101. Ibid. 102. Senghor, “Comments,” 106. 103. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Vues sur l’Afrique noire, ou assimiler, non être assimilés” (1945), in Liberté 1, 39. Hereafter this article is cited in parentheses in the text as “Vues.” It was originally published in a volume edited by Delavignette, to whom Senghor dedicates this piece, on the Fourth Republic’s reorganized French imperial community. 104. Labouret, “Citoyenneté de l’empire.” 105. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “La culture et ‘l’empire,’ ” Charpentes 2 (July–August 1939): 61–64. Hereafter this article is cited in parentheses in the text as “Culture.” 106. Charpentes 1 (June 1939). The premier issue included poems by Senghor and Damas as well as Césaire’s translation of Sterling Brown. 107. Cf. Lebovics, True France, 135–71. 108. “Colonies,” Charpentes 2 (July–August 1939): 60. 109. Lucien Combelle, “Retour à l’humanism,” Charpentes 1 (June 1939): 4; Gaston Diehl, “Le temps de la honte,” ibid., 5–7; Georges Pelerson, “Question de valeurs,” ibid., 9, 10, 15, 18. For parallel reflections on “machinism,” culture, and humanism by more politically radical thinkers, see the essays collected in “Discours au Congrès International des Écrivains pour la Defense de la Culture, 21–25 juin 1935,” Europe 151 (15 July 1935): 424–57. 110. Jean Touchard, “L’esprit des années 30: Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française,” reprinted in Révoltés de l’esprit: Les revues des années 30, ed. Pierre Andreu, Raoul Girardet, and Jean Touchard (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1991), 210. 111. See Jacques Maritain, The Social and Political Philosophy of Jacques Maritain: Selected Readings (New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1955); Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism (London: Routledge, 1952); R. William Rauch, Jr., Politics and Belief in Contemporary France: Emmanuel Mounier and Christian Democracy, 1932–1950 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972); Joseph Anthony Amato, Mounier and Maritain: A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1975). Maritain and Mounier flirted with extreme right-wing nationalism early in their careers. Esprit became a forum for colonial humanist writing by both colonizers and colonized

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112. Senghor, “Comments,” 88. 113. Verdier, Homme de couleur, i–ii, x. 114. Among them were R. P. Aupais, André Gide, Henri Labouret, Pierre Do-Dinh, Jacques Roumain, Airanio Coutinho, Jean-Price Mars, Toxaburo Dan, and L. S. Senghor. 115. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Ce que l’homme noir apporte,” in Verdier, Homme de couleur, 293. Hereafter this article is cited in parentheses in the text as “Homme.” 116. See Hughes, Consciousness and Society. 117. Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903; New York: Macmillan, 1955); Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris: Alcan, 1910); Leo Frobenius, “The Nature of Culture ” (1921), in Leo Frobenius, 1873–1973 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1973), 19– 55; André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924), in Manifestoes of Surrealism by A. Breton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). Senghor was familiar with all of these works. Following German idealists such as Herder and Hegel, Frobenius maintained that every society had its own autonomous culture, soul, or paideuma. He argued that African societies were organized around intuitive rather than mechanistic ways of apprehending reality, which led to distinct aesthetic forms, worldviews, and epistemologies. Frobenius’s Africa was a magical world of childlike play, where feeling and (poetic) creativity were privileged over intellect and empirical facts. 118. Critics regularly identify Senghor’s thought as conservative, racist, and even quasi-fascist by focusing only on its nativist strand. Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor; Steins, “Antecedents”; and William B. Cohen, “French Racism and Its African Impact,” in Johnson, Double Impact. It is true, however, that Senghor was influenced by Arthur comte de Gobineau and Maurice Barrès. He writes, “When I arrived in France, I was educated . . . by provincial priests. I was mostly a monarchist. I was very influenced by Barrès [who] helped me to know and love France better, but, at the same time, he reinforced in me the feeling of Negritude, by placing the accent on race, or at least on the nation.” Senghor, Poésie de l’action, 65. Césaire recounts, “Yes, we read Gobineau, Senghor and I. It was mostly to reject him, since he was the great French theorist of racism. But . . . I must acknowledge, Senghor liked him a lot. . . . Gobineau pleased him by having said: ‘art is nègre.’ . . . As a result, the attitude toward Gobineau was very ambivalent.” Quoted in Ngal, Césaire, 211. Senghor seems to have been most attracted to Gobineau’s idea that civilizations and races are necessarily impure, but he regarded such mixture as a source of dynamism, not degeneration as Gobineau did. 119. Senghor, Liberté 1, 8. 120. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Éléments constitutifs d’une civilisation d’inspiration négroafricaine,” in Deuxième Congrès des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs, vol. 1: L’unité des cultures négro-africaines, Présence Africaine, nos. 24–25 (February–May 1959): 279. 121. Senghor, Liberté 1, 7, 8–9. 122. Ibid., 8, 9. 123. Delavignette, Service africaine, 236, 240–41. 124. Ibid., 240–41. 125. See Spiegler, “Aspects of Nationalist Thought”; Dewitte, Mouvements nègres; Mudimbe, Surreptitious Speech; François Manchuelle, “Le role des Antillais dans l’apparition du nationalisme culturel en Afrique noire francophone,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 32 (3), 127 (1992): 375–408; and Manchuelle, “Assimilés ou patriots africains?”; Michael C. Lambert, “From Citizenship to Negritude: ‘Making a Difference ’ in Elite Ideologies of Colonized Francophone West Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 2 (April 1993): 239–62; Miller, Nationalists and Nomads; Edwards, Practice of Diaspora. 126. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 36–39, 66–67, 87–90.

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127. Cf. Wilder, “Race, Reason, Impasse.” 128. In contrast, recent attempts to recuperate the utopian or messianic often risk slipping unnecessarily into transhistorical or transcendental positions that preclude rather than enable concrete political engagement in this world. See Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drusilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Carson (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Derrida, Specters of Marx. For a critique of this “blank utopia,” see LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 152–53.

chapter eight 1. Fanon, Black Skin, 118, 123, 132. 2. Memmi, Libération du juif, 227–29. 3. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 19. Whereas Chakrabarty attributes this dilemma to the existence of incommensurate lifeworlds, I relate it to a contradictory structure of domination. 4. Partha Chatterjee, “Religious Minorities and the Secular State: Reflections on an Indian Impasse,” Public Culture 8, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 32–33, 37, 38. 5. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 2. 6. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 18–22, 47–71, 244–55. 7. On Negritude and European irrationalism, see Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor; Steins, “Antecedents”; Irele, African Experience, 67–88. 8. Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955), 11. Hereafter this volume is cited in the text in parentheses as Discours. 9. Césaire’s analysis resonates with Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 123–302. 10. . He thereby anticipates later arguments by Michel Foucault and Edward Said. 11. Sartre, “Orphée noir.” This essay appeared as the preface to Senghor’s 1948 collection of Francophone black poetry, which helped institutionalize Negritude as a self-conscious movement. Hereafter this essay is cited in the text in parentheses as “Orphée.” 12. Sartre’s sexualized primitivism is revealed in passages such as the following: “technology has contaminated the white peasant, but the noir remains the great male of the earth, sperm of the world. . . . For our black poets . . . being comes from Nothingness like a penis becoming erect” (ibid., xxxi– xxxiv). 13. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “La négritude est un humanisme du XXième siècle” (1966), in Liberté 3: Négritude et civilisation de l’universel (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 70. Hereafter this essay is cited in the text in parentheses as “Négritude.” 14. Senghor, “Apport de la poésie,” in Liberté 1, 139. Hereafter this essay is cited in the text in parentheses as “Apport.” 15. Senghor, “Langage et poésie Négro-Africaine ” (1954), in Liberté 1, 165. Hereafter this essay is cited in the text in parentheses as “Langage.” 16. Senghor, “Éléments constitutifs,” 257–58. Hereafter this essay is cited in the text in parentheses as “Éléments.” 17. Cf. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics; and Frobenius, “Nature of Culture,” in Frobenius. 18. Aimé Césaire, “Poésie et connaissance,” Tropiques, no. 12, (January 1945), reprinted in Tropiques: 1941–1945. Collection complète (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1978), 157. Hereafter this essay is cited in the text in parentheses as “Poésie.” For my translation of certain passages, I consulted Arnold’s translation of “Poetry and Knowledge ” in Césaire, Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, xlii–lvi.

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19. Cf. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). 20. The Nietzschean concept of creative destruction was developed by Joseph Schumpeter to characterize the cyclical character of capitalism and has received attention from Marxist critics. See Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942; New York: Harper, 1975), 82–85; and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 16–18, 105–8. 21. Cf. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900; New York: Macmillan 1911). 22. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 312–19. 23. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1913; Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), 75–139, 224–29. 24. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. See also Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 366–432. 25. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 253, 255. 26. See Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 260–307. 27. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 257, 261. 28. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 190. 29. Senghor, Collected Poetry (Dixon ed.), 575. Hereafter this volume is cited in the text in parentheses as Senghor. 30. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 256. 31. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 117–51. 32. On the colonial genealogy of “fetishism,” see William Pietz, “The Fetish of Civilization: Sacrificial Blood and Monetary Debt,” in Pels and Salemink, Colonial Subjects, 53–81. 33. Damas frequently dedicated poems to his African friends. 34. On the Cahier as an epic poem, see A. James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 168; and Abiola Irele, introduction to Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, ed. Abiola Irele (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), lxix–lxx, 89. 35. Ngal, Césaire, 80–81. 36. Quoted ibid., 82. 37. Damas, Poètes d’expression française, 134. 38. Césaire, “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” Volontés 20 (August 1939): 23–51. A revised version of Cahier was published in Paris by Bordas in 1947 with a preface by André Breton. See Lilian Pestre de Almeida, “Les versions successives du Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” in Césaire 70, ed. M. a M. Ngal and Martin Steins (Paris: Editions Silex, 1984), 35–89. In 1941 Breton met Césaire in Martinique; Césaire had returned home to be a professor at the Lycée Schoelcher, where he taught Fanon. Anticipating Sartre, Breton claimed that Césaire was not simply a black poet but “embraced all that was intolerable and amendable in the general condition of man in this society.” André Breton, “Un grand poète noir,” preface to Cahier d’un retour au pays natal / Return to my Native Land, by Aimé Césaire (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1971), 8–12. 39. Damas, “Entretien,” 195; Damas, “Négritude en question,” 59. 40. Daniel Maximin, “Aimé Césaire: La poésie, parole essentielle,” Présence Africaine, no. 126 (1983): 17 (interview). 41. Quoted in Lilyan Kesteloot, Aimé Césaire (Paris: Seghers, 1962), 190.

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42. Jacqueline Leiner, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire,” in Tropiques, xvii. 43. Anne Guérin, “Aimé Césaire: Le cannibale s’est tassé,” L’Express, May 19 1960, 35. 44. Jeanine Cahen, “Aimé Césaire et les nègres sauvages,” Afrique Action, no. 6 (November 21, 1960). Cf. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 175–81; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guttari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16–27. 45. Leiner, “Entretien,” xxiv. 46. Cahen, “Césaire.” 47. Decraene, “Césaire,” 197. 48. Quoted in Lilyan Kesteloot and Barthélemy Kotchy, Aimé Césaire: L’homme et l’oeuvre (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1993), 203. Césaire characterizes Negritude as “a truly minimal credo that consists in saying simply that I am Nègre and I know it, I am Nègre and I feel solidarity with all other Nègres, I am Nègre and I believe that I am heir to a tradition and that I must give myself the mission of fructifying this heritage.” 49. Kesteloot reads the poem as an autobiographical expression of Césaire’s experience, emphasizing its progressive movement forward and upward. Ngal’s treatment of its themes and style focuses on the poet’s attempt to establish metaphysical harmony with nature and the cosmos as a way to establish authentic roots in the world. Arnold insightfully attends to its poetic form and textual dynamics but within a Hegelian framework that traces the poet’s voyage from alienation to authenticity. Scharfman’s incisive deconstructive reading explores how the poem undermines its own claims regarding subjectivity but remains within an identity paradigm. Kesteloot, Césaire, 25–26; Kesteloot, Écrivains noirs, 148; Kesteloot and Kotchy, Césaire, 24–26; Ngal, Césaire, 119–208; Arnold, Modernism and Negritude; Scharfman, Engagement, 3, 29–34. The créolité movement criticizes Césaire for privileging African identity over a heterogeneous Antillean culture. Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, Lettres créoles: Tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature (Paris: Hatier, 1991), 116–30; Raphael Confiant, Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Paris: Stock, 1993). Other illuminating interpretations nevertheless ascribe a linear movement to the Cahier. Thomas A. Hale, “Structural Dynamics in a Third World Classic: Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” Yale French Studies 53 (1976): 163–74; Maryse Condé, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: Analyse critique (Paris: Hatier, 1978), 31–42; Irele, African Experience, 133–38. 50. Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry, ed. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 35. Hereafter Eshleman and Smith’s outstanding translation is cited in the text in parentheses as Césaire. 51. On hyperbolic, parodic, and carnivalesque language as critique, see LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 281–324. 52. This is regarded as the first use of the term Negritude, which Césaire coined. Later the speaker declares, “my negritude is neither a tower nor cathedral / it takes root in the red flesh of the soil / it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky / it breaks through the opaque prostration with its upright patience” (Césaire, 69). 53. These and most other verses after this point were added later in post-1939 versions of the Cahier. 54. On the exotic Antillean woman, see Burton, “Maman-France Doudou,” 158–63. 55. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Bakhtin, “Discourse and the Novel,” in Dialogic Imagination. See also Morson and Emerson, Bakhtin. 56. After this point, the Cahier conforms again to the 1939 version. 57. The Cahier anticipates Fanon’s discussion of black lived experience in Black Skin, 109–40. On Fanon as rewriting the Cahier, see Wilder, “Race, Reason, Impasse.” 58. Referring to this scene, Césaire recalls, “It was somewhat lived. He was a guy who haunted

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the Latin Quarter. His name was Hanna Charley. A very bizarre man, half mad [cinglé], but also half philosopher and half bum [clochard], who hung out in the Latin Quarter and interrogated every black student. He had moments of prosperity and moments of poverty. He was originally from Guadeloupe. The portrait is not only of him, I mixed together other characters.” Quoted in Ngal, Césaire, 229. Charley was a member of Lamine Senghor’s CDRN in 1926. Dewitte, Mouvements nègres, 131. He later served as president of both the Groupe du Souvenir de Victor Schoelcher and the Société Amicale des Antillais, Guyanais, et Africains de Paris. Hanna Charley, letter, Race Nègre 8, no. 1 (July 1935): 4. 59. It also mirrors the paradigmatic moment of racial interpellation represented in Diop, Mirages de Paris, and Fanon in Black Skin. 60. Decraene, “Césaire,” 194, 197. 61. Césaire, Lettre à Maurice Thorez, 15. 62. Guérin, “Césaire,” 35. 63. Depestre, “Interview with Césaire,” 76–77. 64. See René Ménil, “Pour une lecture critique de Tropiques,” in Tropiques, xxv–xxxviii; Ngal, Césaire, 111–17. Césaire contends that Tropiques and his lycée courses had “an incontestable influence on an entire generation” in Martinique. Leiner, “Entretien,” x. For Ménil’s Marxian repudiation of the Negritude project, see René Ménil, “Une doctrine réactionnaire: La Négritude,” Action: Revue Théorique et Politique du Parti Communiste Martiniquais, August 1, 1963, 35–42. Contemporaneously (1943–44), under the Vichy regime, Senghor helped publish L’Étudiant de la France d’Outre-Mer: Chronique des Foyers, an outgrowth of a study group organized in 1942. It was concerned with colonial student life in the metropole, folklore and ethnology, and new Francophone writing. It published poetry by Senghor and Césaire. A number of younger writers (Alioune Diop, Mark Sankalé, Guy Tirolien, and Jacques Rabemanjara) who would later participate in the Présence Africaine movement were associated with this journal. Copies can be found in SLOTFOM-V/6. Présence Africaine was the journal founded in 1947 and publishing house in 1949 by Alioune and Christian Diop that became the organ of institutionalized Negritude as epitomized by a series of international conferences on black culture and politics in 1956, 1959, and 1966. See Alioune Diop, “Niam n’goura ou les raisons d’être de Présence Africaine,” Présence Africaine, no. 1 (November–December 1947): 7–14; Alioune Diop, “Discours d’ouverture,” in Le Premier Congrès International des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs: Compte rendu complet, Présence Africaine, nos. 8–10 (June–November 1956): 9–18; Paul Hazoume, “L’humanisme occidentale et l’humanisme africain,” ibid., 29–45; “Mélanges” (Réflexions d’hommes de culture): Présence Africaine, 1947–1967 (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1967); Mudimbe, Surreptitious Speech; Jules-Rosette, Black Paris. 65. See Ernest Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire: Deputé à l’assemblée nationale, 1945–1993 (Paris: Harmattan, 1993). 66. Quoted in Ngal, Césaire, 239. 67. Aimé Césaire, “Crise dans les départements d’Outre-Mer ou crise de la départementalisation,” Présence Africaine 36, no. 1 (1961): 109–11; Césaire, “Sur la poésie nationale,” Présence Africaine, no. 4 (October–November 1955): 39–41; Césaire, “Culture et colonisation,” in Premier Congrès International, 190–205; Césaire, Lettre à Maurice Thorez; Césaire, “L’homme de culture et ses responsabilités,” in Deuxième Congrès des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs, 116–22. 68. Aimé Césaire, introduction to Esclavage et colonialisme, by Victor Schoelcher (Paris: PUF, 1948); Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962); Césaire, La tragédie du Roi Christophe (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963); Césaire, Une saison au Congo (Paris: Seuil, 1967); Césaire, Une tempête (Paris: Seuil, 1969). See Ngal, Césaire, 247–70. 69. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 157–94.

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70. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). Jameson links literary production, Marxian critique, and utopian thinking. 71. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 49, 156–96. For another dialectical attempt to link the social imaginary to revolutionary transformations, see Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).

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{ INDEX }

Achille, Louis Thomas, 152, 153, 174, 345n.140 Achille family, 152, 175 Adjovi family, 337n.110 administrative treatises, 59 Adotevi, Stanislas, 232 advisory councils, 137 Africa (journal), 194 African Americans. See black Americans African art, 155, 248. See also black aesthetics African elites (évolués): chiefs and, 114; citizenship desired by, 122, 128, 136, 137; citizenship for, 128, 129–34, 138–39, 144; civic associations developing among, 139–40; deferring rights for, 124–29, 143; as disrupting colonial order, 149; education and disaffection among, 119–23; growth of, 118–19; nationality without citizenship for, 134–39; semi-citizenship proposals for, 135–38, 160; Senghor on, 237–40; West African Student Association and, 215 African expatriates: black public sphere created by, 144; black republicanism of La Dépêche Africaine, 166–71; cultural nationalism of, 4, 5; and L’Étudiant Noir, 185–92; humanism among, 171–79; in imperial Paris, 149–200; as marginalized in metropolitan civil society, 158–59; at Nardal salon, 174; Panafricanism and republican public sphere, 192–98; patriotism of, 161–66; political freedom of, 150; practicing citizenship in Paris, 157–61; radical Panafricanism of, 179–85; in social circulation in French colonies, 27–28; as source of agitation, 94; voluntary associations of, 157 African family: chiefly lineages and, 115; citizenship and, 127, 131–33, 135, 138, 139, 337n.110; customary law and, 109; Delafosse on, 98; Delavignette on individualism and, 102–3; ethnology of, 74; farms, 86, 88, 89, 323n.35; as foundation of rural society, 98, 102;

fragmentation of, 94, 96, 101, 327n.115; état civil indigène for controlling, 104–5; Hardy on individualism and, 101; and immigration control, 338n.116; Labouret on study of, 73, 74; Senghor and, 247. See also marriage African humanism, 147–294; of African and Antillean expatriates, 171–79; Césaire ’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal on, 290; critique of colonial reason, 256–94; cultural nationalism, 201–55; Negritude formulating black humanism, 203; practicing citizenship in imperial Paris, 149–200; Senghor on, 188, 204, 232–52. See also Negritude African languages, 189, 235, 263 African rulers. See chiefs Afrique Française, L’ (periodical), 59–60 Afrique Occidentale Française. See French West Africa Agence Économique, 58–59 Agence Métromer, 193 agriculture: and depression of 1930s, 90–91, 93; French consumers as dependent on colonial, 26; modernization of West African, 85–89; and Office du Niger, 89; USAID project for, 297–98. See also cotton; development “A` la mort” (Senghor), 211 “A` l’appel de la race de Saba” (Senghor), 193, 213, 215, 231 Anderson, Benedict, 27, 153 Angoulvant, Governor-General, 130 anthropology. See ethnology Antillean expatriates: cultural nationalism of, 4, 5; and L’Étudiant Noir, 185–92; Légitime Défense group, 178–79; Maran, 162; as marginalized in metropolitan civil society, 158–59; McKay’s Banjo influencing, 178; at Nardal salon, 174; Panafricanism and republican public sphere, 192–98; as practicing citizenship, 160;

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Antillean expatriates (continued) radical Panafricanism of, 179–85; voluntary associations of, 157 Antilles, French: administrative reorganization proposed for, 169; citizenship in, 160, 169; La Dépêche Africaine and, 166, 168; racial consciousness developing in, 171; republican racism in, 19. See also Antillean expatriates; Guadeloupe; Guiana; Martinique antinomies, 10–11, 261, 262 anti-Semitism, 13, 18 AOF. See French West Africa Apollinaire, Guillaume, 215, 266 Aragon, Louis, 216 Arato, Andrew, 196 Archimbaud, Léon, 32–33 archival research, 22 Arendt, Hannah, 12–13, 21 assimilation: African and Antillean expatriates opposing, 5; Césaire rejects, 156, 188, 189; colonial rationality on association and, 81; colonial reformers opposing, 52, 53; Damas on, 207–8, 222–26, 229, 230, 231, 232, 277; Delafosse opposing, 99; La Dépêche Africaine on, 167, 168, 169; in Diop’s Mirages de Paris, 198; L’Étudiant Noir on, 188; Gratient on, 191; Jews pursuing, 18; Locke on, 176; Maran on, 189; Negritude as rejection of, 156, 188, 202, 224, 227, 243; Negritude cohort as product of, 151; La Revue du Monde Noir on, 173; Senghor on, 209–10, 213, 232, 235–38, 241–42, 272; slavery compared with, 277; turn to native chiefs and shift from, 112; World War I and shift from, 116 association: and assimilation as entangled in practice, 81; colonial humanism and, 52–53; Senghor on, 241–42; turn to native chiefs and shift to, 112; World War I and shift to, 116 autarchy, 83, 92 authenticity: Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal on, 286; Damas on, 218, 224, 225–26, 227, 229, 231, 276, 277; Légitime Défense on, 179; Negritude on, 190, 213, 218; poetry for recovering, 261; in postcolonial Togo, 296; racist valorization of, 149; Senghor on, 208, 213, 250 authority, crisis of French colonial, 93–98

Bachelard, Gaston, 262 bagne, 218–19

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 268–69, 270, 273, 274 Bal Nègre, 199 Banjo (McKay), 176–78, 199, 200 Banque d’Afrique Occidentale, 27 Barety, Léon, 33, 121 Bastille Day parade of 1935, 192–93 Batouala (Maran), 162–64, 165, 166, 189, 259 Baudelaire, Charles, 153, 248, 265 Benga, M., 161 Benjamin, Walter, 269, 270, 293 Bergson, Henri, 246, 257, 262, 268, 270 Beton, Isaac, 183 biopower, 46 black aesthetics (black style), 189, 248, 263; McKay and, 177; Senghor on, 165, 188–89, 206, 210, 263 black Americans: Césaire studies literature of, 278; Damas on, 222–23, 228; Harlem race riot, 208; Negritude group as interested in, 175. See also Harlem Renaissance; New Negro movement black humanism. See African humanism; Negritude black public sphere: Achille family and, 152; commitments to republicanism and Panafricanism in, 196; La Dépêche Africaine and, 167; ethnic spies creating record of, 158; expatriates forming, 5, 150; Kouyaté as leader in, 194; Légitime Défense and, 179; Maran in consolidation of, 166; and Nardal salon, 174; Negritude cohort in contact with, 175; Negritude group as public intellectuals, 214–17; practicing citizenship in imperial Paris, 149–200. See also African humanism; civil society; Negritude, public sphere Black Workers’ Congress (1930), 181 “Blanchi” (Damas), 277 Bonnamaux, Henri, 38 Bordeaux, 26, 181 Brenier, Henri, 31, 32, 33 Breton, André, 206, 215, 246, 266, 358n.38 Brévié, Jules: agricultural development policies of, 297; censorship policy of, 142; on citizenship for African elite, 128; on citizenship for children of Africans, 139; citizenship legislation of 1932, 132–33; on collectivity and individuality, 101; on deferral of rights for natives, 125, 127; and depression of 1930s, 90, 91, 93; on development and social progress, 99; educational reform of, 119–20, 233; on education and dissent, 123; état civil indigène of, 103–4; immigration controlled by, 141; legal reform of, 107, 109–10; and native chiefs, 112, 113–14, 115; Office du Niger created

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by, 89, 91; scientific administration promoted by, 68–70; on semi-citizenship for African elites, 137; on trade unions, 140; urban development policy of, 99–100; welfarism of, 98, 99–100 British International Institute of African Languages and Civilizations, 72 Brown, Sterling, 175, 345n.142 Bulletin du Comité des Études Historiques et Scientifiques de l’AOF, 315n.73 Burkina Faso, 297

Cabane Cubaine, 154, 175, 270 Café La Samaritaine, 183 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Césaire), 278–92; copy sent to Maran, 165; creative destruction in, 279, 280; framing, 278–81; as nègrerie, 294; publication of, 279, 358n.38; reading, 281–92; tensions within, 291 Cahiers du Sud (journal), 216 CAI (Service de Controle et Assistance en France de Indigènes des Colonies), 157–58, 168, 179 Caisse d’Épargne de l’A.O.F., 89 capitalism: antinomy between universalism and particularism in, 11–13; Césaire on, 258–59, 261; colonial, 26–27; colonial modernity and, 9; Damas on, 228, 230, 231; and depression of 1930s, 91; French colonial, 26–27; in Giscard D’Estaing’s report, 92; in McKay’s Banjo, 176–77; nation-state associated with, 11–12; as necessary to understanding French empire, 301; in new logic of colonial development, 89; in Sarraut’s legislative proposal of 1921, 82; Senghor on African society versus, 247; transition from liberalism to welfarism, 17, 43, 48–50 Carde, Jules: censorship policy of, 142; civil registry created by, 103; economic development policies of, 85–88, 297; education reform of, 119; legal reform of, 107–8, 109, 110; and native chiefs, 112; Office of Emigration and Immigration established by, 140; Sarraut influencing, 98; on semi-citizenship for African elites, 137; Senghor presented with prize by, 152 CDRN (Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre), 180 Cenac-Thaly, Daniel, 169 censorship, 141–42, 221 “Ce que l’homme noir apporte ” (Senghor), 245–50 Certificate of Good Life and Morals, 133 Césaire, Aimé: on African and Antillean students,

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186; analytic and hermeneutic modes employed by, 257; arrives in Paris, 152; assimilation rejected by, 156, 188, 189; autocritique of Negritude of, 278–92; background of, 151; on capitalism, 258–59, 261; on Damas, 279–80; and departmentalization, 230; Discours sur le colonialism, 258–59, 291; on early Negritude writing, 207; emotional toll of student life on, 154–55; engagement with multiple African and Antillean movements, 185; and L’Étudiant Noir, 187, 188, 189–90, 192; French education of, 152; Frobenius influencing, 156; as institutional reformer, 291; on Légitime Défense, 178; on limits of cultural nationalism, 232; at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, 153; and Maran, 165; in Martinican Student Association, 185; on McKay’s Banjo, 178; meets Senghor, 152; as national legislator, 298; “Nègreries,” 188, 189–90, 285, 293; on Negritude as resistance to assimilation, 156; in Negritude cohort, 151–57; “Poésie et connaissance,” 265–68; poetics of, 265–68, 279–81; psychological breakdown of, 155, 279; as public intellectual, 291–92; on La Revue du Monde Noir, 174–75; Tropiques published by, 265, 291; and West African Students Association, 186. See also Cahier d’un retour au pays natal; Negritude Césaire, Suzanne, 291 CGTU (Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire), 181, 183 Chad, 233 Chailley-Bert, Joseph, 52 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 159, 257 “Chant d’ombre ” (Senghor), 210 Chants de maldoror (Lautréamont), 259 Chants d’ombre (Senghor): “A` la mort,” 211; “Chant d’ombre,” 210; “Comme je passais,” 270–71; cultural politics in, 208–13; “Émeute à Harlem,” 208; “Femme noire,” 210; “Nostalgie,” 273; “Nuit blanche,” 270; “Le retour de l’enfant prodigue,” 209–10; Senghor’s distinctive voice developed in, 205; transformation of time-space in, 270–73 Charley, Hanna, 287, 359n.58 Charpentes (journal), 216, 243, 244, 245 Charton, Albert, 119, 233, 234, 239 Chatterjee, Partha, 80, 203, 257 chiefs: court system for reducing power of, 107; in French colonial government, 111–15 Chirac, Jacques, 295

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chronotopes, 268–69, 273, 293 circulation in French imperial nation-state: of administrators, 62; of capital and colonial subjects, 26–28, 38, 73, 94, 99–100; La Revue du Monde Noir and black diasporic, 174; Senghor on, 243, 252; of subversive ideas and individuals, 122, 140–41. See also African expatriates; Antillean expatriates; immigration; imperial nation-state; vagabondage citizenship: African culture seen as antithetical to French, 130–34, 143, 144; African elite ’s desire for, 122, 128, 136, 137; African expatriates practicing in Paris, 157–61; in the Antilles, 160, 169; for colonial people, 33–34, 125, 126–34, 138–39, 144, 160, 195–96; La Dépêche Africaine calling for, 167; dual character of, 12, 16; état civil indigène for restricting, 104; exposing tensions in Greater France, 144–45; Greater France dissociating nationality from, 33, 39, 160; Labouret’s imperial citizenship proposal, 144, 242; race as at center of, 14; republican, 129–30; semi-citizenship for African elites, 135–38, 160; Senghor on colonial African, 236, 240; Senghor’s federal imperial scheme, 242–44; two dimensions of, 196 civic associations, 139–40, 142 civic republicanism, 159, 167, 221, 235 civilizing mission, 6–7, 50, 54, 116, 241 civil registries, 103–5 civil rights, 94, 159 civil society: African and Antillean expatriates as marginalized in metropolitan, 158–59, 161; colonial regulation of, 139–42, 158; as concrete abstraction, 158; La Dépêche Africaine and, 167; Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre on, 181; metropolitan, 150; republican conception of, 159–60, 195–96; restrictive measures often strengthening, 149; Senghor on African, 248; as two dimensional, 196. See also black public sphere, citizenship Clifford, James, 274 Clozel, François: administrative ethnography of, 55; civil registry created by, 103; and Delafosse, 55; on Hardy, 57; on indigenous political systems, 54; legal codification by, 108, 109 coercion, 84, 86, 89, 323n.42, 324n.59 Cohen, Jean, 196 Cohen, Marcel, 155 collectivity: citizenship for natives precluded by, 143; colonial reformers both encouraging and

prohibiting, 101–6; in Mauss’s ethnology, 66–67; native chiefs and, 112; Senghor on African, 247 colonial assimilation. See assimilation colonial association. See association Colonial Cotton Association, 87 colonial education: “Africanizing,” 119–20, 239– 40; Congress on Colonial Education of 1931, 38; Damas on, 223; and disaffection among African elites, 119–23; Hardy’s commitment to, 57; for native chiefs, 114–15; Rural Popular Schools, 120, 233; Senghor on, 234–40; sociopolitical breakdown resulting from, 85, 86, 94, 96, 97, 144 colonial elites: Damas on, 207–8, 223–24, 226–28; educational “pilgrimages” of, 27; L’Étudiant Noir on, 187. See also African elites colonial ethnology. See ethnology colonial humanism, 41–145; African elites and, 118–19; L’Afrique Française associated with, 60; antiracism of, 124, 125; and association doctrine, 52, 81; beyond analytic of failure, 76–81; in Brévié’s administration, 68; circular ideal of, 102; on citizenship for native elite, 128, 129–34; on colonial government and native life, 102; and customary authority, 115–16; Damas redeploying language of, 228, 232; de Coppet attempting to pursue, 233; on deferring rights for évolués, 124–29, 143; defined, 76–77; of Delafosse and Brévié, 98–100; double bind of, 142–45; dual imperatives of, 116–17; École Coloniale and, 62; on education and disaffection among African elites, 119–23; International Congress on the Cultural Evolution of Colonial Peoples and, 239; as method of rule, 77; native policy guided by, 76; Negritude movement and, 156, 202–3, 217, 253, 256; Peace Corps program as legacy of, 297; as politically effective, 118, 142–43; and postwar colonial reformers, 55; of postwar reformers, 54–59; prewar precedents for, 52–54; racialization by, 143; for revising imperial order, 4–5; second-order discourse created by, 299; Senghor and, 232–33, 234, 235–36, 237, 238, 240, 241, 243–44, 246, 251–52; shift from civilizing mission to, 50; as simultaneously universalizing and particularizing, 8, 99, 143; as strategy for promoting virtuous circle of growth, 93; temporality, nationality, and citizenship in, 118–45; toward new colonial rationality, 43–75

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colonial modernity, 8–9; colonial humanist welfarism as instance of, 80; racialization as dimension of, 196; in Sarraut’s legislative proposal of 1921, 82; structural contradictions in, 10; technological intervention and ethnographic conservation combined in, 97–98 colonial reform: advisory councils supported by, 137; in Brévié’s administration, 68–70; care as political instrument for, 78, 79; on collectivity and individuality, 101–6; and colonial humanism, 76–77; cultural humanism of, 80, 124; of La Dépêche Africaine, 166–71; École Coloniale and, 62; Institut d’Ethnologie and, 63; of justice system, 106–11; Maran as moderate reformer, 162, 165; Negritude compared with, 202–3, 217; periodicals associated with, 59–60; postwar reformers, 54–59; prewar precedents for, 52–54; publicity about, 59–61; Sarraut as proponent of, 51; Senghor and, 237, 240, 243–44, 251–52; on social science and policy, 71, 74; World War I leading to calls for, 50–52. See also colonial humanism colonial studies, 78–80 Colonial Union, 27 Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre (CDRN), 180 Comité de l’Afrique Française, 59, 315n.71, 315n.73 Comité d’Études Coloniale (Communist Party), 180 Comité Internationale pour la Défense du Peuple Ethiopien, 193 “Comme je passais” (Senghor), 270–71 Commission of Codification, 109–10 Commission of Native Customs, 108 Committee for the Study of Native Customs, 233 commodity form, 11, 12 Communist International, 181, 182 Communist Party, French (PCF): anticolonialism of, 184; Césaire ’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal on, 290; colonial unrest blamed on, 123; Damas contrasted with, 228; and radical Panafricanism, 180, 182, 183, 184; republican institutions challenged by, 29 Compagnie Française d’Afrique Occidentale, 27 concrete abstraction: as analytic category, 21; civil society as, 158; colonial citizenship as, 196; Greater France as, 36, 39–40; Lefebvre on, 38–39; Lukács and, 10; public and private spheres as, 48 Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire (CGTU), 181, 183

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Congress of Berlin (1885), 262 Congress on Colonial Education (1931), 38 Conklin, Alice, 6–7 Cook, Mercer, 166, 175, 345n.142 cosmopolitanism, 177, 196, 253 Cosnier, Henri, 85 Côte d’Ivoire: civil society developing in, 139; civil war in, 295; Clozel’s administrative ethnography in, 55; Damas’s Pigments published in, 216; elite dissent in, 123; legal codification in, 108; native chiefs in, 114; sociopolitical breakdown in, 95, 96; Sudanese migrant laborers traveling to, 73; tension between évolués and traditional leaders in, 123 cotton, production of in West Africa, 87–88. See also development counter-Enlightenment, 261 créolité, 299 creolization, 191 Cri des Nègres, Le (journal), 183, 186 Cubism, 262 Cullen, Countee, 166, 345n.142 cultural assimilation. See assimilation cultural humanism: of Charpentes contributors, 244; of Delafosse, 99; of Delavignette, 63; International Congress on the Cultural Evolution of Colonial Peoples and, 239; of interwar reformers, 80, 124; Senghor and, 235, 243, 249; of Verdier, 245 cultural nationalism, 201–55; as an analytic category, 351n.5; Césaire ’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal on, 287, 290; Damas’s critique of colonialism, 217–32; immanent critique and political imagination, 252–55; Kouyaté’s, 194; in McKay’s Banjo, 177; of Negritude, 150–51, 203; Negritude cultural politics, 204–14; Negritude group as public intellectuals, 214–17; for revising imperial order, 4–5; Senghor’s African humanism, 232–52; situating Negritude, 202–4 cultural politics: as an analytic category, 205; Césaire and, 283, 291; Damas and, 216, 218, 225, 227, 229, 232; Gilroy on, 351n.9; Negritude ’s 201–2, 204, 207, 252, 270; La Revue du Monde Noir and, 173; in Senghor’s poetry, 208, 211; of subject-citizens, 197 cultural relativism: assimilation criticized by, 52; of colonial humanism, 124; and deferral of rights for natives, 127; of Delafosse, 98–99; of Mauss, 66–67; in Senghor, 237 “culture et ‘l’empire,’ La” (Senghor), 243–44

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Cunard, Nancy, 192 customary chiefs. See chiefs customary law, 106–11, 131, 136

Dadaism, 261 Dadié, Bernard, 214, 238 Dahomey: de Coppet as governor of, 233; elite dissent in, 122; identity cards in, 141; native chiefs in, 112, 114; sociopolitical breakdown in, 95, 96 Dakar, 94, 100, 179 Damas, Léon-Gontran: and African Americans, 175, 345n.142; analytic and hermeneutic modes employed by, 257; on assimilation, 207–8, 222–26, 229, 230, 231, 277; on authenticity, 218, 224, 225–26, 227, 229, 231, 276, 277; background of, 151; and Césaire ’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 279–80; on connections between African and Antillean students, 186; and Diagne, 153; “89 et nous, les noirs,” 222, 224, 225, 228; on empire as economically integrated, 228, 243; engagement with multiple African and Antillean movements, 185; ethnographic mission to Guiana, 155, 217–18, 275; and L’Étudiant Noir, 187; in Fédération des Peuples Colonisés, 193; in French avant-garde, 215, 216; French education of, 152; Frobenius influencing, 156; gender ideology in poetry of, 275–76; and Guèye, 162; immanent critique of, 231, 252–53; on Légitime Défense, 178; and Maran, 165; on McKay’s Banjo, 177–78; meets Césaire, 152; “Misère noire,” 222; moves to France, 152, 154; as national legislator, 298; on Negritude, 156; in Negritude cohort, 151–57; and New Negro writings, 175; one-sided vision of modernization of, 231, 253; on politics and literature, 205; as public intellectual, 216–17; Retour de Guyane, 165, 217–32; on La Revue du Monde Noir, 174; Senghor on, 153; and West African Students Association, 186. See also Pigments decolonization, 254, 299, 300 de Coppet, Marcel, 122, 133, 233–34, 238–39, 332n.199 Delafosse, Maurice: on African family, 98; antiracism of, 124; and Brévié, 68, 98, 99, 109; as colonial reformer, 55–56, 59; cultural humanism of, 99; Damas reading, 155; in Diop’s Mirages de Paris, 199; at École Coloniale, 56, 61; at École des Langues Orientales, 56, 58; on

ethnology and policy, 70; Haut-Sénégal-Niger, 55, 68, 329n.148; and International Congress on Native Society, 71; Negritude drawing on, 257; on self-determination, 98–99; Senghor citing, 246; on welfare and development, 98 de Lanessan, Jean, 52 Delavignette, Robert: at Agence Économique, 58–59; on art of administration, 69, 70; on collectivity and individuality, 102–3; as colonial reformer, 56, 57, 58; Damas meeting, 155; on Damas’s anticolonial poetry, 217; in Diop’s Mirages de Paris, 199; on disaffected populations, 122; at École Coloniale, 36, 59, 61, 62–63; on fraternity in difference, 124, 236; on Greater France, 35–36, 240; in Ministry of Colonies, 59, 332n.199; on native mentalities, 71; Les paysans noirs, 58, 102; preface to Diop’s Karim, 186; on Rural Popular Schools, 120; and Senghor, 251; Service africain, 251; Soudan–Paris–Bourgogne, 35; Toum, 58; on the tour, 69 democracy, Senghor on African, 247–48 democratization, 15, 18 Deng, François, 154 departmentalization, 230, 231, 232, 291, 298 Dépêche Africaine, La (journal), 166–71; and Nardal salon, 174; Nardal’s “L’internationalisme noir” in, 171; La Revue du Monde Noir compared with, 172, 173; seen as political threat by state, 179 Depestre, René, 232 depression of 1930s, 90–93 de Saussure, Léopold, 52, 54 Descartes, René, 270 Deschamps, Hubert, 56 Desnos, Robert, 216 Deuxième Congrès des Écrivains pour la Défense de la Culture (1938), 175, 216 development: African family and, 102; Brévié on social progress and, 99; chiefs and, 114–15; chiefs and, 114; Damas on, 230; economic crisis and, 90–93, 94; ethnological training and, 63; Fourn on native policy and, 95; Homberg on, 31–32; new logic of colonial, 81–90; as objective of colonial humanism, 76, 80; in postcolonial Togo, 297; public works, 30, 82, 83, 99, 298; in Sarraut’s 1921 legislative proposal, 30–31, 81–82; World War I and, 26–27, 83–84. See also agriculture Diagne, Blaise, 129, 161, 162, 342n.77 Diagne, Soulèye, 153 Diop, Alioune, 214

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Diop, Birago: and Guèye, 162; in Negritude group, 154; in West African Student Association, 186–87 Diop, Ousmane Socé: Césaire meets at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, 153; Dakar Chamber of Commerce speech of, 234; Karim, 165, 186; Mirages de Paris, 186, 198–200, 254, 273; in Negritude group, 154; in West African Student Association, 186 Diouf, Galandou, 133, 234 Dioury, Sidy Mohamed, 214 Discours sur le colonialism (Césaire), 258–59, 291 Domination et colonisation (Harmand), 52–53 Donzelot, Jacques, 17, 321n.4 Dreyfus affair, 18 Dubois, Laurent, 19 DuBois, W. E. B., 165, 172, 181 Duchène, Albert, 31, 33 Durkheimian sociology, 62, 65, 67, 76, 199

Éboué, Félix, 353n.58 Eboué, Henri, 187, 188, 189 École Coloniale, 61–63; Delafosse at, 56, 61; Delavignette at, 36, 59, 61, 62–63; Hardy at, 57, 61; and Institut d’Ethnologie, 61, 63; Labouret at, 58, 61, 73, 315n.66; Outre-Mer, 34, 60, 62, 72; renamed École Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer, 59; Vignon at, 54 École des Langues Orientales: Damas studying at, 152, 155; de Coppet studying at, 233; Delafosse at, 55, 56, 58; and École Coloniale, 61; Labouret at, 58, 73 École Libre des Sciences Politiques, 31, 33 economic crisis. See depression of 1930s economy, colonial. See development education, colonial. See colonial education “89 et nous, les noirs” (Damas), 222, 224, 225, 228 elites, colonial. See colonial elites emancipation of slaves, 19, 183, 201, 222, 229 “Émeute à Harlem” (Senghor), 208 emotion: Césaire on poetic knowledge and, 265; Senghor on African art and, 248; Senghor on black reason and, 263–65; Senghor on emotion as African and reason as Hellenic, 245–46 engagé literature, 202, 208, 211, 213, 280 equality: black republicanism calling for, 167; Damas on, 222, 229; French republicanism as based on, 16, 25, 130; Senghor on African, 248; Senghor on African women’s, 247

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Esprit (journal), 216, 222, 244 essentialism, 241, 251 état civil: indigène, 103–5, 106, 131, 138, 141; marriage in French, 132 “Et Caetera” (Damas), 208 Ethiopia, Italian invasion of, 193–95 “Ethnologie coloniale ” (Labouret), 71 ethnology, 63–75; Brévié on colonial government and, 68–70; in colonial administration, 70–75; in colonial reformers’ cultural humanism, 80; Damas’s ethnographic mission to Guiana, 155, 217–18, 275; in Damas’s “Limbé,” 275; of Delafosse, 55; at École Coloniale, 61, 62; ethnological era of colonialism, 28; of Labouret, 58, 61; of Lévy-Bruhl, 64–65; of Mauss, 64, 65–67; Musée de l’Homme, 64; Negritude drawing on, 257; Outre-Mer associated with, 60; postcolonial critique of, 224; Senghor and Damas studying, 155–56; Senghor on, 245, 246. See also Institut d’Ethnologie Étoile Nord Africain, 192 Étudiant Noir, L’ (journal), 185–92; Césaire ’s article in, 188, 189–90, 285; and Italian invasion of Ethiopia, 193; Negritude and, 187, 202; police surveillance of, 192; self-reflexive criticism in, 254; Senghor’s article in, 187, 188–89, 190, 192, 235 Europe (journal), 216, 222 évolués. See African elites expatriates. See African expatriates; Antillean expatriates Expressionism, 262 Eyadema, Gnassingbe, 296, 297

family, African. See African family family allowance system, 49 famine in Niger, 95–96 Fanon, Frantz, 198, 232, 256–57, 260, 297 fascism, 29, 192–93, 246 Faure, Émile, 182–83, 193 Fauvism, 262 federation: Damas’ vision of imperial, 240, 244, 250, 252; Kouyaté’s plan for imperial, 194–95; movement for intercolonial, 193–94; proposals for Greater France as imperial, 5, 23, 34, 144–45, 203, 254; Senghor’s vision of imperial, 240, 244, 250, 252 Fédération des Peuples Colonisés, 193–94 “Femme noire ” (Senghor), 210

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fetish objects, 275–76 fieldwork monographs, 74 First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists (1956), 291 forced labor (coercion), 84, 86, 89, 323n.42, 324n.59 foreigners, 17–18, 141 Foucault, Michel: influence on this study, 21; on political rationality, 14, 44–47; on theoretical schemas, 41; on utopias and heterotopias, 36–37 Fourn, Governor, 95 Fourth Republic, 291, 296, 295 Foyers des Étudiants Coloniaux, 215 France: colonial emigration to, 141; colonial workers in, 27–28; crises of universalism in, 15–19; Fourth Republic, 291, 296, 295; Gaul, 31, 35; national paradigm of, 3; as node in imperial network, 28; Second Empire, 219, 220; Second Republic, 17; survival of empire after World War I, 4. See also French imperial nation-state; French Revolution; Paris; Third Republic French Antilles. See Antilles, French French Colonial Congresses, 52 French colonialism: capitalism of, 26–27; civilizing mission of, 6–7, 50, 54, 116, 241; colonial publicity, 59–61; colonies conceptualized as political whole, 25; colonies reconceptualized after World War I, 4, 19; contradiction between universalism and particularism in, 5–8; Damas’s Retour de Guyane on, 217–32; decolonization, 299, 300; departmentalization, 230, 231, 232, 291, 298; dual imperative of colonial government, 101–11; ethnology of, 28, 63–75; Greater France discourse as concrete abstraction, 36–40; Greater France discourse as justifying, 24, 29–36; International Colonial Exposition of 1931, 37–38, 59, 181, 198; Kouyaté’s Franco-overseas alliance proposal for, 194–95; Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre on, 181; Maran’s critique of, 162–64; Negritude as transcending colonial time-space, 268–78; Negritude ’s critique of colonial reason, 256–94; new logic of development in, 81–90; reconciling republicanism with colonialism, 25–26, 201; Sarraut’s legislative proposal of 1921, 30, 81–82, 90; Senghor on, 232–52; social circulation in, 27–28; toward new colonial rationality, 43–75. See also Antilles, French; colonial education; colonial reform; French West Africa; Greater France; native policy

French Communist Party. See Communist Party, French (PCF) French imperial nation-state: as artifact of colonial modernity, 8–9; contradiction between universalism and particularity in, 5–8; Damas and Senghor as caught up in double-binds of, 254; development of, 24–29; disjointed political form of, 7–8; internal contradictions of, 21–22; legacies of, 295–302; republican France as never not imperial nation-state, 3; Sarraut’s integrated vision of, 82; as a system, 26; transnational forms of identification in, 196–97. See also federation; French colonialism; nation-state French Revolution: antinomy as legacy of, 10; in Damas’s “89 et nous, les noirs,” 222; in Damas’s “Ils sont venus ce soir,” 275; liberalization, democratization, and rationalization converging in, 15, 26; Senghor’s “A` l’appel de la race de Saba” invoking, 213; slavery abolished by, 201; on sovereignty of the nation, 12–13; Toussaint-L’Ouverture and, 225 French West Africa: advisory councils in, 137; Brévié as governor-general, 68–70; Carde as governor-general, 85–88; censorship in, 141–42; circulation regulated in, 140–41; citizenship for native elite, 128, 129–34, 160; civic associations in, 139–40, 142; civil society regulated in, 139–42, 158; colonial humanism in, 77; colonial publicity about, 59–61; colonial rationality in, 43–44, 50, 54, 55–61; customary law in, 106–11; de Coppet becomes governor-general of, 233; deferring rights for évolués, 124–29, 143; Delavignette on France and, 35–36; La Dépêche Africaine on reform in, 166–71; during depression of 1930s, 90–93; dual imperative in, 4–5, 101–16; état civil indigène, 103–5; finance capital in, 27; Labouret’s imperial citizenship proposal, 144; legacies of, 295–302; nationality without citizenship for African elites, 134–39; neomercantilism in, 83–84; new logic of development in, 81–90; postwar colonial reformers in, 55–59; property registration, 105–6; public works projects in, 83; rural depopulation in, 94–95; semi-citizenship for African elites, 135–38, 160; Senghor’s report on education in, 234–39; sociopolitical breakdown feared, 93–98, 149; Van Vollenhoven as governor-general, 84; welfarism in, 79–80; in World War I, 50; World War I and economic development in, 83–84. See

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also African expatriates; African family; chiefs; Côte d’Ivoire; Dahomey; Haute-Volta; Niger; Senegal; Sudan Freud, Sigmund, 178, 268, 269, 270 Frobenius, Leo, 155, 156, 245, 246, 257, 356n.117

Gallieni, Joseph, 54 Galmot, Jean, 170, 344n.119 Garvey, Marcus, 165, 168 Gaul, 31, 35 Geismar, Léon, 110, 111 Ghana, 297 Gide, André, 153, 162, 215 Gift, The (Mauss), 67 Girardet, Raoul, 77 Girault, Arthur, 34, 127 Giscard D’Estaing, M., 91–92 Glissant, Edouard, 257 Gobineau, Arthur, comte de, 356n.118 governmentality, 46–47 Gratient, Gilbert, 187, 190–91, 223 Greater France, 24–40; African and Antillean expatriates envisioning alternative, 5; colonial citizenship exposing tensions in, 144–45; as concrete abstraction, 36–40, 200, 255; Damas on, 221, 228, 229, 232; Delavignette on, 35–36, 240; empire reconceptualized after World War I, 4, 29–36; League of Nations mandates, 51; nationality dissociated from citizenship in, 33, 39, 160; Negritude reconceptualizing, 252, 253, 254; Sarraut on, 30–31, 32, 126; Senghor and, 212–13, 232, 235, 236, 240, 250; toward imperial nation-state, 24–29. See also French colonialism Griaule, Marcel, 63–64 Guadeloupe: citizenship in, 160; La Dépêche Africaine and, 166; republican racism in, 19; sénatus-consulte of 1854, 219 Guèye, Abdou Kader, 214 Guèye, Lamine, 161–62, 234, 239 Guiana: citizenship in, 160; Damas’s ethnographic mission to, 155, 217–18, 275; in Damas’s Retour de Guyane, 217–32; Inini territory proposal, 169–70; mineral extraction from, 230; riot trial of 1931, 170, 344n.119 Guillen, Nicolas, 216 Guyer, Jane, 88

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Hadj, Messali, 192, 193 Haiti, 225, 283 Hardy, Georges: on citizenship for colonial people, 127; on collectivity and individuality, 101; and colonial education, 119, 234, 239; as colonial reformer, 56, 57–58, 59; at École Coloniale, 57, 61; on ethnic psychology, 70–71; Outre-Mer founded by, 60; on scientific knowledge in administration, 69–70 Harlem race riot, 208 Harlem Renaissance: Damas as interested in, 153; Maran introduces Francophone black intellectuals to, 166; Negritude influenced by, 175 Harmand, Jules, 52–53, 54 Harvey, David, 293 Haute-Volta: justice system in, 107–8; Lobi people, 56, 72; native chiefs in, 113, 114; peanut oil press in, 102 Haut-Sénégal-Niger: Brévié in organization of, 68; legal codification in, 109 Haut-Sénégal-Niger (Delafosse), 55, 68, 329n.148 Hazoumé, Paul, 71, 316n.81 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 12, 289–90 Heidegger, Martin, 246, 257, 260 Heisenberg, Werner, 262 Herskovitz, Melville, 217 heterotopia, Greater France as, 36–37 Hirsch, Joachim, 20 Holt, Thomas, 201 Homberg, Octave, 31–32 Homburger, Lilias, 155 Hosties noires (Senghor), 212 Hughes, Langston: Les Continents publishing, 166; at Deuxième Congrès des Écrivains pour la Défense de la Culture, 175, 216; in Diop’s Mirages de Paris, 199; Negritude group as interested in, 175–76, 345n.142; La Revue du Monde Noir publishing, 173; Senghor and black students reading, 215 humanism: meanings of, 23. See also African humanism; colonial humanism; cultural humanism human rights: in anticolonial critique, 203; Césaire on political domination and, 266; versus the nation, 12–13, 16; race as at center of, 14; West African natives denied, 80

identity cards (in French West Africa), 140–41 identity politics, 191

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“Ils sont” (Damas), 207 “Ils sont venus ce soir” (Damas), 274–75 immanent critique, 79; Arendt’s of the nation-state, 14; of colonial humanism, 129, 145; Negritude as, 177, 198, 200, 231, 250, 252–54, 256–57, 265, 292; political rationality and, 47; Postone on 20, 252; working through as, 8, 20 immigration, 17–18, 27–28, 38, 94, 141. See also African expatriates; Antillean expatriates; circulation; Negritude Indigènes d’Elite, 136 individualism: African elites seen as individuals, 143; colonial humanism promoting bourgeois, 143, 203; colonial reformers both encouraging and prohibiting, 101–6; Labouret on Lobi, 56; in Mauss’s ethnology, 67; native chiefs and, 112; Senghor on African, 247; Senghor on Western, 248 Inini, 169–70 Institut de Géographie, 61 Institut d’Ethnologie: Damas studying at, 152, 155; Delafosse in creation of, 56; École Coloniale and, 61, 63–64; monographs published by, 315n.73; Senghor studying at, 205 Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, 70 Institut Nègre de Paris, 182, 183 Intercolonial Union, 180 International Colonial Exposition (1931), 37–38, 59, 181, 198 International Congress of Colonial Sociology (1900), 52 International Congress on Native Society (1931), 71 International Congress on the Cultural Evolution of Colonial Peoples (1937), 239–40 internationalism: Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre on, 180; Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre on, 181; Nardal’s “L’internationalisme noir,” 171; New Negro movement and, 176; Sartre on race consciousness and, 260; in Senghor’s poetry, 210, 213, 231 “internationalisme noir, L’ ” (Nardal), 171 intuition, Senghor on, 263. See also emotion irrationalism, 246, 257, 261, 264, 267 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, 193–95

Jacomet, P., 135 Jaffard, Hélène, 182 Jaillard, A., 186

Jean-Louis, Henri, 179 Jessop, Bob, 12 Je Suis Partout (newspaper), 191–92 Jeune Garde, Le (journal), 226 Jews, 13, 18 Jospin, Lionel, 295 jus solis, 138–39

Kant, Immanuel, 10, 12, 267, 270 Karim (Diop), 165, 186 Kelley, Robin, 293 Kiem, Pham Duy, 153 Kouyaté, Tiemoko Garan: Africa founded by, 194; in Agence Métromer, 193; in Comité Internationale pour la Défense du Peuple Ethiopien, 193; in Fédération des Peuples Colonisés, 193; Franco-overseas alliance proposal of, 194–95; in Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre, 180–83; in Union de Travailleurs Nègres, 183; and West African Student Association, 214

labor coercion, 84, 86, 89, 323n.42, 324n.59 Labouret, Henri: on art of administration, 69; on citizenship for colonial people, 127; on collectivity and individuality, 101; as colonial reformer, 56, 57, 58, 59; on deferral of rights for native elite, 128; at École Coloniale, 58, 61, 73, 315n.66; at École des Langues Orientales, 58, 73; “Ethnologie coloniale,” 71; as ethnologist, 58, 61; imperial citizenship proposal of, 144, 242; Les manding et leur langue, 73–74; at Ministry of Colonies, 58; Plan for Regional Monographs of, 72; scholarly affiliations of, 319n.139; on sociopolitical breakdown, 96; on sociopolitical institutions and policy, 71–74; Les tribus du rameau Lobi, 72–73 LaCapra, Dominick, 8 Lampué, Pierre, 34 Latron, M., 34 Lautréamont, Isidore Ducasse, comte de, 178, 259, 266, 267, 281, 282 Lavergne, Bernard, 136–37 law, customary, 106–11 LDRN (Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre), 180–83 League of Nations, 51, 181, 195 learned societies, 60, 315n.73

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Lebanese merchants, 27 Ledru-Rollin, Louis, 221 Leenhardt, Maurice, 64 Lefebvre, Henri, 38–39 legal codification. See customary law Légitime Défense (journal), 178–79; colonial students contrasted with, 185; Damas and, 205, 224; Sainville and Gratient compared with, 190; Senghor and, 178, 179, 186 Leiris, Michel, 64, 216 Lenin, V. I., 51 Léro, Étienne, 178, 179, 192 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 62, 63, 64–65, 68, 246, 257 liberalism: contradictions in, 201; Damas on racism and, 229; Negritude linking liberal and postliberal discourse, 257–58; as rooted in nation-state, 14; transition to welfarism from, 17, 43, 48–50 liberalization, 15, 18 Liberté: Négritude et humanisme (Senghor), 250 Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre (LDRN), 180–83 “Limbé” (Damas), 275–77 Lobi, 56, 72 Locke, Alain, 165, 166, 175, 176, 177, 345n.142 Lukács, Georg, 10–11 Lyautey, Hubert, 54, 69 Lycée Louis-le-Grand, 152–53

macrohistories, 301 maison du bonheur, La (Maran), 165 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 266 manding et leur langue, Les (Labouret), 73–74 Mann, Gregory, 88 Maran, René, 162–66; Agence Métromer bulletin edited by, 193; articles in Les Continents, 164, 166; autobiography of, 164–65, 200; Batouala, 162–64, 165, 166, 189, 259; black students read, 215; and La Dépêche Africaine, 166; at Deuxième Congrès des Écrivains pour la Défense de la Culture, 216; in Diop’s Mirages de Paris, 199; identifies as nègre, 165; La maison du bonheur, 165; as moderate reformer, 162, 165; as precursor of Negritude, 162, 165; Senghor and Damas attend talk by, 153; Senghor on, 189, 235; as subject-citizen, 164, 179; Un homme pareil aux autres, 164–65, 200; and Union de Travailleurs Nègres, 183 Maritain, Jacques, 244, 245, 247

397

marriage: alliances of chiefs and interpreters, 113; attempts to transform, 328n.130; child, 111; citizenship and colonial, 131–35, 138–39, 336n.88; Delavignette on African, 102; état-civil and customary, 103, 104, 109. See also African family; état-civil “Marseillaise,” 213 Marseille: economic links with colonies, 26; Kouyaté’s black union in, 181; in McKay’s Banjo, 176–77 Marseille, Jacques, 26, 92, 325n.64 Martinican Student Association, 185, 187 Martinique: in Césaire ’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 281–82, 290; citizenship in, 160; La Dépêche Africaine and, 166; Gratient on racial stratification in, 190–91; postcolonial impasse confronting, 257; Sainville on class divisions in, 190; and sénatus-consulte of 1854, 219 Marx, Karl, 9, 11–12, 14, 21, 39, 178, 321n.4 Marxism: Communist International, 181, 182; of Damas, 222, 228–29, 231; of Légitime Défense, 178–79; for understanding noneconomic dimensions of modernity, 15. See also Communist Party, French (PCF) Mauss, Marcel: Damas and, 155; Delafosse and, 99; École Coloniale entrants expected to have studied, 62; ethnological views of, 65–67; The Gift, 67, 317n.109; as Institut d’Ethnologie founder, 63; International Congress on Native Society and, 71; Musée de l’Homme and principles of, 64; native policy and, 76; Negritude drawing on, 257; La Revue du Monde Noir on, 174; Senghor studying with, 155 McKay, Claude: Banjo, 176–78, 199, 200; Damas and Senghor translating, 175; in Diop’s Mirages de Paris, 199; Negritude influenced by, 176; La Revue du Monde Noir publishing, 173; “To America,” 176 Memmi, Albert, 145, 147, 260 Ménil, René, 178–79, 291 mentalities, 65, 66, 71, 125 mercantilism, 26, 29, 82, 83–84, 92 Merlin, Governor-General, 107 “message, Le ” (Senghor), 209 methodology of this study, 20–23 métissage: African and Antillean expatriates celebrating, 5; in Diop’s Mirages de Paris, 199; Gratient on racial stratification in Martinique, 190–91; versus racial authenticity, 200;

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métissage (continued) Senghor on Maran’s, 189; Senghor’s black ontology and, 251 Michelet, Charles, 34 microhistories, 22, 302 Mirages de Paris (Diop), 186, 198–200, 254, 273 mise en valeur: Carde on, 85; colonial education and, 38; Delafosse on, 56; and economic depression, 90; évolués and 121; Homberg on, 31; and the Intitut d’Ethnologie, 63; Sarraut on, 68; Van Vollenhoven on, 84. See also development “Misère noire ” (Damas), 222 Mission Ethnographique et Linguistique DakarDjibouti (1931–33), 63–64 Mission to Civilize, A (Conklin), 6–7 Mobutu Sese Seko, 295, 296 modernism (artistic): Césaire ’s genealogy of, 265–66; epistemological certainties revised by, 270; Negritude drawing on antirealist, 179, 257, 261–62; Senghor on black aesthetic and, 248; Symbolism, 206, 257, 262. See also Surrealism modernity: anticolonial nationalism accepting, 203; depression of 1930s delaying French economic modernization, 92; Foucault on political rationality in, 44–47; Légitime Défense group on, 178–79; Locke on, 176; McKay on, 176–78; modernization of West African agriculture, 85–89; Negritude as immanent critique of, 252–55, 257; in Negritude ’s politics and poetics, 261–68; La Revue du Monde Noir’s critique of, 173; Senghor and, 211–12, 232, 242, 246, 249, 250–51. See also colonial modernity; modernism Monnerot, Jules, 178, 184, 186, 192 Monnerville, Gaston, 169–70, 193, 224, 230, 344n.119, 354n.64 Mounier, Emmanuel, 216, 244, 245 Moutet, Marius, 59, 215, 221, 332n.199 Musée de l’Homme, 64, 217

Napoleon III, 219 Nardal, Jane: and Guèye, 162; “L’internationalisme noir,” 171; salon of, 174–75, 178 Nardal, Paulette: in Comité Internationale pour la Défense du Peuple Ethiopien, 193; L’Étudiant Noir article of, 187–88, 192, 198, 287; and Guèye, 162; and Institut Nègre de Paris, 182; and La Revue du Monde Noir, 171, 172; salon of, 174–75, 178

nationalism: and African elite ’s dissent, 122, 123; Chatterjee on anticolonial, 203; La Dépêche Africaine rejecting, 167, 168; republicanism’s failure associated with, 15; Russian Revolution influencing, 51, 94. See also cultural nationalism; Panafricanism nationality: without citizenship for African elites, 134–39, 161; Benga on, 342n.73; Greater France dissociating citizenship from, 33, 39, 160; immigration and, 17–18, 19; Kouyaté on, 182, 194; Lamine Senghor on, 180; Negritude on, 254; race as at center of, 14; La Revue do Monde Noir on, 172; sovereignty of the nation, 12–13, 16. See also black internationalism; citizenship; cultural nationalism; federation nation-state: antinomies of, 10–15; capitalism and, 11–12; historicizing, 204; Mauss’s definition of nation, 66; paradoxes of colonizing, 13–14. See also French imperial nation-state; nationalism native chiefs. See chiefs native justice system. See customary law native policy: African elites and, 118–19; as both promoting and preventing evolution, 74; Brévié on pedagogy and, 119; colonial reformers on, 54, 71; Delafosse and, 70, 99; Delavignette on, 70; economic development, welfare, and political authority as related in, 97; Hardy on, 69–70; Harmand on, 53; of Labouret, 56, 58; Mauss and, 67; in postwar French West Africa, 77; for promoting virtuous circle of growth, 93; social science and, 74, 76; sociopolitical breakdown opposed with, 95; Vignon on, 53 nativism: Césaire ’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and, 282, 283, 285, 286, 288, 289; versus cosmopolitanism in African and Antillean expatriates, 196; Damas and, 223, 227, 229, 231; in McKay’s Banjo, 177; Negritude and, 156, 186, 191, 202, 218, 252, 253, 299; La Revue du Monde Noir and, 172; of Senghor, 251, 262 Nazi Germany, 123, 258 Ndiaye, Édouard, 214 “Nègreries” (Césaire), 188, 189–90, 285, 293 Nègres Bosh, 218, 225 Negritude: on alliance between masses and elite, 227; as anticolonial resistance movement, 202; antirealist modernism and, 179, 257, 261–62; assimilation rejected by, 156, 188, 202, 224, 227, 243; on authenticity, 190, 213, 218; Césaire ’s autocritique of, 278–92; cohort of, 151–57; colonial humanism and, 156, 202–3, 217, 253,

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256; colonial reformers compared with, 202–3, 217; conceptual and historical originality of, 254–55; critique of colonial reason of, 256–94; cultural nationalism of, 150–51, 201–55; as cultural politics, 204–14; during decolonization, 299; dialectical poetry of, 293; in Diop’s Mirages de Paris, 186, 198, 200; double identification strategy of, 212; dual functioning of, 197–98, 203; as elite Francophile movement, 202; elitism of, 185; and L’Étudiant Noir, 187, 202; Gratient challenging, 190, 191; as immanent critique, 252–55, 257; legacy of, 299; on Légitime Défense group, 178–79; liberal and postliberal discourse linked by, 257–58; Lycée Louis-le-Grand in genesis of, 153; Maran as precursor of, 162, 165; and McKay’s Banjo, 177; as nativism, 156, 186, 191, 202, 218, 252, 253, 299; and New Negro writings, 175–78; origins of, 5; Panafricanism of, 175, 185, 202, 203, 253, 256; poetic immediacy as characteristic of, 207; poetry as privileged medium for, 205; on politics and poetics, 258–68; and Popular Front, 195; practicing citizenship in imperial Paris, 149–200; as public intellectuals, 214–17; as quasi-institutionalized movement, 298; and radical Panafricanism, 185; as remaining in Paris after their studies, 227; republicanism of, 203, 253, 256; revolutionary rejection of, 232, 299; and La Revue du Monde Noir, 174–75; Sainville challenging, 190; Sartre on, 259–61; Senghor’s canonical definition of, 250; Senghor’s Chants d’ombre as meta-narrative of, 205, 208–12; situating, 202–4; and Surrealism, 179. 257, 261, 262; in Togolese schools, 296–97; as transcending colonial time-space, 268–78; utopian poetics of, 292–94. See also Césaire, Aimé; Damas, Léon-Gontran; Senghor, Léopold Sédar neoliberalism, 14 neomercantilism, 82, 83–84, 92 Neruda, Pablo, 216 New Negro movement: La Dépêche Africaine and, 168; Maran in The New Negro, 165; Nardal and, 171; Negritude cohort and, 175–78; La Revue du Monde Noir and, 172; Senghor and black students reading, 215; in Senghor’s Dakar Chamber of Commerce speech, 237–38 Niger: famine of 1931 in, 95–96; Haut-SénégalNiger, 68, 109; native chiefs in, 112 Niger River, 87, 89 Noiriel, Gérard, 17–18

399

nonprofit associations, 140 “Nostalgie ” (Senghor), 273 “Nuit blanche ” (Damas), 274 “Nuit blanche ” (Senghor), 270

Offe, Claus, 41 Office du Niger, 89, 91 Office of Emigration and Immigration, 140 Olivier, Governor-General, 37 Olympio, Sylvanus, 296 originaires, 129–30 “Orphée noir” (Sartre), 259–61 Ortiz, Fernando, 217 Outre-Mer (journal), 34, 60, 62, 72

[399], (13) Panafricanism: African and Antillean expatriates identifying with, 5, 157; African elite ’s dissent and, 123; black students in Paris cultivating, 155; in Césaire ’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 287; contradictory dimensions of, 197; of Damas, 228, 229; in Diop’s Mirages de Paris, 199; L’Étudiant Noir and, 187; failures of interwar, 201; Maran puts Negritude group in contact with, 166; in McKay’s Banjo, 177; Nardal’s “L’internationalisme noir” on, 171; Negritude and, 175, 185, 202, 203, 253, 256; radical, 179–85; republican public sphere and, 192–98; La Revue du Monde Noir promoting, 172, 173; seen as political threat by state, 179; of Senghor, 213, 215, 231; of West African Student Association, 215 Paris: African expatriates in, 149–200; African immigrants as source of agitation, 94; Cabane Cubaine, 154, 175, 270; Delavignette on Africa and, 35, 36; economic links with colonies, 26; as imperial space, 157; as node in imperial network, 28; Senghor on, 155, 157 Parti Colonial, 32, 315n.71 particularism: antinomy in nation-state between universalism and, 11–15, 19–20; Césaire ’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal on universalism and, 289, 290–91; of Césaire ’s rejection of assimilation, 188, 189; colonial humanism as simultaneously universalizing and particularizing, 8, 99, 143; in colonial racism, 203; contradiction in French imperial nationstate between universalism and, 5–8; in Cosnier’s modernization report, 85; crises

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particularism (continued) of French universalism, 15–19; Damas on universalism and, 222, 229, 232; in Lévy-Bruhl’s ethnology, 65; in Mauss’s ethnology, 66; nationstate as founded on antinomy of universalism and, 14, 16; Negritude and, 202, 252–53, 254; republicanism’s failure associated with, 15; La Revue du Monde Noir and, 173; Sartre on people of color and, 260; Senghor on universalism and, 236, 241, 250, 251; temporizing for stabilizing tension between universalism and, 118 pastoral power, 45, 46 paternal idioms, 125–26 patriotism, black, 161–66 paysans noirs, Les (Delavignette), 58, 102 Peace Corps, 296, 298 Pelorson, Georges, 279 “people, the,” 15–16 Pigments (Damas): “Blanchi,” 277; cultural politics in, 206–8; Desnos writes preface for, 216; “Et Caetera,” 208; “Ils sont,” 207; “Ils sont venus ce soir,” 274–75; “Limbé,” 275–77; “Nuit blanche,” 274; “Solde,” 207; transformation of time-space in, 273–78 Plan for Regional Monographs, 72 plus grande France, La (Archimbaud), 32–33 “Poème liminaire ” (Senghor), 212 “Poésie et connaissance ” (Césaire), 265–68 poetic knowledge: Césaire on, 265–68 poetry: Césaire ’s poetics, 265–68, 279–81; Negritude ’s politics and poetics, 258–70; Negritude ’s utopian poetics, 292–94; as privileged medium for Negritude, 205; Senghor on Negro-African, 263; Senghor on poetic immediacy, 207; Senghor studies French, 206. See also black aesthetics; Negritude political rationality, 43–75; as an analytic category, 44–47, 301; colonial humanism as, 76–78; École Coloniale in, 61–63; ethnology and, 63–75; in French West Africa, 50–61; Foucault on, 14, 44; methodological significance of, 301; native policy guided by, 76; Negritude poetry and, 293; Senghor’s Dakar Chamber of Commerce lecture and, 235; welfarism as, 47–50. See also colonial humanism; welfarism polygamy, 104, 131, 133 Pompidou, Georges, 153 Ponty, Governor-General, 107, 111, 233 Popular Front: Damas in cultural politics of, 216–17; de Coppet as representative of, 233;

Deuxième Congrès des Écrivains pour la Défense de la Culture, 175, 216; Negritude group in organizations of, 214; Panafricanism and, 192, 193, 194, 195; and Senghor’s “A` l’appel de la race de Saba,” 213; West African dissent intensifying under, 123 popular sovereignty, 16–17, 25 postliberal. See welfarism Postone, Moishe, 19–20, 252 postcolonial West Africa, 296–98 poststructuralism, 14, 39, 301 Prat, Aristide, 152 Price-Mars, Jean, 217 “primitive ” cultures, 28, 65, 66, 246, 257 primitive mentality (Lévy-Bruhl), 65 primitivism: and Césaire, 285, 290; of Delavignette, 35; of McKay, 176; of Sartre, 35n.12; of Senghor, 246, 290 property registration, 105–6 protectionism, 92, 93, 228 Proust, Marcel, 153, 215 public assistance programs, 49 public health, 82, 100 publicity, colonial, 59–61 public opinion, measures to prevent growth of organs of, 140 publics, multiple, 197 public sphere, Panafricanism and republican, 192–98. See also black public sphere; civic republicanism; civil society public works, 30, 82, 83, 99, 298

“Que m’accompagnement kôras et balafongs” (Senghor), 272

race: colonial humanism’s racialization, 143; La Dépêche Africaine and, 168; essentialism, 241, 251; identity politics, 191; Jews racialized, 18; logic of temporal deferral and, 126, 143; Nardal on race consciousness, 171; New Negro movement on, 175–76; in post–World War I conceptions of imperial order, 19; racialization as dimension of colonial modernity, 196; racialization in Diop’s Mirages de Paris, 198; as replacing nation in colonial societies, 13–14; La Revue du Monde Noir on race consciousness, 172; ruling native peoples through racialization, 78, 79; Senghor on, 209–10, 213, 236, 245–46; in

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Senghor’s poetics, 262–65. See also assimilation; association; authenticity; métissage; racism Race Nègre, La (newspaper), 180, 181, 182, 183 race riots, 19, 208 racism: African and Antillean expatriate challenging, 5; capitalism and, 9; Césaire ’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal on, 284, 285–89; colonial humanism’s antiracism, 124, 125; Damas on, 222, 228–29, 231–32; Delavignette on black, 122; logic of temporal deferral and, 126, 143; Maran on inescapableness of, 164–65; modern regime of power in development of, 80; versus popular sovereignty, 25; of prewar colonial reformers, 54; rationalism enabling, 256–57; republican, 19, 171; republicanism’s failure associated with, 6, 15; reverse, 231, 246; scientific, 202, 246; Senghor on, 151, 233, 241, 246; versus universalism, 201 Rakoto-Ratsimamanga, Albert, 214 Ranke, Leopold von, 269 rationality: Césaire ’s poetry as engagement with, 278–90; versus domination, 201; in imperial integration, 25; of justice system, 108, 110; Negritude ’s critique of colonial reason, 256–58, 292–94; Negritude poetics as a critique of, 205, 258–78; in Sarraut’s legislative proposal of 1921, 82; societal rationalization, 15, 18, 26. See also colonial humanism; political rationality; welfarism Rawlings, Jerry, 297 realism, 248, 262 reason. See rationality “Recommendations for the Study of the Family” (British International Institute of African Languages and Civilizations), 72 reform, colonial. See colonial reform regionalism, 18 relativism, cultural. See cultural relativism republicanism: black, 166–71; on citizenship, 129–30; civic, 159, 167, 221, 235; civil society as conceptualized in, 159–60, 195–96; colonial humanism and, 116; colonial subjects claiming republican rights, 149–50; contradiction between universalism and particularism in, 5–8; crises of universalism in France, 15–19; Damas’s Retour de Guyane on colonialism of, 217–32; Greater France discourse and challenges to, 29; of Negritude, 203, 253, 256; Panafricanism and republican public sphere, 192–98; particularisms seen as antithetical to, 15; reconciling with

401

colonialism, 25–26, 201; republican France as never not imperial nation-state, 3; republican racism, 19, 171; Senghor on colonialism of, 232–52 Retour de Guyane (Damas), 165, 217–32 “retour de l’enfant prodigue, Le ” (Senghor), 209–10 Revolution of 1848, 17 Revue du Monde Noir, La (journal), 171–75; breakaway group from, 178; La Dépêche Africaine compared with, 172, 173; and L’Étudiant Noir, 190; Maran puts African Americans in contact with, 166; McKay’s “To America” in, 176; and Nardal salon, 174; seen as political threat by state, 179 Reynaud, Paul, 37 rhythm, 263 rights: civil, 159; colonial subjects claiming republican, 149–50; deferring for évolués, 124–29, 143; social rights, 17, 48. See also human rights Rimbaud, Arthur, 153, 178, 266, 282 Rivet, Paul, 63, 64, 155, 192, 217 Roberts, Richard, 87 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 15 Roumain, Jacques, 216 Roume, Ernest, 54, 61, 107, 109, 110–11 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1, 12, 195 rulers, African. See chiefs Rural Popular Schools, 120, 233 Russian Revolution, 51, 94

Sabatier, Léopold, 54 Said, Edward, 21 Sainville, Léonard: and L’Étudiant Noir, 186, 187, 190, 191–92; on Negritude group, 214; and Union de Travailleurs Nègres, 183, 184, 192 Sajous, Léo, 171, 182, 193 sanitary passports, 100, 141 Sankalé, Mark, 214, 215 Sankara, Thomas, 297 Sarraut, Albert: Brévié influenced by, 98, 99; and Carde, 85, 98; on citizenship for colonial people, 33, 126–27; and citizenship legislation of 1932, 132; on colonial crisis, 97; on colonial education, 121, 126; colonial reform supported by, 51–52; on deferring rights for natives, 124–25, 128; on état civil indigène, 103; on food security, 96; on Greater France, 30–31, 32, 126; on human

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Sarraut, Albert (continued) dignity and skin color, 124; legislative proposal of 1921, 30, 81–82, 90; on semi-citizenship for African elites, 135, 137; social welfare and political authority in policies of, 97 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 215, 259–61 Satineau, Maurice, 166, 179, 180, 183 Schoelcher, Victor, 183, 229 scientific administration, 43, 60, 61, 63, 68–71, 74–75 scientific knowledge: Césaire on, 265; colonial administration applying, 69–75; social reform based on, 52; Western administrative state and, 45. See also ethnology; sociology scientific racism, 202, 246 Second Empire, 219, 220 Second International Black Writers Congress (1959), 291–92 Second Republic, 17 self-determination, 51, 98–99, 144, 176 self-government, 12, 16, 25, 160 sénatus-consulte (1854), 219–20, 221 Senegal: citizenship for originaires, 129–30; Dakar, 94, 100, 179; education encouraging social fragmentation in, 96; Geismar’s collection of civil customs of, 110, 111; Haut-Sénégal-Niger, 68, 109; nationalist activity in, 123; Senghor as first president of independent, 298; Sudanese migrant laborers traveling to, 73 Senghor, Lamine, 180, 185 Senghor, Léopold Sédar: on African humanism, 188, 204, 232–52; in Agence Métromer, 193; agrégation obtained by, 153; “A` l’appel de la race de Saba,” 193, 213, 215, 231; analytic and hermeneutic modes employed by, 257; arrives in France, 152; on assimilation, 209–10, 213, 232, 235–38, 241–42, 272; on authenticity, 208, 213, 250; background of, 151; on black reason, 263–65; “Ce que l’homme noir apporte,” 245– 50; on Césaire ’s breakdown, 155; and colonial humanism, 232–33, 234, 235–36, 237, 238, 240, 241, 243–44, 246, 251–52; on connections between African and Antillean students, 186; conservative and racist influences on, 356n.118; “La culture et ‘l’empire,’ ” 243–44; Dakar Chamber of Commerce speech of, 234–39; on Damas, 153; on Damas’s Pigments, 206–7; death of, 295; and Delavignette, 251; Diagne as sponsor of, 161; early poems of, 206, 208, 270; on education in French West Africa, 234–39;

on emotion as African and reason as Hellenic, 245–46; engagement with multiple African and Antillean movements, 185; and L’Étudiant Noir, 187, 188–89, 190, 192; French education of, 151–52; French poetry read by, 206; Frobenius influencing, 156; gender ideology in poetry of, 272–73; and Guèye, 161–62; Hosties noires, 212; immanent critique of, 252–53; imperial federation scheme of, 242–44, 250; at Institut d’Ethnologie, 155; International Congress on the Cultural Evolution of Colonial Peoples speech of, 239–40; and Italian invasion of Ethiopia, 193; on Légitime Défense, 178, 179; Liberté: Négritude et humanisme, 250; at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, 152–53; as lycée teacher, 205–6; and Maran, 165, 189; meets Césaire, 152; “Le message,” 209; as national legislator, 298; on Negritude as cultural problem, 204–5; in Negritude cohort, 151–57; and New Negro writings, 175; one-sided primitivism of, 246, 253; Panafricanism of, 213, 215, 231; on Paris, 155, 157; “Poème liminaire,” 212; on poetic immediacy, 207; poetics of, 262–65; as president of Senegal, 298; as public intellectual, 214–16; “Que m’accompagnement kôras et balafongs,” 272; on La Race Nègre, 185; on La Revue du Monde Noir, 175; scholarship of, 154; on Lamine Senghor, 185; social Christians influencing, 244–45; as socialist, 215–16, 244; on Surrealism, 179; trade union activism of, 215–16; “Vues sur l’afrique noire,” 240–43; in West African Student Association, 183, 185, 186; during World War II, 353n.45. See also Chants d’ombre separatism, 229, 231, 232, 241 Service africain (Delavignette), 251 Service de Controle et Assistance en France de Indigènes des Colonies (CAI), 157–58, 168, 179 Sewell, William, 17 SIPs (sociétés indigènes de prévoyance), 88–89, 91, 96 slavery: abolition of, 19, 183, 201, 222, 229; assimilation compared with, 277; Damas on, 222, 225; French opposing African, 111; Gratient on Martinican racial stratification and, 190; racialization and, 173; republican racism and, 19 Smith, Adam, 12 SNES (Syndicat National de l’Enseignement Secondaire), 215–16 Social Contract, The (Rousseau), 1 social insurance, 49, 80

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Socialist Party, 216 social rights, 17, 48 social workers, 49 Société Commerciale de l’Ouest Africain, 27 sociétés indigènes de prévoyance (SIPs), 88–89, 91, 96 sociology: Durkheimian, 62, 65, 67, 76, 199; International Congress of Colonial Sociology of 1900, 52 Sol, Bernard, 110 “Solde ” (Damas), 207 Solus, Henri, 127–28 Soudan–Paris–Bourgogne (Delavignette), 35 sovereignty, 12–13, 16, 23 Soviet Union: Kouyaté travels to, 181–82; in new geopolitical order, 51, 97 space, Negritude as transcending colonial time-space, 268–78 Spiegler, James, 193 Spivak, Gayatri, 195 Stavisky affair, 29, 35 student elites, 94 subject-citizens, 160–61, 164, 168, 170, 195–97, 201, 207, 217, 220, 227, 237, 239, 252, 253. See also citizenship; nationality Sudan: cotton production, 87–88; Delavignette on, 35–36; irrigation project in, 89; Labouret on Manding, 73; native chiefs in, 112 Suret-Canale, Jean, 84 Sureté Générale, 99, 157, 167–68, 179 Sureté Nationale, 216–17 Surrealism: Damas’s “ethnographic surrealism,” 274; Légitime Défense and, 178; Negritude and, 179, 257, 261, 262; “profane illumination” of, 270; Senghor and, 206, 246, 248 Symbolism, 206, 257, 262 Syndicat National de l’Enseignement Secondaire (SNES), 215–16 Syndicat Nègre de Marseille, 182 Syrian merchants, 27

Tagore, Rabindranath, 215 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 262 temporality: deferring rights for évolués, 124–29, 143, 160; Negritude as transcending colonial time-space, 268–78; temporizing for stabilizing tension between universalism and particularism, 118 Third Republic: Dreyfus affair, 18; Greater France

403

discourse in, 29–36; nationality question, 17–18, 19; pressures for colonial reform in, 50–52; and sénatus-consulte of 1854, 219–20; on social solidarity, 17; Stavisky affair, 29, 35; structural contradictions of, 6–8; toward an imperial nation-state, 24–29; welfarism developing in, 17, 47–50. See also Popular Front time. See temporality “To America” (McKay), 176 Togo, 73, 296–98 Torrens property registration system, 105–6 Touchard, Jean, 244 Toum (Delavignette), 58 tour, the (tournée), 69, 96, 320n.156 Toussaint-L’Ouverture, 225, 231, 283 Towa, Marcien, 232 trade unions: de Coppet legalizing colonial, 233; deferral of legalization of colonial, 140; on economic rationalization, 49; Kouyaté’s black union, 181, 183; republicanism challenged by, 29; Senghor as active in, 215–16 Trente-Six group, 216 tribus du rameau Lobi, Les (Labouret), 72–73 Tropiques (journal), 265, 291

Un homme pareil aux autres (Maran), 164–65, 200 Union Coloniale, 98 Union de Travailleurs Nègres (UTN), 183–84, 190, 192 Union Française, 298–99 unions, trade. See trade unions United States: in new geopolitical order, 51, 97; La Revue du Monde Noir as concerned with, 173–74; USAID, 297. See also black Americans Universal Exposition (1937), 239 universalism: antinomy in nation-state between particularism and, 11–15, 19–20; of Césaire, 266; Césaire ’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal on particularism and, 289, 290–91; and Césaire ’s rejection of assimilation, 188, 189; colonial humanism as simultaneously universalizing and particularizing, 8, 99, 143; in colonial racism, 203; of colonial reformers’ cultural humanism, 80; contradiction in French imperial nation-state between particularism and, 5–8; in Cosnier’s modernization report, 85; crises of French, 15–19; Damas on particularism and, 222, 229; of La Dépêche Africaine, 167, 170–71; Lévy-Bruhl’s critique

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universalism (continued) of, 65; Mauss’s critique of, 66; nation-state as founded on antinomy of particularism and, 14, 16; Negritude and, 202, 252–53, 254; versus racism, 201; La Revue du Monde Noir and, 173; Sartre on people of color and, 260; Senghor on particularism and, 236, 241, 250, 251; temporizing for stabilizing tension between particularism and, 118 urban policies (French West Africa), 94–95, 100 USAID, 297 UTN (Union de Travailleurs Nègres), 183–84, 190, 192 utopia: Césaire on poetry and, 267; Césaire ’s “nègreries” as utopian, 189; civil society as utopian, 158; in Damas, 231, 274, 275, 276, 277; Greater France as, 36–37; immanent versus utopian critique, 252; Negritude as utopian-imaginative, 254–55; of La Revue du Monde Noir, 158; in Senghor’s “A` l’appel de la race de Saba,” 213; in Senghor’s “Ce que l’homme noir apporte,” 247; utopianism of Negritude ’s poetics, 292–94

vagabondage, 94–95, 100, 141, 218 van Buesekom, Monica, 89 Van Vollenhoven, Joost: and African rulers, 111–12; and Carde, 85; and Delafosse, 55; on Hardy, 57; on indigenous political structures, 54; and new logic of colonial development, 84; professional syndicates opposed by, 94, 140 Verdier, Cardinal, 245 Vignon, Louis, 53–54 Villamur, Roger, 109 vitalism, 257, 263 Vogel, Lucien, 217 Voix des Nègres, La (newspaper), 180 Voix du Dahomey, La (periodical), 114 Volontés (review), 216, 279 voluntary nonprofit associations, 140 “Vues sur l’afrique noire ” (Senghor), 240–43 Vu et Lu (journal), 217

Warner, Michael, 197 welfarism, 47–50; of Brévié, 98, 99–100; of Carde, 87, 88; and colonial reform, 62; colonial versus metropolitan, 79–80; and customary authority, 115; of Delafosse, 99; and état civil, 103; French government organizing around, 7; in Giscard D’Estaing’s report, 92; of Kouyaté’s Syndicat Nègre de Marseille, 182; Mauss’s ethnology in foundation of, 67; as modality of rule, 116; native policy and, 76; in new logic of colonial development, 85, 86, 87, 88; Outre-Mer associated with, 60; political authority and, 97; for promoting virtuous circle of growth, 93; as rooted in nation-state, 14; in Sarraut’s legislative proposal of 1921, 82; transition from liberalism to, 17, 43, 48–50; of West African Student Association, 214 West African Student Association, 183, 185–87, 214–15 Wilson, Woodrow, 51 women: in Césaire ’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 285, 289; citizenship for African, 132; colonial administration and, 209; emigration of, 338n.116; gender ideology in Damas’s poetry, 275–76; gender ideology in Senghor’s poetry, 272–73; Senghor on African, 247 working class, 17, 19, 210, 213, 228, 231 World War I: as accelerating long-term transition, 116; citizenship for African veterans of, 133; and colonial economic development, 26–27, 83–84; and colonial rationalization, 43–44; colonial troops in, 27; in crisis of republican universalism, 18–19; demobilized African soldiers as discipline problem, 93–94; pressures for colonial reform generated by, 50–52; in welfarism’s development, 49 Wright, Richard, 175, 215

xenophobia, 17–18, 142, 228

Zaire, 295, 296

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