Inaugural Issues: The Cultural Politics of the Early Presence Africaine, 1947-55

Abstract

In the late 1960s, Editions Présence Africaine publishedMélanges (Réflexions d'Hommes de Culture), 1 a substantial four-hundred-page collection of testimonies, seminar papers, and essays, written in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the 1947 founding of the francophone journal of African and Black studies. In the early 1990s, a little more than twenty years after the publication of Mélanges, V. Y. Mudimbe edited an equally voluminous collection of texts, which carried the title The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947-1987 (1992) and celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the journal's founding. 2 Mélanges (Réflexions d'Hommes de Cultures) and The Surreptitious Speech use the occasions provided by the journal's anniversaries to assess developments in black cultural and intellectual activities and to announce new directions for research on Africa and the black diaspora. While both these collections mark time in relation to the founding of Présence Africaine, defining the year 1947 as a watershed in black cultural history, on the fiftieth anniversary of the first issue, I want to suggest that the year 1955 is equally important to understanding the early history of the journal.