‘Pour constituer une “Bibliothèque de Littérature Nègre”’

Abstract

Arthur Barnett Spingarn (1878–1971) was a Jewish American lawyer who during the early twentieth century built an extensive personal library of books by authors of African descent. In 1937, Spingarn delivered a speech in Washington, DC entitled ‘Collecting a Library of Negro Literature’, which sought to expand his audience’s understanding of black literature beyond the United States. The following year, Spingarn’s address was published in anonymous French translation by the Haitian literary and political journal La Relève (1932–1939). This article is an enquiry into how this translation, entitled ‘Pour constituer une “Bibliothèque de Littérature Nègre”’, was used by editors Jacques Carméleau Antoine, Jean Fouchard, and Jules Blanchet to feed into the cultural debates taking place in Haiti during the 1930s. I focus on two key aspects of Spingarn’s text: firstly, his vision for a transnational and transhistorical ‘bibliothèque de littérature nègre’, the broad scope of which corresponded to two related, yet ultimately divergent, cultural ideologies prevalent in post-occupation Haiti, namely, the cultural syncretism of the Indigenists and the ethno-nationalism of the Noirists. Secondly, I assess Spingarn’s schema for the individuals involved in building an archive of black literature, revealing parallel ‘bourgeois public literary spheres’ (Stieber, 2020, p. 13) in Haiti and the United States. The inter-American trajectory of Spingarn’s address reveals a transatlantic interest in collecting practices associated with black literature. A close reading of its republication in La Rèleve offers new directions for French postcolonial studies by demonstrating the value of periodicals as literary sites which juxtapose competing cultural visions and raise important questions regarding the collection and commodification of Africana.