Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism by Lane Jeremy F.;

Author:Lane, Jeremy F.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Points in Common—Panassié, Senghor, Jazz, and Jacques Maritain

Like his friend and collaborator Léon-Gontran Damas, Senghor had traveled to Paris in the interwar years from the colonial periphery, in his case from his native Senegal, in order to complete his studies, initially at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand and subsequently at the Sorbonne. It was during his time in Paris that Senghor struck up the series of personal friendships and made the intellectual discoveries that would prove catalysts to his emerging conception of négritude. Through the pages of La Revue du monde noir and his attendance at the Nardals' salon, he was exposed to the work of the poets and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance. In the course of his studies, he discovered the work of the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius, studies that revealed to him the richness of precolonial African cultures. He also met and became close friends with both Damas and Aimé Césaire, the three men subsequently being identified as the founding fathers of the négritude movement.

The importance of these intellectual discoveries and personal friendships has been examined at some length in existing accounts of négritude's genesis (Kesteloot 1963; Vaillant 1990; Sharpley-Whiting 2002). What has received less attention, however, is the potential impact of jazz on Senghor's particular conception of négritude. For, like Damas, Senghor was a keen fan of the jazz he first heard in the bars and nightclubs of interwar Paris. Allusions to jazz occur frequently in the poems he wrote in the course of the 1930s and 1940s, both those contained in his first published collection, Shadow Songs of 1945, and those he had written earlier in the 1930s but which would only be published much later, in the collected poems of 1964, as the Lost Poems.

Senghor's interest in Panassié's jazz criticism, meanwhile, surely reflected his own fondness for the philosophy of Maritain, a philosophy whose political implications had, by the 1930s, become rather ambiguous. As we have seen, at the time of writing Art et scolastique Maritain was a firm supporter of Charles Maurras and of the latter's antidemocratic, extreme right-wing organization Action française. In 1926, however, Maritain had left the movement, following the pope's official denunciation of both Maurras and Action française for their political extremism. By the 1930s, Maritain had allied himself with the broad current of French social Catholicism, situated on the center, or center-left of the political spectrum, and had begun to elaborate his philosophy of “integral humanism” as a foil to Maurras's “integral nationalism” (Maritain 1936). This current, which embraced the “personalism” of Emmanuel Mounier alongside Maritain's own “integral humanism,” sought a “third way” between fascism and communism, while retaining many of the Catholic, antirationalist, antimodern, anti-Statist, procorporatist ideas that Maritain had shared with Action française in the early 1920s. Its antimaterialism and anti-Statism led to an interest in the cultures of France's provinces and colonies, and hence its journals, such as Charpentes and Mounier's Esprit, were happy to publish the first writings by French intellectuals of color, including Damas, Césaire, and Senghor himself.

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