‘The francophone world was set ablaze’: Pan-African intellectuals, European interlocutors and the global Cold War

ABSTRACT By the mid-1930s, migration from the French colonies had brought Afro-intellectuals into the heart of political and artistic conversations in the metropoles of Europe and had created imbricated spaces of heated debate. Coming from various nations in Africa and the Americas, the interlocutors in these debates grappled with their fraught relationship to imperial centres while addressing questions specific to their diverse national contexts and racialized realities. The declarations they made and conclusions they drew were scrutinized by multiple, and at times antagonistic publics. This article chronicles a fascinating instance of such networked literary polemics: the 1955–1956 Présence Africaine ‘Debate on National Poetry’. It offers a close look at the intellectual and political underpinnings of this fraught exchange between celebrated Martinican poet-statesman Aimé Césaire and then-militant socialist Haitian poet René Depestre as a means of understanding how twentieth-century intellectual and artistic movements in Europe presented real challenges to prominent figures in the (imminently post-)colonial francophone world. Depestre’s uncomfortable positioning reflects the larger quandary facing Afro-diasporic intellectuals and artists called on to navigate identities that reflected their political commitments and the expectations of their white allies, on the one hand, and their racial identifications, on the other.