The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966

246 Pages·2016·2.101 MB·English

by  David Murphy (ed.)

The First World Festival of Negro Arts,
Dakar 1966
Postcolonialism across the Disciplines 20
Postcolonialism across the Disciplines
Series Editors
Graham Huggan, University of Leeds
Andrew Thompson, University of Exeter
Postcolonialism across the Disciplines showcases alternative directions for
postcolonial studies. It is in part an attempt to counteract the dominance
in colonial and postcolonial studies of one particular discipline – English
literary/cultural studies – and to make the case for a combination of
disciplinary knowledges as the basis for contemporary postcolonial
critique. Edited by leading scholars, the series aims to be a seminal
contribution to the field, spanning the traditional range of disciplines
represented in postcolonial studies but also those less acknowledged. It
will also embrace new critical paradigms and examine the relationship
between the transnational/cultural, the global and the postcolonial.
The First World Festival
of Negro Arts,
Dakar 1966
Contexts and Legacies
David Murphy
The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966
Liverpool University Press
First published 2016 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2016 Liverpool University Press
The right of David Murphy to be identified as the editor of this book has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
print ISBN 978-1-78138-316-2 cased
epdf ISBN 978-1-78138-351-3
Typeset in Amerigo by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Figures ix
Notes on Contributors xi
Introduction. The Performance of Pan-Africanism: Staging the African
Renaissance at the First World Festival of Negro Arts 1
David Murphy
I Contexts
1 ‘The Real Heart of the Festival’: The Exhibition of L’Art nègre at the
Musée Dynamique 45
Cédric Vincent
2 Dance at the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts: Of ‘Fabulous
Dancers’ and Negritude Undermined 64
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach
3 Staging Culture: Senghor, Malraux and the Theatre Programme at
the First World Festival of Negro Arts 83
Brian Quinn
4 Making History: Performances of the Past at the 1966 World
Festival of Negro Arts 97
Ruth Bush
5 ‘The Next Best Thing to Being There’: Covering the 1966 Dakar
Festival and its Legacy in Black Popular Magazines 113
Tsitsi Jaji
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The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966
II Legacies
6 ‘Negritude is Dead’: Performing the African Revolution at the First
Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969) 133
Samuel D. Anderson
7 Beyond Negritude: Black Cultural Citizenship and the Arab Question
in FESTAC ’77 151
Andrew Apter
8 Cultural Festivals in Senegal: Archives of Tradition, Mediations of
Modernity 166
Ferdinand de Jong
9 FESMAN at 50: Pan-Africanism, Visual Modernism and the Archive of
the Global Contemporary 180
Elizabeth Harney
10 PANAFEST: A Festival Complex Revisited 194
Dominique Malaquais and Cédric Vincent
Books and Films about the 1966 Festival 203
Bibliography 204
Index 220
vi
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
This project has been long in the making. In the process of writing a book
chapter on Léopold Sédar Senghor almost a decade ago, I kept encoun-
tering references to the First World Festival of Negro Arts, which was cited as
the ‘apotheosis’ of Negritude but it seemed impossible to find any in-depth
analysis of the event. As I began to explore the topic further, I encountered
the work of Elizabeth Harney, Tobias Wofford, Tracy Snipe and others who
had already conducted research on the visual arts strands of festival. I then
discovered the pioneering work of Andrew Apter, whose monograph on
FESTAC ’77 confirmed what I had begun to suspect: that Dakar 1966 and the
other major Pan-African festivals of the 1960s and 1970s were so rich and so
diverse that even a book-length study would struggle to engage with them in
their entirety. I realised that there was a real need for a volume that would
offer a sustained engagement with the contexts and legacies of the 1966
festival: then, as time passed and the 50th anniversary of the festival grew
closer, it began to dawn on me that if I did not try and pull such a volume
together, then perhaps no one else would.
A project such as this is impossible without archival research and I am
greatly indebted to those bodies whose funding allowed me to visit various
far-flung archives. I would like to recognize the support of the British
Academy who awarded me two separate grants which permitted me to
attend FESMAN 2010 and also to consult the official 1966 festival archive
at the Senegalese national archives. A University of Stirling–Santander staff
mobility grant made it possible to consult the Marian Anderson papers at the
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, as well as the official US festival
organizing committee papers held at the Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture in New York. Finally, funding from the Division of Literature
and Languages at the University of Stirling facilitated a trip to consult the
vii
The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966
Mercer Cook papers at the Moorland-Springarn Research Center at Howard
University in Washington, DC.
Over the past six years, I have benefited from various opportunities to
share my research on the 1966 and 2010 Dakar festivals, and I am very
grateful to the following colleagues for invitations to speak on this topic at
their respective universities: Sam Coombes (University of Edinburgh), Pierre-
Philippe Fraiture (University of Warwick) and Lydie Moudileno (University of
Pennsylvania). In addition, I was able to deliver papers to the French Media
Studies Research Group Study Day on ‘Sport and the Media’ at the University
of Newcastle (September 2011), an AHRC Workshop on ‘Utopian Archives’
at the University of East Anglia (May 2013), a conference on ‘Pan-Africanism
and Negritude’ at Howard University (November 2015) and a study day on
Francophone West Africa at the British Library (January 2016).
I offer my sincere thanks to Alison Welsby and Anthony Cond at Liverpool
University Press for accepting to publish this volume. As always, they have been
extremely supportive, demonstrating once again why Liverpool University
Press is head and shoulders above most other academic publishers. I am
also very grateful to the Press’s anonymous reader who provided incredibly
insightful feedback on a draft manuscript. I thank Aedín Ní Loingisgh for her
brilliant translation of Cédric Vincent’s chapter and for her typically astute
comments on a draft of my introduction (any remaining flaws are, of course,
my own).
In the process of researching this topic, I encountered numerous
researchers who were simultaneously exploring various aspects of the 1966
festival, and some encounters have proven particularly fruitful: Tsitsi Jaji
has been an amazingly generous source of information, leads and ideas
on the 1966 festival and on Pan-Africanism, more generally; Sarah Frioux-
Salgas, a curator at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris introduced me to
some fascinating archival material on Dakar 1966 through her exhibition on
Présence Africaine (2009–10); Sarah was also kind enough to introduce me to
Dominique Malaquais and Cédric Vincent who were then just beginning their
ground-breaking work on what would become the PANAFEST Archive. I am
delighted that Tsitsi, Dominique and Cédric as well as so many other scholars
and friends whose work I admire have contributed to this volume. Indeed, I am
deeply grateful to all the contributors to this collection, who were a pleasure
to work with not only in practical terms but also in thinking through the
intellectual parameters of the project. And I hope this book will inspire others
to take its ideas forward in new and unexpected directions.
viii
Figures
between pages 42 and 43
Figures
1 (left to right) Mercer Cook, Langston Hughes, Léopold Sédar
Senghor. Official meeting at the presidential palace
Mercer Cook Archive; Moorland-Springarn Research Center,
Howard University, Washington, DC
2 Sleeves of two official festival music LP records
3 Duke Ellington on stage at the national stadium
Fonds Jean Mazel; Collection PANAFEST Archive
4 (left to right) Duke Ellington, Mercer Cook, Léopold Sédar
Senghor. A formal handshake at Ellington’s concert at the
national stadium
Mercer Cook Archive; Moorland-Springarn Research Center,
Howard University, Washington, DC
5 (left to right) Langston Hughes, Katherine Dunham, St Clair Drake
at the festival colloquium
Mercer Cook Archive; Moorland-Springarn Research Center,
Howard University, Washington, DC
6 A view of the Musée Dynamique from the Corniche ouest in Dakar
Fonds Jean Mazel; Collection PANAFEST Archive
7 Mounting the exhibition of Negro Art at the Musée Dynamique
Fonds Jean Mazel; Collection PANAFEST Archive
8 The Negro Art exhibition at the Musée Dynamique
Fonds Roland Kaehr; Collection PANAFEST Archive
9 Alvin Ailey Dancers performing at the Sorano Theatre
Mercer Cook Archive; Moorland-Springarn Research Center,
Howard University, Washington, DC
ix
The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966
10 Duke Ellington orchestra performing at the national stadium.
Drummer Sam Woodyard is visible in the foreground; President
Senghor, US ambassador Mercer Cook and their spouses are
visible in the front row of the audience
Mercer Cook Archive; Moorland-Springarn Research Center,
Howard University, Washington, DC
11 Performance of Césaire’s La Tragédie du roi Christophe at the
Sorano Theatre
Fonds Jean Mazel; Collection PANAFEST Archive
12 Performance of the Spectacle féerique de Gorée
Fonds Jean Mazel; Collection PANAFEST Archive
13 Performance of the Spectacle féerique de Gorée; the camera tripod
of the Soviet documentary film crew is visible in the edge of the
frame
Fonds Jean Mazel; Collection PANAFEST Archive
14 Léopold Sédar Senghor on the cover of the April 1966 issue of
French West African cultural magazine, Bingo
15 Afro-American Information Center, Algiers, 1969
Photograph: Robert Wade
x