lycée, Louis-le-Grand, where he formed a close lifelong friendship with fellow student Georges Pompidou, later president of France. By the early 1930s Senghor had reenrolled at the Sorbonne, this time as a student of grammar. During this period he took up residence at the Cité Universitaire, a dormitory for French-speaking students from around the world. It was there that he met Antillean students like Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) and began to get a sense of the global dimensions of African civilization. Despite his plaintive letters to colonial administrators complaining about his life of unrelieved drudgery in Paris,20 it was during this period that he first started visiting La Cabane Cubaine, sometimes in the company of Césaire. A New World opened up to the previously reticent and withdrawn student as he began to socialize with intellectually gifted youths from the Caribbean and elsewhere in Africa at Paris’s Afro-Cuban music nightclubs. Though an awkward dancer, by the late 1930s he was teaching newly arrived Senegalese students in Paris the latest steps.21
Out of this sustained intellectual and social interaction between African and Antillean students and the explosively creative climate in Montmartre/Pigalle and the Rive Gauche emerged the famous cultural movement negritude. Pioneered by Senghor, Césaire, and the Guyanese Léon-Gontram Damas (1912–1978), “négritude was a rejection of assimilation, an identification with blackness, and a celebration of African Civilization.”22 The movement advocated a reverse racialization of colonial knowledge, privileging an African “emotional” way of knowing over an arid European “rationalism.” According to negritude theorists like Senghor, Africans and people of African descent, through intuition and sensory perception, could see through surfaces to the essence of an object or behavior. This ability to get to the heart of the matter was something invaluable that African culture could bring to world civilization. At its inception, negritude tried to strike a balance between cosmopolitanism (universal ways of knowing) and cultural authenticity (validating particular African methods of producing knowledge). In so doing, it addressed philosophically many of the same challenges of being modern and African that Afro-Cuban music did on a more everyday level.23
At least in their early phases, the histories of negritude and the Senegalese embrace of Afro-Cuban music were intertwined, involving some of the same individuals. The initiators of negritude and those who saw the path to African modernity illuminated by Afro-Cuban music believed that African modernity must have a prominent aesthetic dimension. The two groups equally underscored the significance of rhythm and movement in defining blackness. The theorists of negritude and the aficionados of Afro-Cuban music also argued that any modern black identity had to be transnational, “not simply constructed in opposition to Europe but in relation to it.”24 Both argued that these identities had to be performed publicly to counter dominant European cultural models. Each saw cafés and nightclubs as important laboratories for incubating ideas and developing modern forms of sociality.
By the late 1930s, however, the trajectories of negritude and the linking of Afro-Cuban music with Senegalese modernity began to diverge. This fissure grew out of a number of debates that began in Paris in the 1930s during the formative period of negritude and still resound in Senegalese academic and artistic circles. Senghor and his allies saw negritude as a “high-culture,” modernist project in dialogue with important contemporary trends in French literary and philosophical thought, like surrealism and phenomenology. He recognized that for his generation Paris was the world capital of modernity and cultural prestige.25 It was also, despite its imperial ambitions, a global repository of republican values and political liberalism.26 Taking these facts into account, Senghor’s strategy for the political and cultural liberation of his nation was to simultaneously pursue full citizenship in the French Republic and “the world republic of letters” centered in France.27
The realization of Senghor’s vision of cultural citizenship entailed the creation of a mandarin literary class, similar to France’s. By definition, such a group would dominate the imagining of modernity in Senegal and, as a result, would benefit the most from it. While this position was intellectually coherent and politically viable, it had ramifications that some Senegalese found disturbing. Their reservations revolved around the elitist assumptions of Senghor’s position. In addition, Senghor’s variety of negritude, despite its efforts to strike a balance between universalism and cultural nationalism, still seemed to favor cosmopolitanism over cultural authenticity, thus potentially limiting the scope and significance of intellectual decolonization. Some Senegalese felt it was too accommodating of French intellectual hegemony. Moreover, Senghor’s model left little room for serious consideration of the role of popular culture in creating Senegalese modernity. That meant a dismissal of the cultural importance of Afro-Cuban music (and even of African music) and, with it, an implicit repudiation of an embodied modernity.
Two literary texts dealing with this era—Senghor’s famous poem “Comme Je Passais” and a much less known novel by Socé Diop, Mirages de Paris, articulate these differing early visions of negritude. Afro-Cuban music plays a crucial role in both texts. However, in Senghor’s poem, references to Afro-Cuban music are so oblique that many distinguished literary scholars have completely overlooked them. By contrast, Socé Diop’s novel gives pride of place to Afro-Cuban musical expression and shows how it served as one of the foundations of an African modernity. Senghor’s poem hints at his future distancing from Latin music, while Socé Diop’s novel suggests why this music would have such a powerful attraction for postwar Senegalese youth. Not surprisingly, Senghor was critical of the novel when it was published in Paris in 1937.28 His disapproval, however, could not prevent the ideas expressed in the novel from having a long life in Senegalese discussions of what sort of modernity would best suit the Senegalese.
It is possible to generate many readings of the extraordinary “Comme Je Passais,” but the analysis here focuses exclusively on how the poem illuminates Senegalese debates about music, cultural identity, and modernity.29 The poetic voice recounts the thoughts and sensory sensations he experiences as he walks past La Cabane Cubaine on the Rue Fontaine in Paris:
Comme je passais rue Fontaine,
Un plaintif air de jazz
Est sorti en titubant,
Ébloui par le jour,
Et m’a chuchoté sa confidence
Discrètement
Comme je passais tout devant
La Cabane cubaine.
Un parfum pénétrant de Négresse
L’accompagnait.
Voilà des nuits,
Voilà bien des jours au sommeil absent.
Réveillés en moi les horizons que je croyais défunts.
Et je saute de mon lit tout à coup, comme un buffle
Mufle haut levé, jambes écartées,
Comme un buffle humant, dans le vent
Et la douceur modulée de la flûte polie,
La bonne odeur de l’eau sous les dakhars
Et celle, plus riche de promesses, des moissons mûres
Par les rizières.
As I was walking by Fontaine Street,
I heard a jazz song stagger about,
Dazzled by the day,
And it whispered its secrets to me
Discreetly.
