Critical Inquiry — Volume 34, Number S2

It’s a Friday evening, 21 September 1956, the occasion of the First International Conference of Black Writers and Artists, held at the Sorbonne’s Amphithéâtre Déscartes in Paris, now in its third day. In the audience is Aimé Cesaire, Cheikh-Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Jean Price-Mars, Jacques Alexis, and Léopold-Sédar Senghor, just to begin a long and glorious roll call. With the conspicuous exception of W. E. B. DuBois, who was denied a passport by the U.S. State Department, here is assembled practically every major black critical thinker of the age. Here are the authors of Third World liberation, world-historic theorists of colonial resistance, forging new ideologies, new analyses, new “weapons of theory” out of negritude, Marxism, psychoanalysis, African communalism, you name it; remember, it’s 1956, and these are the heady days of grand theory for the black world. Never had the promise of a genuine politics of culture seemed more real, more realizable. .

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W. E. B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.