THE LEGENDARY BOOK A FACSIMILE EDITION
150
By Cyrille Zola-Place
FIG. 1 (right):
Page 714 of the Negro
Anthology (1934, Nancy
Cunard, ed.), facsimile
edition published by
Nouvelles éditions Place,
Paris, 2018.
FIGS. 2–10 (above, left to
right): Cover and pages
38, 731, 567, 306, 701,
316, 344, and 320 of the
Negro Anthology (1934,
Nancy Cunard, ed.),
facsimile edition published
by Nouvelles éditions Place,
Paris, 2018.
For Frioux-Salgas, this “major, unique, and original
synthesis of the diversity of the scientifi c, political,
artistic, and cultural discourse on and about
people of color in the 1930s was the expression
of the will of an exceptional woman who strived
to show and to prove that racial prejudice has
no basis or justifi cation, and that people of color,
whether African, American, or European, have a
long social and cultural history behind them. The
Negro Anthology is a sort of an antique Pan-African
object.”
The book had hardly any distribution when it
fi rst appeared, and it became almost impossible to
fi nd after most of the one thousand copies of the
original edition burned in a bombed London warehouse
during the Second World War. As such, the
book was seldom read in its entirety. It reappeared
in an unfortunately abridged edition in 1970, lacking
about half of what was in the original and
completely altered and denatured in content. The
Negro Anthology became a legendary work but,
because of this republication, a deformed one. The
legend was nourished by absence, and its intent
was often exaggerated. The myth went far beyond
reality, and its creator, Nancy Cunard, was made
out to be nothing more than an attractive and
wealthy heiress (she was the daughter of the owner
of the Cunard Line, the ships of which included
the Queen Mary) whose forearms were loaded
with African ivory bracelets and who sponsored
avant-garde artists while collecting lovers. The
truth was entirely different. Cunard was, in fact,
a poet published by the Woolfs. She edited Samuel
Beckett and Ezra Pound, was a war correspondent,
a translator for the French resistance, an African
art collector, and a political activist.
The L’Atlantique noir exhibition brought the
largely forgotten Negro Anthology back to light
In 2014, the Musée du Quai Branly featured
an original copy of a rare book held in its library,
the Negro Anthology, in an exhibition titled L’Atlantique
noir (Black Atlantic), which centered on
Nancy Cunard, a notable fi gure in Europe in the
between-the-wars artistic and intellectual counter
cultural movements. Sarah Frioux-Salgas, director
of the museum’s archives and the curator of
this exhibition, exhumed and spent years studying
this mythical 872-page tome that was published
in 1934 and was conceived of, assembled, and edited
by Cunard.
NEGRO
ANTHOLOGY
EDITED BY NANCY CUNARD
BOOKS