NEGRO ANTHOLOGY
major fi gures in the Harlem Renaissance), it also
addresses subjects as diverse as Creole songs, Bambara
sculpture, and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana.
Cunard assigned the task of writing the essays on
the subject of African art to noted dealers, collectors,
and curators such as Charles Ratton, Carl
Kjersmeier, and Henri Lavachery. The heavily illustrated
section on African art featured ninety photographs
and twelve plates of drawings of objects,
most from major museum collections, including
the British Museum, the Musée d’Ethnographie
du Trocadéro, and the Musée du Congo Belge in
Tervuren, as well as from prestigious private collections
such as those of Paul Guillaume, Félix
Fénéon, and Charles Ratton. It also included a
long list of American and European museums with
signifi cant African art holdings.
Frioux-Salgas revealed and underscored the
unique and innovative nature of the Negro Anthology
in the way she arranged the L’Atlantique
noir exhibition. She presented excerpts of key texts
from the encyclopedic work, each still relevant to
varied genres in present-day Black culture. These
were presented without establishing hierarchies or
even boundaries between the arts, the political, the
social, the historical, and the poetic.
In 2015, while we were examining the exceptional
and never-published manuscript of the fi rst
version of the famous Discours sur le colonialisme
by Aimé Césaire, which we were preparing
to publish in volume II of Ecrits politiques,
the director of the archives slipped an original
copy of the legendary Negro Anthology into
our hands. After having experienced its unique
voyage through intellectual, artistic, and politiand
151
cleared up many of the misunderstandings
with which it was initially received by relating the
story of the development of Cunard’s awareness of
the subject, as well as that of her era in general,
and of how the book came into being. It notably
includes a gallery of portraits of its 155 contributors,
who were militants, journalists, artists, and
academics—men and women of African-American,
Latin-American, Antillean, African, American, and
European descent. Above and beyond the few familiar
names on the list, such as those of René Crevel,
Josephine Baker, and Langston Hughes, Zora
Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke (the latter three