4 - Civilization’s Gone to Hell? Revolutionary Poetry, Humanism and the Crisis of Sovereignty

Summary

When Wall Street crashed in October 1929, it sparked an economic depression that shook the American people to the core. France fared little better: the full impact of the crash may not have been felt there until the end of 1932 but the Republic had already endured a decade of economic instability, due in part to the heavy burden of French war debts. As the decade wore on, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic worried that modern capitalism and the associated “liberal culture of modernity” was too frail to sustain democracy or the nation-state. This chapter focuses on the ways that African American and francophone black intellectuals responded to this so-called “crisis of modernity” during this period. Key black intellectuals and activists such as the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor and the African American Mercer Cook sought to transform their respective national and imperial landscapes in order to reconfigure republican democracy along more egalitarian lines. Through journals such as L'Étudiant Noir, and the Crisis, as well as through a series of congresses and published anthologies these men and women made important theoretical and practical interventions into thinking around citizenship, national sovereignty and access to rights.