Black in France: The Language and Politics of Race in the Late Third Republic

Abstract

When the metropolitan-based, anti-imperialist organization known as the Comité de défense de la race nègre (Committee for the Defense of the Negro Race, hereafter CDRN) shifted from African to Afro-Caribbean leadership in 1927, it also changed its title to the Comité de défense de la race noire. Replacing nègre with noir made an explicit political statement. Although black intellectuals did not begin formulating the cultural and political declaration of black pride known as Negritude until 1935, anti-imperialist and nationalist members of the African diaspora-predominantly workers-had previously announced their desire to reclaim the word nègre. 2 In a 1927 article in La Voix des nègres, a short-lived organ of the CDRN presided over by a Senegalese antiimperialist leader and former tirailleur named Lamine Senghor, the CDRN explained that there existed levels of racial categorization. 3 These included noir and nègre, classifications created by those in power (Europeans) to divide blacks among themselves, encouraging some groups to believe that they were superior to others. The editors encouraged all those oppressed because of their pigmentation to unite under the banner of the term nègre, stating: "the youth of the CDRN make it their duty to pick this word up out of the mud through which you're dragging it, in order to make it a symbol." 4 What did it mean to be black in the French working-class circles of the interwar years? French fascination with otherness, resulting in popular cultural phenomena such as negrophilia, allowed black performers to find work during these years, but there were also self-definitions of race that revealed agency amid the black colonial community. 5 Race was used in multiple ways by the colonial subjects and citizens who lived and worked in the metropole. Their understanding of race helped them to explain their perceptions of, and rela-

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