« LE NÈGRE DEBOUT » : L’ESPRIT DU JAZZ ET DU BLUES CHEZ LES POÈTES DE LA HARLEM RENAISSANCE AMÉRICAINE ET DE LA NÉGRITUDE FRANCO-CARIBÉENNE
« LE NÈGRE DÉBOUT » : THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ AND BLUES AMONG THE POETS OF THE AMERICAN HARLEM RENAISSANCE AND THE POETS OF FRANCO-CARIBBEAN NÉGRITUDE

Summary/Abstract: This paper is devoted to the ideological and aesthetic affinities between the Afro-American poetry of Harlem Renaissance (1920–1960), called also the “New-Negro”, and the poetry of Negritude, a literary movement born in Paris in the 1930s’ among the poets coming from French Antilles and Madagascar, and particularly popular in the French Caribbean, Guyana and Haiti in the 1940s’–1960s’. I will start with the analysis of the historical context and I will focus on the personal contacts between the poets of the two literary movements as well as on the impact of the black American poetry on the French literary journals involved with Négritude (Légitime Défense, La Dépêche africaine, La revue du monde noir et Présence africaine). Subsequently I will analyze poems by Claude MacKay and Langston Hughes on the one hand, and Aimé Césaire (Martinique), Léon-Gontran Damas (Guyane), Jean Fernand Brière (Haiti) on the other. I will attempt to highlight the affinities between the two sets of poems, both on the thematic and ethical level (exile, identity issues, antiracist and anti-bourgeois claims), as well as on the level of poetics (interest in orality, similarities between the lexical fields and rhetoric, similarities in rhythmic structures and the musicality of the verse inspired by jazz and blues ).

• Details
• Contents