Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. St. Louis University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African American Review. W hen in 1935 the Martinican writer Aime Cesaire coined the term negritude in an essay published in L'Etudiant Noir, he grounded this term in the historicity and particularity of the imperialist and supremacist subjugation of black people and in the ensuing cultural and political resistance by black people to that subjugation. Even in 1939 with the publication of his celebrated piece in prose and poetry titled "Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal" ("Notebook of a Return to My Native Land"), Cesaire situated negritude within the lived realities of his life as a French colonial subject and his rejection of that condition. Over time, however, this term, along with its English predecessor and analogue blackness, has come to be associated with some sort of mystical and transcendent African/Black essence or soul.This essentialist conceptualization of black culture has locked far too many discussions of African diasporic cultural and political issues within a binary prison of black versus white or dominant versus subordinate, and focused far too many discussions on transgressions against the purported power of whiteness instead of on understanding the operations-at all of their various intersections, social, political, historical, intellectual-of the culture at hand. In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre's preface to Leopold Sedar Senghor's anthology of black literature (Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poesie Negre et Malgache) positioned negritude writers within the self-reflexive and transgressive qualities of the orphic, and referred to these writers as Black Orpheus. This, very likely inadvertent, act of un-naming potentially usurps the particularity suggested in the term negritude as well as contests the negritude writers' desire to position themselves in an African heritage rather than in the hegemonic and often tyrannical embrace of universalism located in ancient Greek culture. Subsequent uses of Sartre's appellation by Ulli Beier and Janheinz Jahn, the German founders of the Nigerianbased literary magazine Black Orpheus, contrast with the titles of similar journals (founded by diasporic Africans) from the 1930s through the 1950s, L'Etudiant Noir and Presence Africaine, as well as the title of Senghor's book, all of which conspicuously reclaim the contested terms black and African. Along with this reclamation or reconstruction of identity comes the concomitant revisions that the African enacts upon the received and privileged European culture in which she also is situated.In African American literature, Kimberly Benston's revision, in the 1970s, of the orphic as a "re-membering" -a un...