Family Resemblances: Presence Africaine and the Genres of Anticolonialism (Peter Kalliney) will track how the generic codes of diplomatic meetings (such as the Paris Peace Conference, League of Nations and United Nations resolutions and petitions, and the Bandung Conference) inform the 1956 and 1959 Black Writers and Artists Congresses. Although these Presence Africaine gatherings participated in the anticolonial cultural turn – the insistence on the value of Indigenous culture and knowledge against the imposition of metropolitan practices – these values were articulated in the language and forms of petitions and resolutions borrowed from diplomatic meetings. Professor Peter Kalliney's presentation will answer the question of how we can explain this generic interplay.

In Family Rift: Modernist Realignments during the Early Years of Présence Africaine, Professor Fatoumata Seck will examine the subtle challenges posed by young writers to the modernist aesthetics of Négritude in the early years of Présence Africaine. Taking the poetry of David Mandessi Diop as an example, she will show how these writers sought to realign the journal’s proclaimed neutrality and cultural politics toward forms of revolutionary writing that advanced alternative political visions for decolonizing African and Afro-diasporic writers. This family rift remained largely masked by the family resemblance in their commitment to anticolonialism. Tracing Diop’s reception among New Left poets after his untimely death in 1960 and parsing through its continuities in their experimental and underground poetry in French and Wolof will shed light on its implications for global modernism.

Although Présence Africane claimed to be (and, to a significant extent, was) a “free tribune” that avoided taking a side in the Cold War and maintained a steadfast non-alignment, Fires in the Hearth: Présence Africaine as Cold War Ideological Battleground (Christopher Bonner) will consider Présence Africaine as an organ of Cold War high liberal discourse, considering the ways in which this ideological alignment determined its editorial line on issues of race, aesthetics, and political economy. Promoted by its editor Alioune Diop as the “incandescent hearth” of global Black culture, Présence Africaine was a symbol of the fundamental unity of the “monde noir.” At the same time, it served as a forum for intensely polemical debates over aesthetics, politics, economics, religion, and culture, all of them deploying rhetoric infused with Cold War ideology of various tendencies. Diop’s own editorial interventions, as well as those of his ideologically diverse editorial team, will be this paper's main object of analysis, with the objective of situating the journal’s contributions and limitations within the intellectual tradition of postwar liberalism.