Archiving the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Dakar 1966): recuperation, nostalgia and utopianism

Abstract

This article will examine the concepts of recuperation, nostalgia and utopianism in relation to the First World Festival of Negro Arts, which was held in Dakar in 1966, in part through an exploration of how this event was evoked in the third edition of the festival (known as FESMAN) in 2010. It will address a series of intriguing questions about the difficulties involved in locating an archive of ephemeral, performance-based events, which may leave few material traces after they have been completed. Although the major Pan-African cultural festivals of the 1960s are regularly cited (usually in passing) as key illustrations of the utopianism that marked the period of decolonization, the issue of their actual legacy in terms of popular, institutional and official national memory is a complex one. The first half of the article will thus explore the official archive of the 1966 festival, while also attempting to identify new ways of engaging with some of its legacies for its multiple audiences. The second half of the article will then explore what FESMAN 2010 reveals about the prevalence of processes of recuperation and nostalgia, but also the ongoing utopian engagement with the Pan-African archive in contemporary encounters with these ephemeral events from the past.

Keywords:

• festivals
• archive
• performance
• nostalgia
• African Renaissance

Notes on Contributor

David Murphy is Professor of French and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Stirling. He has written widely on Francophone African, and particularly Senegalese, culture, as well as on the history of the black community in France. He published the first critical edition of the writings of the Senegalese anti-colonial militant Lamine Senghor (L’Harmattan, 2012), and is currently writing an intellectual biography of Senghor to be published by Verso in 2017. He recently finished editing the first volume to be devoted to the 1966 Dakar World Festival of Negro Arts (to be published by Liverpool University Press in September 2016).

Notes

1. For an overview of the festival, see Murphy (Forthcoming). This volume offers detailed analysis of various strands of the festival, which it is beyond the scope of the present article to provide.

2. Alioune Diop, founder of the Paris-based publishing house Présence Africaine, was the official chair of the organizing committee, but Senghor was the figure who did most to promote the specific cultural vision at the heart of the festival.

3. For a more in-depth discussion of Senghor’s historical understanding of African culture, see Murphy 2009: 157–70.

4. For an in-depth discussion of the attempt to recuperate Sembene at the 1966 festival, see Murphy 2015.

5. This information is taken from an undated Los Angeles Times clipping contained in the Mercer Cook Papers, Box 157-18, File 5 at the Moorland-Springarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.

6. For an outline of the exhibition, see www.quaibranly.fr/en/exhibitions-and-events/at-the-museum/exhibitions/event-details/e/dakar-66-36335 (accessed 27 February 2016).

7. To view some of the material from the project, see http://www.iiac.cnrs.fr/article477.html (accessed 27 February 2016).

8. Programme of the 2010 festival available at: http://www.sangonet.com/eventc/Exposition/Fesman3/program_french-fesman-MAJ2dec2010.pdf Logo available at: http://blog.afropop.org/2011/01/history-of-world-festival-of-black-arts.html

9. On the Monument de la Renaissance Africaine, see De Jong and Foucher (2010). De Jong and Quinn (2014) trace a similar process of positing deep historical roots and projecting towards the future in Wade’s (failed) attempts to restore the École William Ponty, at which he and other members of the Francophone West African colonized elite were trained, while nearby he began the construction of the Université du Futur Africain, a development that ran out of funding and remains an unfinished building site.

10. The unreliability of the programme as archive is illustrated by the case of a US-based scholar with whom I am acquainted. In late 2010, she received an invitation to give a paper at the ‘conférence structurante’ and, several weeks after the festival, received a note from the organizers thanking her for her contribution: unfortunately, she had not in between these two missives either received her airline ticket or actually attended the conference. For an account of the often chaotic experience of attending the festival, see Murphy (2011).

11. For a brief account of the museum’s troubled history, see Sylla (2007).