The Rise of Black Internationalism

The struggle to eradicate colonial relations between the French and people from the former

colonies was certainly not new. Paris of the interwar period had been a hub for black political

activism as Paris had been “a colonial metropolis” where people of African descent experienced

various forms of marginalization. This colonial climate brewed resistance within the African

diaspora in Paris and France as a whole. In the aftermath of World War I, a new appreciation for

black culture emerged in interwar Paris which functioned as a node for the circulation cultural

products through which black identity was made and claimed (Gillett, 23). This led to various

networks of national exchange of work and ideas that crisscrossed the Atlantic which

encompassed art, literature and music that led to dimension of black solidarity and produced

black internationalism (Gillett,57). For Edward Brent, one approach to the stirrings of the

cultures of black internationalism is to consider the ways that during and after the war,

metropolitan France was one of the key places where African Americans, Antilleans, and

Africans were able to “link up. During the war, France had a large population of African

American Soldiers, labor force and students from the colonies whose tales of encounter and

connection were

forged in the trenches and on the docks, traveled back to the United States with the American

fighting forces. It is important to recognize that the significance of these different groups in

interwar Paris, as Edward Brent has argued, the European metropole after the war provided

a special sort of vibrant, cosmopolitan space for interaction that was available neither in the

United States nor in the colonies. It allowed “a complexity and a sophistication of social

relations, supplemented in the most important cases—Paris, above all—by exceptional liberties

of expression.