The New Survey of Black Poetry: "Evidence that Negritude is still alive"?
In 1966, during the World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, the journal Présence Africaine published its 57th issue, which brought together 144 poets and 393 poems. A collective work, the Nouvelle somme de poésie du monde noir is a multilingual anthology, gathering poems written in five different languages (French, English, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch). The author recaptures the intentions of the anthologists (Léon-Gontran Damas, Lamine Diakhaté, Abiola Irele and Virgílio de Lemos) and their conceptions of the "poetry of the Black world" from the accompanying apparatus and the organization of the New Sum. There is a desire to give substance to both a literature ("the poetry of the black world"), and an imagined community ("the black world"). It then indicates the stakes underlying the project to gather the poetry of a new generation of writers on the occasion of the World Festival of Black Arts and the attempt led by Damas to affiliate the new generation of poets to the Négritude.