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# Nancy Cunard and Her Anthology “Negro”, Published in London in 1934
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/po-sovremennym-merkam-priamo-kramolnaia-kniga/
- Published: 2026-10-20T18:53:13.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-20T20:10:11.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Books, London, Observations, The Golden Age, The East

A title that, by today's standards, is seditious

Nancy Cunard, heiress to the British shipping line Cunard Line, was a poet and a publisher, and in February 1934 she brought out, with the London house of Wishart, the anthology “Negro”, Negro Anthology 1931-1933\. Cunard dedicated the book to the jazz pianist Henry Crowder, with whom she had lived for several years. The British newspapers ran scandalous articles about their affair; Cunard sued them for libel and used the damages awarded to her to publish the anthology in an edition of one thousand copies.

The book runs to 855 pages and contains texts by some 150 authors. Cunard arranged the material on a geographical principle: sections headed “America”, “The West Indies and South America”, “Europe” and “Africa”, together with separate sections on music, poetry and black stars of the stage and of sport. More than half of the volume is given over to the United States. The book includes essays, statistics, newspaper material, sheet music, and photographs of African art from the British Museum, the Trocadéro ethnographic museum in Paris and the Congo museum at Tervuren in Belgium. Among the contributors were Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, William Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston with her essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression”, George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Theodore Dreiser. The French Surrealists André Breton, Paul Éluard, Yves Tanguy and others wrote for the anthology an anti-colonial pamphlet, “Murderous Humanitarianism”. Nineteen French texts were translated into English by the young Samuel Beckett, and this work became his largest prose publication of the time.

The preface begins with the words: “This book had to be made… in order to record the struggles and achievements, the persecutions and the revolts against them, of the Negro peoples ... Only communism breaks down racial barriers as conclusively as it destroys class distinctions. ... The truth is that Africa is a tragedy.” The book closes with an article by Raymond Michelet, whose title runs “The White Man Is Killing Africa”.

Contemporaries barely noticed the anthology, and a considerable part of the unsold print run was destroyed when a German bomb hit the warehouse during the Blitz. Today a first edition sells at auction for several thousand pounds. In the display case before me lies the facsimile issued in 2018 by the Paris publisher Jean-Michel Place.

Beside it lies the fourth number of “Tropiques” for January 1942, the journal that Aimé Césaire published in Fort-de-France while Martinique was governed by the Vichy regime. The best-known text of the issue was written by Suzanne Césaire, Aimé's wife and co-editor. In her article “The Misery of a Poetry” she attacks the exotic Martinican verse of “the hammock, sugar and vanilla”, written for tourists, and ends with the phrase “Martinican poetry will be cannibal or it will not be”.

Well, Martinican poetry did indeed become cannibal, though not quite in the form that the refined authoress had expected