The most famous and influential of these clubs was La Cabane Cubaine in the Place Blanche in Pigalle. The Cuban musician and entrepreneur Eduardo Castellano opened the club at 42 Rue Fontaine in 1930. The club featured cabaret shows with both large Cuban orquestas and small son and rumba ensembles.16 Its success appears to have been instantaneous. Probably because the poet and surrealist theorist André Breton lived upstairs, the club soon became a surrealist haunt. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were also habitués. Bohemians and intellectuals of all sorts flocked to the club to hear “authentic” Cuban music and see professional Cuban rumba dancers. The club was simultaneously seedy and stylish, a mix many Parisians found exhilarating.
For somewhat different reasons, African and Antillean students frequently visited the club as well. The club was a place where individuals from the black Atlantic could meet one another, recognize their cultural diversity, and find common ground in Afro-Cuban music. The Senegalese writer Ousmane Socé Diop (1911–1973), in his novel Mirages de Paris, described it as an “ethnographic museum”: “In the throng of blacks gathered at the Cabane Cubaine so similar in appearance, Fara introduced Jacqueline to Africans, Haitians, and Mauriciens. People said this nightspot was an ethnographic museum of the black world, to which each nation had sent a specimen.”17
The club was a cultural contact zone, one of the few places in the world at that time where blacks and whites could socialize on a basis of relative social equality. An image by the photographer Brassaï, “En La Cabane Cubaine,” shot around 1932, captures the special ambience of the club. The photo immediately draws the viewer’s eye to how racially integrated La Cabane Cubaine was in its heyday. There are racially mixed couples as well as all-black and all-white couples, everyone obviously at ease at the club. In the photo’s foreground is a table at which are seated a white couple deep in conversation with one another and a nattily dressed black man lost in thought, smoking a cigarette. Movement is an important visual component of the image. At the center of the image a laughing black man dances with a smiling white woman. The delight they take in each other’s company is palpable. Other dancing couples surround them, equally enjoying themselves. Indeed, pleasure and desire, rather than racial diversity, is the image’s dominant feature. Brassaï’s photo references Paris as a city of erotic adventure where taboos that impede sexual intimacy elsewhere evaporate.18 During the Harlem Renaissance, European American men went to Harlem to hear Duke Ellington and court black mistresses in segregated nightclubs like The Cotton Club. La Cabane Cubaine offered an altogether different experience. It was a combination of a nodal point for people of color in Paris, a space where whites and blacks could freely interact, and a space where desire from all its patrons could be displayed publicly. Most of all, it was a site where young Africans connected Afro-Cuban music, movement, and blackness with modernity.
A La Cabane Cubaine, Montmartre, ca. 1932 Brassaï (Gyula Halasz, called, 1899–1984) © Estate Brassaï-RMN. Photograph PL.473. Photo: Michèle Bellot. Private Collection. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY
One of the patrons of La Cabane Cubaine in the early 1930s was a young Senegalese student in Paris, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a major figure in the cultural and political history of Senegal. Senghor was born in 1906 in Joal, a coastal maritime village in a region where Kru and Cape Verdean sailors had been exposing the Senegalese inhabitants to Caribbean music for centuries. After spending his early years in an agricultural village with his mother, Senghor began attending a Catholic mission school as a boarder when he was eight years old. He proved an extraordinary student, and when he was seventeen he entered a newly established Catholic seminary in Dakar. Disenchanted by the racist condescension he encountered there, he withdrew and enrolled in a new lycée in Dakar in 1926. He excelled in his studies and in 1928 received a half scholarship from the colonial regime to study literature in Paris.
Senghor found academic success difficult to achieve in France in the 1920s. His colonial education had not adequately prepared him to excel at the university level. Moreover, many of his Parisian professors were not receptive to teaching African students, no matter how outstanding. One of his biographers, Janet G. Vaillant, also suggests that he found much of the teaching about literature at the Sorbonne hidebound and out of date.19 To make himself better able to withstand the rigors of the French university system, Senghor withdrew from the Sorbonne and became a student at a famous lycée, Louis-le-Grand, where he formed a close lifelong friendship with fellow student Georges Pompidou, later president of France. By the early 1930s Senghor had reenrolled at the Sorbonne, this time as a student of grammar. During this period he took up residence at the Cité Universitaire, a dormitory for French-speaking students from around the world. It was there that he met Antillean students like Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) and began to get a sense of the global dimensions of African civilization. Despite his plaintive letters to colonial administrators complaining about his life of unrelieved drudgery in Paris,20 it was during this period that he first started visiting La Cabane Cubaine, sometimes in the company of Césaire. A New World opened up to the previously reticent and withdrawn student as he began to socialize with intellectually gifted youths from the Caribbean and elsewhere in Africa at Paris’s Afro-Cuban music nightclubs. Though an awkward dancer, by the late 1930s he was teaching newly arrived Senegalese students in Paris the latest steps.21
Out of this sustained intellectual and social interaction between African and Antillean students and the explosively creative climate in Montmartre/Pigalle and the Rive Gauche emerged the famous cultural movement negritude. Pioneered by Senghor, Césaire, and the Guyanese Léon-Gontram Damas (1912–1978), “négritude was a rejection of assimilation, an identification with blackness, and a celebration of African Civilization.”22 The movement advocated a reverse racialization of colonial knowledge, privileging an African “emotional” way of knowing over an arid European “rationalism.” According to negritude theorists like Senghor, Africans and people of African descent, through intuition and sensory perception, could see through surfaces to the essence of an object or behavior. This ability to get to the heart of the matter was something invaluable that African culture could bring to world civilization. At its inception, negritude tried to strike a balance between cosmopolitanism (universal ways of knowing) and cultural authenticity (validating particular African methods of producing knowledge). In so doing, it addressed philosophically many of the same challenges of being modern and African that Afro-Cuban music did on a more everyday level.23
At least in their early phases, the histories of negritude and the Senegalese embrace of Afro-Cuban music were intertwined, involving some of the same individuals. The initiators of negritude and those who saw the path to African modernity illuminated by Afro-Cuban music believed that African modernity must have a prominent aesthetic dimension. The two groups equally underscored the significance of rhythm and movement in defining blackness. The theorists of negritude and the aficionados of Afro-Cuban music also argued that any modern black identity had to be transnational, “not simply constructed in opposition to Europe but in relation to it.”24 Both argued that these identities had to be performed publicly to counter dominant European cultural models. Each saw cafés and nightclubs as important laboratories for incubating ideas and developing modern forms of sociality.
By the late 1930s, however, the trajectories of negritude and the linking of Afro-Cuban music with Senegalese modernity