Universal Suffrage as Expressive Self-Realization

“We must remember that if the theory of democracy is correct, the right to vote is not merely a privilege, not simply a method of meeting the needs of a particular group, and least of all a matter of recognized want or desire.” It is rather “a method of realizing the broadest measure of justice to all human beings.” Such was W. E. B. Du Bois’s appraisal of universal suffrage in his 1920 Darkwater. It was an expansive vision, so expansive in fact that universal suffrage became a motor of civilizational development. “There must come to the polls every generation, and indeed every year, men who are inexperienced in the solutions of the political problems that confront them.” Yet only through repeated voting “will civilization grow” (Du Bois [1920] Reference Du Bois2016, 81–82). For the interwar Du Bois, universal suffrage did not presuppose a fully formed electorate but conveyed it to self-ruling maturity as its effect. That was because political power was like a musical instrument. Its mastery was a matter of practical, repeated exercise.

Du Bois did not always hold universal suffrage in such exalted estimation. Since the 1890s, his attitude towards the franchise could be uneven and contradictory. Certainly in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) his view was comparatively dim. There the ballot could only be “looked upon as a visible sign of freedom” in his people’s “credulous race-childhood.” As Black Americans entered adulthood after Emancipation, “a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power,” namely “book-learning.” Enthusiasm for Black enfranchisement had to shrink in proportion to his race’s spiritual progress, its struggle for “dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect” (Du Bois [1903] Reference Du Bois and Huggins1986, 367, 369). Racial self-advancement, Souls argued, was not found at the ballot box but at the summit of an existential climb “the end of which [was] culture” (Du Bois [1903] Reference Myers1986, 434.)

Nineteenth-century romanticism often viewed modern politics as a fallen realm relative to the heights of culture. For a Rousseau or a Blake, a Delacroix or a Wagner, modern politics was inextricable from moral enervation. It was not in politics but in art and war that the romantic found an arena for soulful self-expression (Rosenblum Reference Rosenblum1982). Like the German romantics he imbibed as a student in Berlin, Du Bois was reluctant in Souls to ascribe to the franchise higher spiritual purposes (Gooding-Williams Reference Gooding-Williams2009, 19–65; Lewis Reference Lewis2009, 95–109). He did not share the romantics’ romance with war, but he accepted the hierarchy they drew on that basis between politics and culture, matter and spirit. Hence he consigned “the dream of political power” to his people’s race-childhood.

Undoubtedly, Du Bois and others like Ida B. Wells insisted “voting [was] necessary to modern manhood” (Du Bois [1903] Reference Myers1986, 401; Wells [1910] Reference Césaire2014, 424). But if their rhetoric on suffrage could soar, that was only to balance the impossible weight of the alternative: “The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defense,—what else shall save us from a second slavery?” (Du Bois [1903] Reference Myers1986, 370).

“The sole and legitimate defense of a free people”—a bitter appraisal of something necessary in lieu of the social revolution Reconstruction had pledged. The Freedman’s Bureau of 1865–72 had promised the seeds of Black economic independence, “forty acres and a mule.” Denied this, Black suffrage was a consolation prize (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1910, 785). Souls defended universal suffrage’s value unconditionally, but that value was minimal, even pathetic. “Sheer self-defense” is a value of last resort. To prize racial self-defense is to concede, however tacitly, that economic and racial justice is not forthcoming.

We only glean from Du Bois a premonition of “universal suffrage as decolonization” after he turned towards women’s suffrage and international socialism. As Du Bois became more feminist and internationalist, his appreciation of the ballot’s spiritual and expressive powers grew. Consider first women’s suffrage (Dennie Reference Dennie2020; Sklar and Kuzma Reference Sklar and Kuzma1998). Du Bois was long-time editor of The Crisis, and beginning in 1912 he published repeatedly on women’s suffrage, editing a special September 1912 issue on “Woman Suffrage” and a “Votes for Women” symposium in August 1915. In these articles, Du Bois navigated the treacherous ill will between women’s and Black male suffrage movements; the relation between the two was marred by the former’s racist “Southern Strategy” and their anger at the latter’s claim it was “the Negro’s hour” (Pauley Reference Pauley2000). On one hand, these articles defended women’s suffrage on grounds of self-defense (Du Bois [1914] Reference Du Bois and Huggins1986, 1159–60). On the other hand, Du Bois argued in his November 1915 article,

Du Bois reiterated disenfranchisement left one “unprotected,” but he added the new argument that women’s suffrage was required by “the meaning of the twentieth century”: the liberation of the soul. This, Robert Gooding-Williams (Reference Gooding-Williams2009) argues, is an ideal of freedom as “expressive self-realization.” Emancipation here involves an inner authentic spirit finding expression in the public, political realm. It is a politics of authenticity, because the sign of our freedom is what Du Bois describes in Souls: “To attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another” (Du Bois [1903] Reference Du Bois and Huggins1986, 368). Women needed the ballot for self-defense. But now they also needed it, because the twentieth century demanded all souls be themselves and not another.

The same growing spiritualization of universal suffrage appears in Du Bois’s Darkwater ([1920] Reference Du Bois2016), his first semiautobiographical work. There he describes how the First World War irrevocably tarnished Europe’s luster: “This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity, this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture” (Du Bois [1920] Reference Du Bois2016, 22). The war forced Du Bois to redefine whiteness. No longer was it skin color or an ascriptive character of persons. Whiteness now named a colonial disposition, a person’s discovery that they enjoyed a natural, propriety relationship to the earth and labor (Du Bois [1920] Reference Du Bois2016, 18; Myers Reference Myers2019). Moreover, the war pushed Du Bois to resituate African American struggles at home in a global context of imperial competition and extractive processes applied to people of color in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and internally in America. American racism became, in Harold Cruse’s famous formulation, an example of “domestic colonialism,” and the First World War became an episode in the history of racial capitalism (Cruse Reference Cruse1968; Gutiérrez Reference Gutiérrez2004). Together, these conclusions radicalized Du Bois. No longer optimistic the color line could be overcome by expanded education and American liberalism, he now endorsed “a new African World State,” “a new democracy of all races,” and the abolition of “all private property in raw materials and tools and demand that distribution hinge, not on the power of those who monopolize the materials, but on the needs of the mass of men” (Du Bois [1920] Reference Du Bois2016, 37, 42, 57). If the color line was a global problem, then nothing less than a global restructuring of race and economy was necessary.

This analysis could have led Du Bois to an even dimmer view of suffrage’s power. Voting for a local representative out of self-defense seems remote from abolishing racial capitalism. Yet the opposite happens. As with women’s domination, Du Bois responded by enhancing the ballot’s expressive powers. Enlightenment philosophers discovered universal suffrage, Du Bois argued in Darkwater, but these early democrats only knew how to apply it to limited issues like privileges and taxation. With the onset of the industrial revolution, “the new democracy stood aghast and impotent. It could not rule because it did not understand: an invincible kingdom of trade, business, and commerce ruled the world, and before its threshold stood the Freedom of 18^th century philosophy warding the way.” The dream of universal suffrage was born too late. By the time it penetrated the popular imagination, it was already outmoded, incapable of subjecting “the tyrants of the Industrial Age” to democratic control (Du Bois [1920] Reference Du Bois2016, 78–79).

Rather than dismiss universal suffrage as the dream of a credulous race-childhood, however, Du Bois elevated its role in the “future industrial democracy of the world.” To overcome racial capitalism, workers everywhere had to “apply their political power to [the economy’s] reform through democratic control” (Du Bois [1920] Reference Du Bois2016, 80, 58–59). That could not happen if elites governed the world economy in the name of all. A global industrial democracy needed everyone’s voice. Hence it needed universal suffrage, because the ballot had an irreplaceable expressive power.

To limit the franchise, to believe one group can speak for another, was to perform Du Bois’s new definition of whiteness. Likewise, to limit the franchise was to undercut the future industrial democracy of the world, because nobody’s inner life could be expressed by someone else. The many must participate in industrial democracy for the many to enjoy its benefits. In the end, overcoming whiteness and capitalism amounted to the same thing: a world industrial democracy that accorded “proportionate representation in physical and spiritual form” to all races (Du Bois [1920] Reference Du Bois2016, 88). Du Bois did not shy from the radical implications. Either the voices of working folk of all races were to be included in a global economic democracy or they would have no choice but to “overturn the world.” They would show Europe and America the true meaning of world war (28).

The distance from Souls was dramatic. Universal suffrage was no longer limited to self-defense, but a spiritual medium allowing the souls of all races to find expression in a global industrial democracy. Electors were not to be regarded as “sharers of a limited treasure, but as sources of new national wisdom and strength” (Du Bois [1920] Reference Du Bois2016, 84). The ballot participated in a communist logic. As access to it was shared, its value increased rather than diminished.

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Du Bois anticipated “universal suffrage as decolonization” by magnifying the ballot’s expressive powers. Even so, he left a crucial matter ambiguous: how did universal suffrage connect the knowledge and beauty “locked in the bosoms” of “individual souls” to the articulation of the collective “gift of Black folk”? Was the latter hidden in the former, too? Black workers were disenfranchised as a group, yet they needed ballots as individuals because “a man in a modern civilized land” needed, beyond work and property, “something of the higher spiritual life of the world” (Du Bois Reference Sharpley-Whiting1909, 82). Between the emancipation of the individual soul and the expressive realization of a Black volk, Du Bois delineated a whole terrain of Black cultural politics.

The terrain came into sharper focus in Du Bois’s Francophone counterparts. In 1944, France embarked on a constitutional refounding. For four years, Nazis had occupied its northern and western regions. The remaining unoccupied “Free Zone” was led by Marshal Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist government based in Vichy. Under Pétain’s “national revolution,” Vichy France collaborated with the Nazis to deport Jews, frequently in proactive ways. It restricted women’s liberties, criminalized homosexuality, revalorized France’s Catholic heritage, and advocated a pronatalist family policy in the name of “regenerating” the nation (Marrus and Paxton Reference Marrus and Paxton1981, Pollard Reference Pollard1998; Sibalis Reference Sibalis2002). From within, communist women and men formed resistance cells, sabotaging Nazi efforts to turn France into a launchpad for Aryan domination (Schwartz Reference Schwartz1989). From without, Charles de Gaulle denounced “the body located in Vichy” as “unconstitutional and subject to the invader” and declared France Libre the true seat of French sovereignty (de Gaulle Reference De Gaulle1940). Such patriotic efforts cannot hide the fact, better understood today, that the Resistance’s numbers were sometimes exaggerated; that many French men and women—even young Jews—collaborated with the occupation; that it was wrong to quarantine Nazism as a German phenomenon; and that Vichy was not a “parenthesis” in the history of France, because Vichy was, at bottom, French (Lee Reference Lee2014; Noiriel Reference Noiriel1999; Rousso Reference Rousso and Goldhammer1994).

Liberation provided an opportunity for France to denazify and repudiate Vichy. War against Nazism was understood as a war against racism. To continue colonial rule on the grounds of racial hierarchy would have been ludicrously hypocritical. “Fighting against the Germans,” Simone Weil remarked, “is not sufficient proof that we love freedom” given the French behaved in “true Hitlerian style” in Africa and Indochina (Jennings Reference Jennings2001; Weil Reference Weil and Little2003, 112, 92). Africans had also played an outsized role in the war. Félix Éboué from Chad was among the first to rally to France Libre. Colonial reform was overdue.

A Constituent National Assembly was elected in October to draft a new French constitution. Electors, including women, overwhelmingly elected representatives from the Communist and Socialist parties. These included men from overseas territories like Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire. Born in Senegal, Senghor studied in interwar Paris. There he founded L’Étudiant noir with Césaire and Léon Damas, the journal that with the Nardal sisters inaugurated négritude (Sharpley-Whiting Reference Sharpley-Whiting2002). During the next two decades, négritude would, like Harlem’s “New Negro” movement, participate in a transatlantic African modernism (Kesteloot Reference Kesteloot and Kennedy1991). With liberation in 1944, Senghor was invited to teach linguistics at the École nationale de la France d’outre-mer. The teaching stint was brief. That same year, Senghor joined Lamine Guèye on the Socialist ticket to represent Senegalese noncitizens at the Constituent Assembly; he was elected. For the next two years he would play a decisive role in preparing the new French Constitution, the first draft of which was so covered with his fingerprints that critics sometimes called it, contemptuously, the “Constitution Senghor” (Cooper Reference Cooper, Arato and Cohen2018; Wilder Reference Wilder2015, 51–94).

Césaire grew up in Martinique before moving to Paris in the 1930s. Studying alongside Senghor, he translated the work of radicals like Richard Wright and contributed to L’Étudiant noir. In December 1939, Césaire returned to Martinique with his partner, Suzanne, where they both taught in Fort-de-France. To young radicals like Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon, Aimé assigned Malraux, Rimbaud, Lautréaumont, and ethnologists like Leo Frobenius. In 1941, he founded Tropiques with Suzanne and René Ménil. Over the next four years, their journal would produce iconic essays on twentieth-century modernist poetics. In 1944, Aimé would be recruited by Ménil to head the communist ticket for Martiniquais representatives to the Constituent Assembly. Like Senghor, he was elected (Nesbitt Reference Nesbitt2013, 86–95; Wilder Reference Wilder2015, 19–45). By the opening session of the Constituent National Assembly in December 1945, France was an inverted image of the just city in Plato’s Republic. Plato’s city was one of philosopher kings and banished poets, but the Fourth Republic was to be the handicraft, quite literally, of poets.

The Constituent National Assembly’s work is well known (Marshall Reference Marshall1973; Cooper Reference Cooper2014). Under communist and socialist leadership, the Assembly created sécurité sociale; approved the US Marshall Plan; passed Houphouët-Boigny’s law abolishing forced labor in the colonies and Guèye’s law elevating colonial subjects into citizens; promised overseas territories local assemblies with deliberative rather than consultative powers; created a colonial development fund; and torpedoed proposals for a presidential system, to de Gaulle’s dismay. Yet articles concerning the Empire’s constitutional structure, now rebranded as the “French Union,” bounced back and forth between the Commission de la France d’Outre-mer and the Commission Constitutionnelle (Cooper Reference Cooper2014, 67–88). Césaire sat on the former; Senghor was a member of both. By the time Assembly members finalized the constitution’s first draft in June 1946, it reflected major compromises. The commitment to a more egalitarian empire triumphed. Overseas territories were provided elected assemblies, and a single legislature was designed to govern the Union. At the same time, the text retained important hierarchies. A Conseil de l’Union française was subordinated to the National Assembly. The extent of suffrage and the specific powers of local assemblies were left unspecified. Senghor defended these ambiguities as realistic. “This system is supple,” he argued. “I could call it a transitional system; I prefer to call it a dynamic system which leaves the door open to the future” (Senghor Reference Senghor1946, 1714). Ambiguity left room for the Union to evolve. Nobody wanted the French Union to ossify into “a cage nobody would like to enter” (Senghor [1946] Reference Senghor1947, 3792).

Defending “Constitution Senghor” turned out to be futile. In a disastrous June referendum, the French electorate voted down the draft text. The vast majority of non-Europeans voted in favor of it; the vast majority of Europeans voted against it. Catholics of the Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP) and de Gaulle campaigned against it because they hated how its unicameral legislature empowered the communists (Bidault [1965] Reference Bidault and Sinclair1967, 108–122; Lewis Reference Lewis1998). The draft text was revised and voted upon again after yet more debate in October 1946. This second version was ratified as the Fourth Republic’s constitution. It prescribed a bicameral legislature, representation for overseas territories (but not proportional to their population), and neither universal suffrage nor a single electoral college. White Europeans and settlers would have their own voter lists, guaranteeing them an outsized voice in the legislature.

This process was tortured. Nevertheless, Senghor and Césaire fought for as egalitarian a franchise as possible. For them, universal suffrage could place the empire on the path to decolonization, the latter understood as the creation of “a domination-free international order” rather than a world of independent states (Cooper Reference Cooper, Arato and Cohen2018, 36–37; Getachew Reference Getachew2019, 10). At least, that would be true if enfranchisement could give voice to a civilization whose voice had long been smothered by European colonialism and French assimilation. “We want,” Senghor argued, “an authentic voice of Africa to be heard” (Senghor Reference Senghor1945, 237).

Consider Senghor’s Reference Senghor1945 essay “Vues sur l’Afrique noire ou assimiler, non être assimilés,” written on the eve of the constitution drafting process. The essay popularized Senghor’s refrain to Black Africa: “assimilate, don’t be assimilated.” It also spelled out his preferred view on universal suffrage:

Universal suffrage should not be reduced to individual enfranchisement. To endorse the ballot as an individual’s possession would mean subscribing to a European understanding of society as an aggregation of individual proprietors. As Senghor was fond of explaining, Africans believed “the simplest component, the basic cellule” of society “[was] the family.” Indeed, “African Negro society is, in effect, made up of widening concentric circles, superimposed and interlaced” (Senghor Reference Senghor1956, 54). The mode of election adequate to African society would therefore be a ballot expressing collective voices, for humanity was not made of individuals but families, clans, tribes, villages, regions, and civilizations.

Senghor made variations of this argument repeatedly. In Esprit in July 1945, he urged the Declaration of the Rights of Man be “completed” by “adding to the liberty and equality of individuals that of peoples and races” (Senghor Reference Senghor1945, 247, 244). Before the Constituent Assembly in April 1946, Senghor acknowledged the historic importance of 1789’s radical individualism. But twentieth-century sociology and ethnology demonstrated that not only individuals but also civilizations inhabited the world: “France had discovered little by little … the brilliant Arab civilization … the social humanism of China and Indochina, the collectivist and artistic humanism of Black Africa.” “Voilà,” Senghor indicated, “the difficulties that have arisen” for French individualism. The French Union’s new constitution had to “take into account historical and geographical realities,” to “recall that the science of man has living matter for its object,” not dead abstractions, that to force the Union into a more “geometric construction” would threaten “brutal integration” (Senghor Reference Senghor1946, 1714–15). Yet again, in a speech to the Assembly in September 1946, Senghor insisted “democracy demands … that all its members contribute to the election of deputies.” But we must never forget the French Union is both a collection of individuals and “a conjunction of civilizations, a crucible of cultures.” For it to succeed, the new constitutional framework had to establish “diverse laws or constitutions proper to each land” (Senghor [1946] Reference Senghor1947, 3790–92).

Césaire shared Senghor’s reluctance to organize electoral democracy around abstract individualism. A communist, Césaire was more open to a unitary state. From 1944 to 1946, he pursued “departmentalization,” or the conversion of dependent territories into equal administrative units of a single French state (Wilder Reference Wilder2015, 108–27). He claimed departmentalization would “bring to its logical conclusion the evolutionary process begun a century ago” in the French Revolution (Césaire Reference Césaire1946, 659). Departmentalization was no toothless process of legal inclusion. Applying the letter of the law to overseas departments would mean extending the postwar welfare state to underdeveloped colonies, an act of economic redistribution so enormous it would effectively bankrupt the metropole.

But as administrative sabotage over the years mocked departmentalization’s promises, Césaire attacked “geometric” visions of integration and inclusion (Césaire [1947] Reference Césaire2013, 48–50). After the Constitution was accepted, some of Césaire’s and Senghor’s electoral recommendations were implemented. Yet consider Césaire’s response to a subsequent 1949 proposal to “assimilate the electoral mode applied in these departments to that of the metropole.” “The principle of departmentalization,” he insisted, “had never been mechanical homogenization. I would even say that it was to the contrary.” Why then did legislators “suppress under the pretext of assimilation a mode of voting which [was] traditional in the overseas departments”? After all, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion had long “enjoyed in the electoral domain a system of their own,” one reflecting “a natural partition, rooted in the soil and which, as such, has never raised any protest in the past.” But France now wanted to inflict an “indignity to democracy” by imposing “a rigid assimilation, a geometric assimilation, an assimilation against nature”: the creation of electoral districts without any attention to geography, traditional population centers, or demographics. Democracy, Césaire implies, does not rest on quantitative individualism. If electoral districts are not contoured to existing peoples, then those electoral maps will “snatch from our people what was left to them: their true representation” (Césaire [1949] Reference Césaire2013, 61–64).

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Individualism has long provided the French republican left its philosophical artillery against corporatism. Corporatism is an image of society as overlapping hierarchical groups: the family, the church, the town, and the guild. Historically, it was indissociable from the ancien régime’s society of orders. Since 1789, the French left’s credo has been that a society of equal citizens can only be realized by liberating individuals from membership in unequal groups. For subjects to become citizens, they must become individuals.

Césaire’s and Senghor’s insistence that universal suffrage articulate a corporate racial voice put them at odds with some of the republican left’s deepest convictions. That was one reason why Césaire broke with the Parti communiste français in 1956 (Hale and Véron Reference Hale and Véron2009). Commitment to collective voice also brought Senghor into confusing proximity with Catholics of the MRP. Believing society’s elemental unit should be groups rather than individuals is a hallmark of modern Catholic thought (Accetti Reference Accetti2019; Chappel Reference Chappel2018). Hence the MRP’s receptivity to Senghor’s federalist proposals. Senghor’s references to “familial” ballots also seemed to reinforce paternalistic understandings of state obligation and the postwar conservative pronatalist welfare policy (Chapman Reference Chapman2018, 109–63). After a complete accounting, his championing of women’s suffrage may be insufficient (Senghor Reference Senghor1945, 239–40; Senghor Reference Senghor1946, 1713).

Even so, Senghor’s defense of familial ballots provides a clue to understanding what he meant by collective voice. He never saw the African family as nuclear. The association merged seamlessly with the community, nature, and history. “But what is the family?” It is, Senghor argued, “the totality of all of those, living and dead, who recognize a common ancestor” (Senghor Reference Senghor1956, 54). The individual, the family, nature, society, and mythological history all existed on the same metaphysical plane because each were simply aspects of our existential coparticipation in a common élan vital (Diagne Reference Diagne2008; Jones Reference Jones2011). “Co-operation, in family, village, tribe, has always been held in honor in Africa,” Senghor insisted, but “not in its collectivist form as an aggregate of individuals, but in its communal form as con-spiracy, from centre to centre, of hearts” (Senghor Reference Senghor, Reed and Wake1965, 100).

Césaire insisted this in his own way, too. “It is self-evident,” Césaire wrote, “that national cultures, however differentiated they may be, are grouped by affinities,” and “these great cultural families have a name: they are called civilisations.” Hence one could speak of “the French family,” not as a biological entity but a multi-generational bond formed by attachment to revolutionary republicanism (Césaire Reference Césaire1946, 659). One could also speak of African civilization, a cultural family that has “given to the political and social world the original communal institutions such as village democracy … which is a negation of capitalism.” For Césaire, African familialism contained an emancipatory element, and one of colonial capitalism’s crimes was that it induced “the break-up of the social and economic structure of the community as well as the disintegration of the family” (Césaire Reference Césaire1956, 194, 198).

Senghor and Césaire invoked the family just as it was becoming an object of intense theoretical reflection. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s landmark The Elementary Structures of Kinship appeared in 1949. There he argued the family presented “a dramatic encounter between nature and culture,” that it was not only “necessary for the social state, but the social state itself” (Lévi-Strauss [1949] Reference Lévi-Strauss, Bell, von Sturmer and Heedham1969, 489–90). We may have sex because we live in nature and are biological creatures, but we marry because we live in society and are symbolic creatures. To have family life is to have symbolic life.

Senghor and Césaire came to know Lévi-Strauss’s work. Everyone did. Lévi-Strauss was then pioneering a nascent French structuralism. His 1942 essay for the surrealist journal VVV was framed by Césaire’s poetry, and the two were increasingly read together after the publication of the former’s “Race and History” UNESCO pamphlet (Lévi-Strauss Reference Lévi-Strauss1952; Loyer [2015] Reference Loyer, Vinsonneau and Magidoff2018, 221, 318–19). Césaire named Lévi-Strauss and Michel Leiris the new pillars of anti-racist anthropology in France (Césaire [1950] Reference Césaire and Pinkham2001, 101). Senghor and Lévi-Strauss probably encountered one another through Georges Balandier (Dosse [1991] Reference Dosse and Glassman1997, 264–72); for his part Senghor consumed ethnology voraciously. These filiations invite us to see how Senghor and Césaire conceptualized the family much the same way structuralists were starting to see the family: as a synonym for social, symbolic life. What Senghor means when he writes “I would rather [the ballot] be familial in Black Africa” is that the ballot should be social in Black Africa. It must not be atomistic but express African symbolic life. Black African voices as Africans will never be heard if we simply count votes one by one. Even with non-European majorities, counting votes one by one will at best yield the voice of a majority that by happenstance is non-European. So organized, it will not enunciate the “authentic voice of Africa” in its all its symbolic density and that colonial assimilation repressed as a distinct imperative.

Towards an Anti-Essentialist Culturalism

Du Bois, Césaire, and Senghor’s interventions conscripted universal suffrage into a politics of racial expressivism. Highlighting that fact should not lead us to overstate continuities. Each reimagined universal suffrage amid their own political contexts. Du Bois fought on the interwar battlefield of women’s suffrage and African American leadership; Césaire and Senghor navigated a polarizing postwar constitutional refounding. Each also cited distinct colonial histories. Du Bois grounded his arguments in the institutional experiments of Radical Reconstruction. Césaire’s speeches on suffrage invoked Victor Schoelcher and 1848’s revolutionary republicanism. Senghor cited the unusual privilege Senegal’s four communes enjoyed as originaires extended “citoyenneté dans le statut” and exemption from the Code de l’indigénat.

Their discrete interventions nevertheless participated in a wider “culturalist” tendency that for better or worse dominated anticolonial intellectual politics in the twentieth century. Culturalism was once a method of imperial rule, enjoining colonial governors to calibrate their policies to the shapes of customary societies (Mantena Reference Mantena2010). In the twentieth century, the culture concept—“cultural difference”—also provided an immanent standpoint to critique the global capitalist system (Sartori Reference Sartori2008). Notions of ancestral voice ballasted “universal suffrage as decolonization” because they infused antiracist thought generally. Du Bois spoke of the “Sorrow Songs” as ancestral “voices of the past,” disavowed by America yet whose self-conscious prominence would constitute the “greatest gift of the Negro people” to the world (Du Bois [1903] Reference Du Bois and Huggins1986, 536–38, 541). Alain Locke defended the Harlem Renaissance in 1925 as “a movement of folk-expression and self-determination,” one that mirrored the “resurgence of a people” all over the world from India and China to Palestine and Mexico. To “repair a damaged group psychology,” Locke believed it was time to “let the Negro speak for himself.” (Locke [1925] Reference Locke1997, xxv, xxvii, 10–11). Suzanne Césaire made much the same point in Tropiques in April 1942 when she claimed “our sentiment of the Martinican way of life can perhaps be the point of departure for a viable cultural style,” an alternative to European culture’s bankrupt rationalism (Césaire [1942] Reference Césaire1978, 48).

These culturalist claims were sourced in the common conviction that colonialism involved more than foreign rule and territorial occupation. It also named a process of psychic and linguistic dispossession. It left behind, Aimé Césaire lamented, only “the frightening silence of Man,” a silence so existential it depleted the life of the land it stilled (Césaire [1941] Reference Césaire1978a, 5–6). No wonder Senghor believed anticolonialism entailed “cultural revolution” (Senghor Reference Senghor1949, 1024). The transatlantic project to unfetter Black “folk-expression and self-determination” preceded and succeeded Du Bois, Césaire, and Senghor’s interventions in universal suffrage, and situating the latter within that horizon reveals those interventions as contiguous segments of a revolutionary dream.

Was this culturalist tendency underlying “universal suffrage as decolonization” essentialist? Even racist? Already by the time Locke published “The New Negro” in 1925 the question had become unavoidable. Josephine Baker posed it in epic form with her “banana dance” performances in Paris (Dalton and Gates Reference Dalton and Gates1998; Figure 1). For Senghor, Aimé, and Suzanne Césaire in particular, Alioune Diop’s 1956 conference in Paris, organized under Présence Africaine’s auspices, provided an international forum to confront the matter. They were joined by the Black intelligentsia’s leaders like Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin (Figure 2). For her part, Baker promoted the conference, which was covered extensively by the press on both sides of the Atlantic. Lévi-Strauss forwarded a supportive telegram to be read aloud. Du Bois did the same; denied a travel visa by the American government, his missive urged attendees to “believe in socialism for Africa” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1956).

Figure 1.

Josephine Baker and Joe Alex in Their Danse Sauvage

Note: Baker’s 1925 performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées made her France’s most famous Black female performer. Lorenzo Ciniglio/Sygma via Getty Images.

Figure 2.

Photograph of the Speakers’ Platform at the 1956 Congrès International des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs

Note: Alioune Diop stands. Second from the left is Richard Wright. Third from the right is Aimé Césaire. ©Présence Africaine Editions, Communauté Africaine de Culture, n 8/10, juin–novembre 1956.

At the conference, Fanon attacked beliefs in an authentic African culture as racist. “Discovering the uselessness of his alienation,” Fanon explained how the assimilated intellectual “plunges with passion in to this culture which he had abandoned, left, rejected, despised.”

Recuperating the voice of an African volk was sheer psychological defense mechanism. Race pride was the sign of an alienated consciousness trying to return home only to live out a second alienation.

There was an unmistakable element of self-critique in Fanon’s presentation. But these arguments also reflected his racial abolitionism, his belief that “the black soul is a white man’s artifact” and that Black liberation necessitated “the liberation of the man of color from himself” (Fanon [1952] Reference Fanon and Markmann1967, 8, 14). It was one reason he opted for the nation over race. His criticisms of racial authenticity cut deep. Paul Gilroy (Reference Gilroy1993) has warned that struggles for racial justice that ground themselves on racial foundationalism, whether biological or cultural, stand on quicksand. And there is no denying Du Bois, Senghor, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Locke, and their comrades sometimes flirted with racial foundationalism. Volk conceptions of race and civilization were unavoidable in an age where anthropology reigned among the human sciences (Conklin Reference Conklin2013; Stoczkowski Reference Stoczkowski2008). Even Baldwin, who listened to Senghor claim that “the Negro is a man of nature,” a being who is “touch, before being eye like the white European,” admitted he found Senghor’s perspective seductive even if he did not agree with it (Baldwin Reference Baldwin and Morrison1998, 150; Senghor Reference Senghor1956, 52).

We nonetheless misunderstand “universal suffrage as decolonization” if we take the culturalist demand for collective voice underwriting it to be naïve. Whatever else it was, this generation’s pursuit of an African vox populi was critical and self-reflexive. They demanded a collective voice, but they did so first and foremost as critical theorists of voice. However much their calls for a corporate racial voice seemed “a symbol of purity,” the fact of the matter was that such invocations just as often challenged racial foundationalism.

Consider how many thinkers employed Freud to uncover the African vox populi as a historical achievement rather than a given essence. When Du Bois spoke of slave songs “unknown to me” and yet “at once I knew them as of me and mine,” or when Zora Neale Hurston journeyed to the American South in the 1920s to discover the “characteristics of Negro Expression,” these were not quests for an authentic, precolonial culture. They were attempts to identify historical products of the Atlantic slave trade that had been disavowed, relegated to the “unconscious” of American history. Psychoanalysis could be a technique for reading history against the grain. Fanon knew that better than most (Robcis Reference Robcis2020). Du Bois later reflected he had not been “sufficiently Freudian,” despite studying with William James at Harvard (Lewis Reference Lewis2009, 116). Richard Wright opened a low-cost psychoanalytic clinic in 1945 named after Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law. Ralph Ellison praised Wright’s Harlem clinic as “the most successful attempt in the nation to provide psychotherapy for the underprivileged” and heal the “vast nervous and mental disorders found within the urban Negro community” (Ellison [1946] Reference Ellison, Callahan and Conner2019, 212). Personally, Ellison hoped to synthesize Marx and Freud to understand the “irrational” aspects of African American oppression (Ellison [1945] Reference Ellison, Callahan and Conner2019, 204). Eli Zaretsky is surely right that Black Americans drew on psychoanalysis to “come to grips with their history through mourning, working through, and the constitution of collective memory” (Reference Zaretsky2015, 39).

Consider, too, négritude’s engagement with surrealism (Kesteloot Reference Kesteloot and Kennedy1991, 37–45, 229–276). Surrealism: that infamous artistic movement spanning Dali and Picasso, so focused on weaponizing Freud to rescue, in Breton’s words, the “omnipotence of dream” from everyday instrumental reasoning (Breton [1924] Reference Breton, Seaver and Lane1972, 26). The bonds between surrealism and négritude went deep. In March 1941, the Capitaine Paul Lemerle docked in Martinique en route to New York City with Wifredo Lam, Lévi-Strauss, and Breton aboard. They were fleeing Vichy; the boat’s gendarmes considered them “undesirables” and “scum” (Lévi-Strauss [1955] Reference Lévi-Strauss and Weightman1992, 22–34; Loyer Reference Loyer2005; Jennings Reference Jennings2018, 180–211). After disembarking Breton encountered Tropiques and the Césaires (Breton [1972] Reference Breton, Seaver and Lane2008, 83–94). The enthusiasm was mutual, and the Césaires repositioned Tropiques as a surrealist journal. In surrealism they found “the tightrope of our hope,” a method Suzanne believed could “transcend at last the present’s sordid antinomies: white-black, European-African, civilized-savage” (Césaire [1943] Reference Césaire1978, 18). Lam, a Cuban artist and Breton’s friend, had already been using surrealism to articulate an African “archaic collective subconscious.” On the trip to Martinique, he listened to Lévi-Strauss discuss Black Brazilian mythologies with rapt attention (Benitez Reference Benitez1999, 54, 81). Lam’s encounter with Aimé in Martinique would lead to lifelong collaboration (David [2015] Reference David2016). In fact, Lam provided the artwork for the 1942 publication of the “Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal” in Havana (Figure 3). Pablo Picasso, for his part, supplied the poster for Diop’s 1956 conference (Figure 4; Figure 5).

Figure 3.

Retorno al País Natal

Note: Aimé Césaire, preface by Benjamin Peret, illustrations by Wifredo Lam, translation by Lydia Cabrera. The Museum of Modern Art Library, Special Collections (L2357 C27). Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 4.

Pablo Picasso’s Poster for the 1956 Congrès International des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs.

Note: Picasso’s portrait “Negro, negro, negro …” had earlier adorned Césaire’s 1949 Corps perdu. © 2020 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 5.

Yandé Christiane Diop Hanging Picasso’s Poster

Note: Diop, putting up Picasso’s poster at the Sorbonne conference. ©Présence Africaine Editions, Communauté Africaine de Culture, n 8/10, juin–novembre 1956.

Aimé Césaire explained surrealism and négritude’s relationship best in a 1967 interview with René Depestre. Surrealism was a “joyful” confirmation of what he had been searching for: “a weapon that exploded the French language” and “a process of disalienation.” Surrealism worked like a scalpel. It pried from below the surface of our consciousness hidden and unconscious dreamworlds. And what was Europe’s unconscious? “If we break with all that, if we plumb the depths,” what dreamworld do we find? “If I apply the surrealist approach to my particular situation, I can summon up these unconscious forces. This, for me, was a call to Africa.” Beneath the imprints of his Cartesian education lay something “fundamentally black” (Depestre [1967] Reference Depestre, Césaire and Pinkham2001, 83–84; see Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Wifredo Lam, “The Jungle,” 1943

© 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Digital Image ©The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Black radical engagements with psychoanalysis and surrealism warn us against interpreting the search for an ancestral African vox populi in essentialist and nostalgic terms. Disalienation is not about excavating a virginal reality, because the unconscious is not a factual given prior to repression. It is the stratum of mental life produced by repression itself, the outcome of the unending psychic amputations required for us to transcend nature into society, individual instinct into normative collective life (Althusser Reference Althusser1969). Likewise, the African diaspora’s vox populi does not enunciate an essentialist notion of race or an anthropologically authentic civilization. As European modernity’s unconscious it, too, has no essential or preexisting reality. “Africa” is a myth produced by Europe’s own repression, incarnating everything it alienated in the name of progress. Hence the return of the repressed is a feat of creation, not a return to origins. “For my part, I search in vain,” Césaire insisted, “where I ever preached a return of any kind.” Decolonization’s task was “not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. It is a new society that we must create” (Césaire [1950] Reference Césaire and Pinkham2001, 44–45, 52). There is no primordial measure, Du Bois argued, for African American music. “The Negro chorus has a right to sing music of any sort it likes,” because “Art is not natural and is not supposed to be natural … and just because it is not natural, it may be great Art” (Du Bois [1933] Reference Du Bois and Huggins1986, 1239). “Négritude,” Senghor insisted, “is awareness, defense and development of African cultural values. Négritude is a myth, I agree. And I agree there are false myths, myths which breed division and hatred.” However, “Négritude as a true myth is the very opposite of these” (Senghor Reference Senghor, Reed and Wake1965, 96–97).

A true myth, is that an oxymoron? But which is more mythic, biological racism or the bonds of family Black Atlantic intellectuals tried to summon into being? Between measuring cranium sizes and the dream of Africanity, which is the civilized and which barbaric? That we think the relevant opposition is between “myth” and “science” is colonial thinking. Mythology and science, Lévi-Strauss argues, are equal forms of intelligence when the stakes concern the living of life (Reference Lévi-Strauss1955, 444). At stake is not a contest between authenticity and alienation, science and myth, but the political purposes to which we put our symbolic relations, the distribution of power among peoples produced by our symbolic designs.

Universal Suffrage as Colonial Nightmare

The conception of voice animating “universal suffrage as decolonization” was both authentic and nonessentialist, the basis of a new “civilization of the universal” and a truly “democratic humanism” (Delavignette Reference Delavignette1945, 230; Lévi-Strauss Reference Lévi-Strauss1956, 384–85). Structuralism, surrealism, Freud, Bergson, and Marx—these were among the tools Black Atlantic intellectuals used to “reconstitute” and “integrate [their] new experiences, hence [their] new wealth with the framework of a new unity” (Césaire Reference Césaire1956, 205). With these instruments, they would search “the racial grain of sand” for what the received canon of modern European thought had spectacularly failed to find: an “ethic that is ‘universal,’” the seeds of a collectivist, democratic future (Ellison [1945] Reference Ellison, Callahan and Conner2019, 204).

Depending on how much of this bricolage we accept, our mileage will vary. Those wary of psychoanalysis and structuralism will only despair. Certainly nascent “elite” theories of electoral democracy had no patience for notions of collective voice; such a thing was sheer mysticism, an archaism from bygone ages. Indeed, just as Césaire was demanding humanity hear the “cry of the eldest son of life” ([1941] Reference Césaire1978b, 37), just as Senghor was calling the world to hear “the authentic voice of Africa,” men like Walter Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter were trying to bury the idea of a vox populi once and for all. It is notable that the latter’s antidemocratic theses—and not anticolonial cries for a collectivist future—were the ones Cold War democratic theory absorbed as doxa (Son Reference Son2020, 40–55). Few better allegories exist for the fate of the democratic imagination in the twentieth century.

To be sure, this cohort underestimated the African diaspora’s internal divisions (Prashad Reference Prashad2007). Baldwin listened to Diop’s opening remarks at the 1956 conference, only to marvel at the experiential gap separating African Americans from their Africana brothers and sisters: “We had been dealing with, had been made and mangled by, another machinery altogether.” The result was “a psychology very different” (Baldwin Reference Baldwin and Morrison1998, 147–148). Richard Wright’s presentation similarly elicited controversy, attacking as he did the irrational “rot” of African customary societies (Marso Reference Marso2014). Even in their own time, their task must have seemed insurmountable: to forge a new symbolic filiation—a “true myth”—out of an historical experience that was above all centrifugal and disintegrating.

It is also unclear what institutionalizing this conception of voice could mean. Senghor considered “voice” both visual and aural, a surrealist image “uniting sign and sense, flesh and spirit into one whole” (Senghor Reference Senghor1956, 59). To hear the vox populi would require something akin to synesthesia, a readiness to relinquish the division of labor among the senses so precious to the modern European scientific mind. For his part, Césaire contrasted the African “immediacy of voice” whose rhythms were “like that of the mystic” with our feeble representational formalism: “When it comes to mathematics, the real escapes its abstract activity and logicality” (Césaire [1945] Reference Césaire1978, 157). Even Du Bois complained “the rhythmic cry of the slave” was often “mistaken and misunderstood” by white Americans who heard it (Du Bois [1903] Reference Du Bois and Huggins1986, 536–537). How the ballot could ever express such a surreal voice remains uncertain.

If translating anticolonial poetics into politics was an equivocal effort, the effort still had to be made. That was why, when faced with an incoherent redesign of Martinique’s electoral map, Césaire denounced the National Assembly’s effort to impose “mechanical homogenization,” “total assimilation and standardization,” in the name of departmentalization (Césaire [1947] Reference Césaire2013, 63). That was why Senghor placed his faith in federalism for so long. It approximated his dream of a global symphony of civilizational voices: “far from weakening the unity of the Empire,” a federation “would cohere it, just as an orchestra conductor’s mission would not be to smother the voices of the different instruments by covering them up with his own, but by directing them in unity and allowing the least important country flute to play its part” (Senghor [1945] Reference Senghor1964, 59–60).

What is clear is that “universal suffrage as decolonization” struck empire’s defenders with the purest terror. Time and again, Du Bois documented systematic attempts to restrict Negro suffrage during and after Reconstruction. “No language,” Du Bois showed, was “spared to describe the results of Negro suffrage as the worst imaginable.” African American voting was apocalyptic. To hear their voice would have meant social revolution. That was why Black suffrage offered “the greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world” (Du Bois [1924] Reference Du Bois2007, 75; see also Bateman Reference Bateman2018, 43–206).

De Gaulle, for his part, recommended universal suffrage for the colonies at Brazzaville in January 1944. Yet he was careful to distinguish his proposal from a devolution of power. To the contrary: “We believe,” de Gaulle insisted, “that, as far as the life of the world of tomorrow is concerned, autarchy would not be desirable nor even possible for anybody” (de Gaulle Reference De Gaulle1944). The MRP felt no need to be ambiguous. In the Constituent National Assembly, they opposed “Constitution Senghor” by recommending a “dual” citizenship in the French Union: one for “France” and one for the larger “Union” (Cooper Reference Cooper, Arato and Cohen2018, 44–45; Dimier Reference Dimier2004). Their provision would have constitutionalized racial inequality in the form of a differentiated citizenship. It underlined their fear of non-European votes shaping metropolitan affairs. As Adolphe Landry (Reference Landry1946) complained in Le Monde,

Landry could not even disguise his contempt. A single citizenship meant unqualified colonial men and women—people not even good enough to elect the Académie française!—might vote on all “national” concerns. The very idea seemed frankly “illogical” to Landry: “What is therefore necessary is two citizenships: French citizenship and a citizenship of the Union.”

Édouard Herriot of the Radical Party best captured the primal fear universal suffrage provoked. Speaking on August 27, 1946, he denounced Article 67 of Constitution Senghor, which stipulated that “Nationals or ressortissants of the metropole, departments, and overseas territories enjoy the liberties and rights attached to the quality of the French citizen.”

The colonizers will become the colonized. Herriot’s phrase articulated, in the most compact way possible, why universal suffrage was empire’s worst nightmare. Senghor interrupted Herriot to shout back, “That’s racism!” but the effect was like dynamite. Herriot had vocalized the fear everyone had shrouded in endless chatter.

“Universal suffrage as decolonization” owed its utopian power to the rich mosaic of theories that composed it. But it incited terror because, if properly instituted, it could call into existence the subject of decolonization. Like the wider culturalist politics of which it was a piece, universal suffrage’s power did not depend on transcribing the voice of a preexisting African people, but on its alchemical capacity to create that people’s voice from within the heart of imperial institutions.