Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are
going to do something a little bit different.
Yeah, a slightly different approach today. Usually
we start with a concept, right? Or maybe a piece
of tech or a trend. But today, I actually want
to start with a place and a time. Because the
where and the when are, well, they're almost
as important as the what. It's basically impossible
to separate them in this case. The context is
everything. Exactly. So I want you to just sort
of close your eyes for a second. We are going
to Paris. But, uh... Not the shiny romantic Paris
of Emily in Paris or, you know, a Woody Allen
movie. Definitely not that. It is late 1947.
The Second World War has been over for about
two years, but the city is still really bruised.
Yeah, it's gray. It's cold. There's still rationing
going on. The buildings are covered in soot.
But if you walk down into the Latin Quarter,
specifically around the Sorbonne, there is a
completely different kind of energy. It's not
just the energy of reconstruction. It's the energy
of revolution. It really is a pressure cooker.
Because you have thousands of students, intellectuals,
and soldiers from the colonies, men who had literally
just fought for France, all converging in this
one specific neighborhood. And right in the center
of all this atmospheric pressure, a new journal
hits the newsstands. It has a very stark cover.
It's called Presence Africane. African Presence.
Right. Now, if you just glance at the history
books, you might see it listed as a quarterly
literary magazine. And sure, technically, that's
what it was. But calling Presence Africane a
magazine is sort of like calling the Manhattan
Project a, I don't know, a science fair. That
is actually a very apt analogy. Because the fallout,
the intellectual fallout from this single publication
completely reshaped the world map. And that is
our mission for this deep dive. We are looking
at our historical records, our encyclopedic overviews
of the magazine's history and its contributors.
We aren't just looking at a table of contents
today. No, we're looking at a machine. Exactly.
We are looking at how a Senegalese philosophy
professor named Alion Diop built this machine.
a magazine, a publishing house, a bookstore,
and how it became the preeminent voice of the
negritude movement. Which is a massive cultural
shift. Massive. We're going to look at how he
basically assembled the Avengers of the African
diaspora and why, about 15 years later, this
literary project was considered dangerous enough
that terrorists actually tried to blow it up.
With plastic explosives. Right, which is wild
to think about. And that violence is key, I think.
We tend to think of literature as this, you know,
soft, passive thing. You sit in it. an armchair
and read poems. But the story of Presence Africaine
proves that literature, when it's truly effective,
is a threat. It's a weapon. So let's start with
the architect, Alain Diop. The Socrates of the
Black World, as he was later called. That is
a very heavy title to carry. Who was he in 1947?
He was essentially a bridge. Diop was born in
Senegal, he was educated in the French colonial
system, and he eventually became a professor
of philosophy living in Paris. He was even a
senator for a brief period, representing Senegal
in the French Fourth Republic. But intellectually,
he was fascinating because he was a devout Catholic
on one hand, and a deeply rooted African intellectual
on the other. He moved effortlessly between the
ancient traditions of his Wolof heritage and
the high -minded existentialism of those Parisian
cafes. And that duality seems really crucial
here, because in 1947, the prevailing wind in
Europe regarding Africa was, well, let's just
say dismissive. Dismissive is putting it very
politely. The prevailing European worldview at
the time was that Africa essentially had no history,
no culture, and no philosophy that was worth
preserving. Wow. The whole goal of the colonial
project was assimilation. The idea was basically
we will make you French because being African
is a void. So Diop decides to launch a journal
to counter this narrative. But he doesn't just
gather his friends from Senegal. He does something
very, very strategic with that first issue in
November 1947. He builds a coalition. Right.
A coalition that, frankly, looks impossible on
paper. It was a strategic masterstroke because
if he had just published a magazine of African
writers in 1947. The French establishment probably
would have just ignored it entirely. They would
have brushed it off. Exactly. It would have been
categorized as folklore or just colonial writings.
So what he does is he enlists the absolute heavyweights
of the European intelligentsia to serve on his
patronage committee. The allies. We're talking
about Jean -Paul Sartre. Albert Camus. André
Gide. Theodore Monod. Georges Ballandier. Michel
Léris. These were the gods of French thought
at the time. Okay, but let's push on this a little
bit. Isn't there a risk here? You're starting
a magazine called Presence Africaine, and the
very first thing you do is put a bunch of prominent
white European men on the masthead. Was there
pushback on that? Was the scene as, I don't know,
seeking validation from the oppressor? That is
the eternal debate with this period. And yeah,
looking back now, it might look like centering
the European perspective, but you really have
to look at the 1947 chessboard. Diab was a pragmatist
above all else. He knew what he was doing. Exactly.
He knew that to get the magazine into the hands
of the people who actually needed to read it,
which included the colonial administrators themselves,
he needed a sort of Trojan horse effect. You
come for the Sarche, you stay for the Seigneur.
Precisely. But it was also more than just clever
marketing. It was a challenge to these thinkers.
By having André Gide, who had already written
Voyage au Congo, and... criticize colonial abuses
or sartre who was the reigning king of existential
freedom involved diabop was forcing them to put
their money where their mouth was he was calling
their bluff yes He was saying, you talk all day
about freedom. You talk about the human condition.
OK, look at us. Engage with us directly. And
they really did engage. Sartre didn't just lend
his name to a letterhead. He wrote the introduction
to an anthology connected to the movement, this
famous essay called Black Orpheus or Orphanuar.
Which remains one of the most important and controversial
essays on race ever written by a European. Let's
break that down for the listener because it's
a bit complex. What was Sartre actually arguing
in Black Orpheus? Well. Sartre defined negritude,
which was the movement the magazine championed
as anti -racist racism. Anti -racist racism.
That sounds I mean, that sounds bad on the surface.
It does sound jarring, but he didn't mean it
as an insult at all. He meant it dialectically
in a philosophical sense. He argued that white
supremacy was the thesis. Negritude, which is
the strong affirmation of blackness, was the
antithesis. The necessary, inevitable reaction
to that supremacy. OK, I follow. And he theorized
that eventually these two opposing forces would
merge into a synthesis, a society without race.
So he saw the celebration of blackness as a necessary
step, but ultimately a temporary one. Exactly.
He called it the weak stage of the dialectic.
And as you can imagine, this did not sit well
with everyone involved in the movement. I bet.
Many African thinkers like Leopold Seder -Senghor
saw negritude not as just some temporary political
strategy to get. to a race -blind society, but
as a permanent, essential reality of the African
soul. So even within that very first foundational
coalition, you had deep philosophical friction.
Which honestly makes the magazine so much more
interesting than if it were just one unanimous,
echoing voice. It was a battleground of ideas.
It was a live debate. And that brings us to the
core contributors, the African and diaspora voices.
Because while Sartre and Camus kind of held the
door open, the people who actually walked through
it were giants like Aimé Césaire, Senghor, Alianz
Sarr, and Richard Wright. The heavy hitters of
the early movement. And they were very different
men with very different approaches. Take Aimé
Césaire. He was from Martinique in the Caribbean.
He was a poet deeply influenced by surrealism.
He was explosive, fiery. He's the one who actually
coined the term negritude in a previous journal
he had called Le Tour du Noir. Right, but it
was Presence Africaine that really became the
preeminent voice for it. Exactly. Then you have
Senghor from Senegal. His approach was much more
traditional, more rhythmic in his poetry. He
was very focused on this idea of the singleization
of the universal. And then Richard Wright, the
American in the group. The outsider, in a sense.
Wright didn't even speak French very well. And
he was deeply skeptical of the more mystical,
poetic aspects of niggertude that Sigmore talked
about. Wright was a hard -nosed realist. He came
out of the Jim Crow South in America and the
Communist Party in Chicago. I find Richard Wright's
inclusion so fascinating because it signals right
from the start that Presence African wasn't just
about the French colonies. I mean, the subtitle
of the magazine was Review Culturelle du Monde
Noir Cultural Review of the Negro World. That
word world is the key to the whole project. Diop
and his editorial board understood something
profound, which was that the black experience
was global, but it was heavily fragmented by
these colonial languages. Right. The British
had their colonies speaking English. The French
had their speaking French. The Portuguese had
theirs. And then you had the American system
of segregation. And none of these groups could
easily talk to each other. They were literally
walled off by language. Right. If you were a
brilliant intellectual in Nigeria, you were reading
and writing in English. If you were in Senegal,
you were working in French. Presence Africaine
set out to smash that wall down. They actively
included English abstracts in the predominantly
French magazine. That's a huge effort for the
time. It was. And later, they went even further.
Between 1955 and 1961, they actually published
a full English edition of the journal. 60 issues
of it. That is a massive undertaking for a relatively
small independent publisher in Paris. But they
felt it was essential. You simply cannot have
Pan -Africanism if the Pan -African world can't
communicate with itself. So we have this magazine
established in 1947. It quickly becomes the watering
hole for the Negritude movement. But we should
probably define Negritude a little bit more clearly
for the listener because we've used the word
a few times now. It wasn't just a simple slogan,
was it? No, not at all. It wasn't just a bumper
sticker. Negritude was a highly complex intellectual
response to that French policy of assimilation
we talked about earlier. The French essentially
told their colonial subjects, your ancestors
are the Gauls. Your culture is barbarism. You
need to evolve and become French. Just erase
yourself and become us. Exactly. Negritude was
a flat -out rejection of that premise. It was
the assertion that African culture, history,
and identity were valid and vital on a global
stage. It was essentially saying, we don't want
to be second -class Frenchmen, we want to be
first -class Africans. Correct. But as we saw
with Césaire and Senghor, it had different flavors.
For Césaire, negritude was a weapon. It was a
tool to reclaim human dignity in the face of
just crushing colonial oppression. For Senghor,
it was more ontological. It was about emotion,
rhythm, a deep connection to the earth that he
felt the overly rational European culture had
entirely lost. And Presence African was the laboratory
where these differing definitions were tested
out. It was the only place they could be tested.
There was quite literally no other journal in
the world at that time that would publish a dense
essay on the grammar of the Wolof language right
next to a surrealist poem about Martinique, right
next to a blistering critique of American racial
segregation. And that brings us to the next big
question. Why does a literary magazine matter
politically? It's easy to dismiss culture as
separate from policy, but the historical texts
show that the editors explicitly saw themselves
as engaged in the cultural and political struggles
of Tan Africanism. Because you can't have political
liberation without cultural liberation first.
If a people are taught that they have no history
and no worth, they can't effectively organize
a political resistance. The magazine provided
the intellectual scaffolding for the decolonization
movements that were about to sweep the globe.
It validated their existence. So the magazine
is a massive hit in these intellectual circles.
But Diop is smart. He knows that a quarterly
journal is somewhat ephemeral. It gets read,
it gets passed around, but eventually it gets
discarded. If you want to build a permanent culture,
you need a physical footprint. You need a home
base. Right. So in 1949, just two years after
launching the magazine, they expand. They launch
Editions Presence Africaine. The publishing house.
Yes. And alongside that, they open a physical
bookstore right in the Latin Quarter of Paris
on Rue des Écoles. Paint that picture for us.
What did this physical space mean to the community
at the time? Imagine walking down a street lined
with these very stiff, very traditional academic
French bookstores. And then you come across this
one shop. In the window, you don't see the usual
texts. You see books by African authors, Caribbean
authors, African -American authors. In a completely
different world. And inside, it's cramped. There
are piles of journals and books absolutely everywhere.
But the air is just thick with smoke and intense
conversation. So it wasn't just a place to buy
a book. It was a hub. Oh, it was a sanctuary.
If you were a young student arriving in Paris
from Cameroon or Benin and you feel completely
isolated in this cold, gray, colonial capital,
you went straight to Rue des Ecole. You'd find
Alion Diop sitting in the back office. You'd
run into Aimé Césaire browsing the shelves. It
functioned as a post office, a debating society,
and a crisis center all rolled into one. I love
that image. And it was from this exact hub that
they launched the next major phase of their plan.
The events. Specifically, the massive 1956 Congress.
The first international congress of black writers
and artists. Now, I've heard this event described
by historians as the cultural equivalent to the
Bandung Conference. That is a brilliant comparison.
Just as the Bandung Conference in 1955 was the
political assertion of the third world coming
together, this Congress in 1956 was the cultural
assertion of the black diaspora. And the location
is crucial. It was held at the Sorbonne. The
absolute belly of the beast. The inner sanctum
of elite French academia. And look at the guest
list they pulled together. You had the Americans,
like Richard Wright. Langston Hughes couldn't
make it, but he set a paper to be read. You had
the Caribbean intellectuals, Césaire, Frantz
Fanon, Jean Pricemars from Haiti. You had Jacques
-Robin Marara from Madagascar, Czech Anta Diop,
the brilliant historian from Senegal. Oh, and
we have to mention the artistic touch. Pablo
Picasso actually designed the poster for this
event. Which, again... Signals the immense level
of global visibility and solidarity this project
had achieved. But I think it's important to pause
on the actual atmosphere of this Congress because
reading the transcripts, it wasn't just a happy
celebration. It was tense. Very tense. Why was
that? Well, think about the year, 1956. The Cold
War is freezing over. The U .S. State Department
is actively watching Richard Wright and the other
Americans. Terrified they're going to say something
pro -communist on stage. The French government
is sweating watching the Algerians and the Cameroonians.
So basically, everyone in that room is likely
under some form of government surveillance. Absolutely.
The stakes were incredibly high. And there were
intense internal fights, too. You had the Marxists
arguing that class struggle was the only thing
that mattered for liberation. Then you had the
Negritude traditionalists arguing that reclaiming
culture was the primary battle. I read that Richard
Wright gave a speech where he essentially told
the African delegates, you need to modernize
and abandon your superstitions, which I imagine
did not go over smoothly. It went over like a
lead balloon. It was hugely controversial. But
that friction is what made the Congress so historically
important. They weren't performing a unified
front for a white audience. They were arguing
intensely with each other about the very future
of their own civilization. And this really brings
us to the sharp edge of that future. Because
while they were debating high culture and philosophy
in the Sorbonne, the world outside those walls
was getting very violent. We needed to talk about
what our notes call the weaponization of words.
We do. Because Presence Africaine was explicitly
anti -colonialist. Their stated goal was to denounce
colonial racism through foundational texts. They
weren't just publishing lovely poetry about the
African landscape. They were publishing anti
-colonial dynamite. And the most famous example
of that dynamite has to be M .A. Césaire's discours
sur le colonialisme discourse on colonialism.
This is a text that everyone listening should
seek out. It is short, it is punchy, and it is
absolutely devastating. It was originally published
by a smaller press in 1950, but the revised definitive
version was published by Additions Presence Africaine
in 1955. And it remains their best -selling work
to this day. Why was the specific book considered
so dangerous? Because Césaire systematically
took the moral high ground away from Europe.
You have to remember the standard European justification
for colonization was the civilizing mission.
The narrative was, we are bringing you the light
of civilization, we are bringing roads, hospitals,
modernization, we are saving you from yourselves.
And Césaire looked at that and said what? He
said, I look around and I see no civilization.
I see forced labor. I see brutal intimidation.
I see theft. But then he takes it a step further.
He argues that colonization actually works like
a poison on the colonizer himself. The boomerang
effect. Exactly. He argued that every time a
French soldier tortures someone in the colonies,
that soldier becomes a little less human. He
brutalizes himself. And his most controversial
point was his argument that Hitler wasn't an
anomaly in European history. Right. This is the
part that really shook people. He compared colonialism
to Nazism in 1955. He did. He essentially said
that Hitler was just what happened when Europe
finally applied its colonial methods to other
white Europeans. Césaire wrote that what the
West couldn't forgive Hitler for was not the
crime against humanity itself, but the crime
against the white man. The fact that Hitler applied
to Europe the exact same colonialist procedures
that had previously been reserved exclusively
for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India,
and the blacks of Africa. That is, I mean, that
is scorching. It completely dismantled the entire
moral scaffolding of the West. It was a paradigm
shift. And then you have thinkers like Frantz
Fanon. The historical records show that present
African was practically his primary resource,
wasn't it? Fanon is the perfect example of the
intellectual ecosystem that Diop built. When
Fanon was writing his groundbreaking book, Black
Skin, White Masks, He heavily used excerpts from
Presence Africaine to strengthen his arguments.
He was citing people from the magazine directly.
Constantly. He cited Aimé Césaire, of course,
but also Michel Salomon, Abdoulaye Saji, and
George Moulin, all from the pages of the journal.
He used the sociological data, the psychological
observations, and the history that the magazine
was excavating to build his major theories on
colonial trauma. So the magazine was essentially
mining the raw material, and Fanon was the refinery.
Yes. They provided the... the foundational texts,
and Fanon built the theories that would go on
to inspire revolutions worldwide. And when you
have that much concentrated truth coming out
of one single building on Rides Ecole, well,
the empire eventually strikes back. It always
does. Let's talk about 1962, the attack. To really
understand the attack, you have to understand
the atmosphere of Paris in 1961 and 1962. This
was the absolute height of the Algerian War of
Independence. And this wasn't just a distant
war happening across the Mediterranean. It was
bleeding directly into the streets of Paris.
Very much so. There were strict curfews specifically
for Algerians living in France. There were horrific
police massacres. In October 1961, the Paris
police actually threw Algerian protesters into
the Seine River. The entire city was on a knife's
edge. And the primary antagonist in this domestic
violence was a group called the OAS. The Organization
Armée Secrète. Who exactly were they? They were
a far -right paramilitary terrorist organization.
They were mostly made up of hardline French military
personnel and colonial settlers who wanted to
keep Algeria French at any and all costs. They
felt deeply betrayed by the French government's
slow moves toward decolonization. So their response
was a campaign of terror. They started bombing
targets in Paris they associated with anti -French
or anti -colonial sentiment. And Presence Africaine
was on their radar. It was very high on their
list. The bookstore wasn't just a symbol. It
was the intellectual engine of the decolonization
movement. So in 1962... The OAS planted a plastic
explosive charge right at the bookstore on Rue
des Ecole. Plastic explosives? At a bookstore?
Yes. The explosion blew out the windows. It destroyed
a massive amount of the stock. It completely
shattered the peace of the Latin Quarter. I really
want to pause on the symbolism of that moment.
Because you don't bomb a bookstore unless you
are absolutely terrified of what is inside those
books. That is the ultimate twisted validation
of Diop's work. The OAS didn't care about, you
know, flowery poems. They cared about ideas that
were actively toppling empires. By resorting
to plastic explosives, they were implicitly admitting
that Alion Diop had won the intellectual war.
He had created a weapon powerful enough to threaten
a military order. Did the bombing stop them?
Did they shut down? Not for a single day. The
community rallied immediately. They swept up
the glass, they boarded up the windows, and they
just kept publishing. If anything, it underscored
the power of their ideas and increased their
resolve. That level of resilience is just incredible.
So they survived the bombing. The 1960s roll
on and the wave of independence sweeps across
the African continent. Senegal becomes independent
in 1960. And Leopold Siddhar Singh Hoare, the
poet who was a founding voice in the magazine,
actually becomes the first president of the country.
Which is an amazing story in itself. Yeah. Just
imagine if the editor of a literary poetry journal
became the head of state. Yeah. That shows the
immense level of intellectual prestige these
men held in their newly independent nations.
Presence African didn't just turn into a state
mouthpiece for these new governments, right?
Right. And that is very much to their credit.
Once the decolonization struggles were largely
won, they remained a space for rigorous critique.
But I think their biggest, most enduring legacy
from this era is what we call the first imprint.
We've talked a lot about politics and philosophy,
but we have to talk about the literature itself.
Right. The novels. Right. Editions, Presence
African, the publishing house side of things.
They were the very first. to publish most of
the 20th century's best -known Francophone African
writers. It's an unbelievable roster. Run through
the roll call for us. Well, you have Mongo Bedi.
Kendugul. Rago Diop. Jibril Tamsir Nian. William
Sassine. And Ousmane Semben. Yes. Semben is often
remembered today as the father of African cinema,
but he was a prolific writer first, and Presence
Africaine published his early work. And on the
nonfiction side, they published Cheek and Diop.
Which was revolutionary. Jay Kandadia published
his foundational work arguing for the African
origins of Egyptian civilization with them. When
he first proposed his theories, the mainstream
French academy literally laughed at him. They
refused his doctoral thesis. But Addition's presence
after Kane published it anyway. They did. And
today, his work is considered absolutely foundational
to African historical studies. They gave a platform
to genius when the establishment shut the door.
And we also have to circle back to that language
barrier we mentioned earlier, because they didn't
just stick to French authors. The translation
work they did was monumental. This is where they
did the real heavy lifting for Pan -Africanism.
They actively brought the titans of Anglophone
African literature into the Francophone world.
They were the first to publish French translations
of Chinua Achebe. And Wolswa Inka. And Gujiwa
Tiong 'o. Exactly. They also published the political
works of major Pan -Africanist leaders from the
English -speaking world, like... Kwame Nkrumah
of Ghana and Julius Nera of Tanzania. That observation
just constantly reinforces their core Pan -African
mission. They were actively breaking down those
colonial language barriers, English versus French,
to create a unified, continent -wide dialogue.
If you were a Francophone student in the 70s,
the only reason you could engage with Achebe's
ideas was because Presence Africaine translated
him. They essentially stitched the intellectual
life of the continent back together book by book.
Which brings us to the inevitable transition
phase of any great institution. Alain Diop, the
visionary founder who started it all in 1947,
passed away in 1980. He ran the entire enterprise
for 33 years. And usually when a founder dies,
especially a founder with such a singular, massive
vision. the organization kind of crumbles or
it splinters or it just gets bought out by a
larger conglomerate. But that is not what happened
here. There was incredible continuity. Right.
His wife, Christiane de Diop, took over the leadership.
And we really need to highlight her importance
here because it is one thing to launch a fiery
revolution in the heat of 1947 when everything
is changing and everyone is energized. It is
another thing entirely to keep an independent
publishing house alive and relevant through the
1980s and 90s. When the economy is fluctuating.
And maybe the trendiness of African independence
has faded in Parisian literary circles. Exactly.
She was the one who maintained the mission for
decades. She navigated the lean years and made
sure the legacy didn't just feed into obscurity.
And under her leadership, they reached a massive
milestone in 1997, the 50th anniversary. Yes.
And they celebrated it at UNESCO in Paris. The
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization. Talk about a shift in status. They
went from being the radical outsiders. literally
getting bombed by terrorists, to being officially
celebrated by UNESCO. The attendees for that
50th anniversary include major figures like Daniel
Maximan and the Nobel laureate, Wolf Soyinka.
It's a huge testament to Christiane Yanday Dieppe's
stewardship. And the sheer volume of output is
staggering. Our records show that as of late
2007, they had released 173 issues of the magazine.
And over 400 works published by the book division.
With 322 of those works still actively in print
at that time. Which is the real achievement for
a publisher. Keeping the backlist alive, keeping
those foundational texts available for the next
generation of students. So let's bring it up
to the modern era. The publishing house is still
active today, right? Very much so. It's not just
a museum piece. They are still publishing contemporary
works. New novelists like Hamadou Dia, Antoinette
Tijani -Alu, and Dudeneng Namaku, they are still
publishing cutting -edge historians like Abukere
Musalam. And who is steering the ship currently?
The current publication's director is Romul Fonkua.
He is a professor of comparative French literature
at Université Marc Bloch in Strasbourg. So the
academic rigor is still very much intact. Completely.
The leadership is still deeply tied to the highest
levels of scholarship. It's amazing to step back
and look at the whole arc. From a 1947 startup
dreamed up by a philosophy professor in a cold
Parisian winter to a physical target of far -right
terrorism to a massive literary institution that
essentially defined the voice of an entire continent.
It's an unparalleled trajectory in modern publishing.
So as we wrap up this deep dive, I want to try
to distill all of this. We've covered philosophy,
terrorism, poetry, Pan -African politics. For
you, what is the ultimate takeaway from the story
of Presence Africaine? For me, boils down to
the enduring relevance of creating your own platforms.
Alion Diop and his team didn't wait around for
the French literary establishment to give them
a column or validate their worth. They recognized
that the existing infrastructure was never going
to serve them fairly. So they built their own
platform for intellectual discourse. They proved
that if you want to control the narrative of
your own history, you have to own the printing
press. That is so powerful. For me, the takeaway
is a realization of how fragile history can be.
I keep thinking about that bomb at the bookstore.
If that plastic explosive had been a little bigger,
or if a fire had spread, and wiped out their
archives. Or honestly, if Diop had just decided
in 1962 that it was too dangerous for his family
and quit, we might not have these books. Many
of the absolute classics of African literature
might never have reached a global audience. They
wouldn't have been translated. The intellectual
history of the 20th century would just have this
massive gaping hole in it. We would be living
in a significantly poorer world, intellectually
speaking. We really would. And I want to leave
you, the listener, with a final provocative thought
to mull over. We mentioned earlier that the English
edition of the magazine ran for only six years,
from 1955 to 1961. A very brief window in the
grand scheme of things. Right. It makes you wonder
what vital conversations were started in those
English pages that were suddenly cut short or
interrupted when that specific edition folded.
What further connections between the African
-American civil rights movement and the Francophone
decolonization movement were lost because that
bridge couldn't be sustained financially? It's
a haunting historical what if. And taking that
into today's context, we live in a digital age.
We have infinite blogs, podcasts, social media
platforms. The barrier to publishing is basically
zero. But do we have a modern equivalent of presence
africaine? Do we have a single centralized space
that unites culture, politics, and literature
across international borders with that much weight?
Or has that powerful centralized voice been fractured
by the algorithm? We definitely have more noise
today. I'm just not sure we have a stronger signal.
Something to really think about. Well, thank
you for joining us on this journey to the Latin
Quarter and into the pages of history. My pleasure.
It was a great discussion. Keep exploring and
we will see you on the next Deep Dive.