Abstract
The chapter traces an encounter between Marina Tsvetaeva and proponents of the Négritude movement in Paris in 1937 which was a one-time event that left hardly any traces in literary debates and developments. However, the encounter can serve as a lens through which light can be shed onto some of the parallel and intersecting dynamics at work in transnational, interwar Paris. Both Tsvetaeva and the Négritude writers appropriated Pushkin as a Black writer in ways that seem astonishingly similar at first glance. However, when read from a postcolonial perspective these modes of appropriation differ. The interaction between discussions of world literary dynamics and postcolonial readings helps us to understand the cultural site of the interwar “world republic of letters”. The result is a complex picture of entanglements and disconnections that includes the literatures of the Global South and Russian émigré literature in the dynamics at play.
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Drews-Sylla, G. (2020). Commemorating a Black Pushkin in Paris: Marina Tsvetaeva and Négritude. In: Sturm-Trigonakis, E. (eds) World Literature and the Postcolonial. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61785-4_6
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