Negro Anthology Made by Nancy Cunard, 1931-1933
Cunard, Nancy. Negro Anthology Made By Nancy Cunard 1931-1933. London: Published by Nancy Cunard at Wishart & Co., 1934.
Folio; hundreds of photographic illustrations throughout; brown cloth, stamped in red; a lovely copy.
First edition; approximately 200 copies, the entire edition; in the late 1970s an American university press issued a radically truncated version of Cunard’s text, which was misleadingly issued under the same title.
Graphically and textually ravishing, Negro Anthology remains Cunard’s crowning achievement as a writer and publisher; it is her most politically and aesthetically revolutionary publication. The 855-page volume stands as Cunard’s comprehensive tribute to the legacy of the African people, printing poetry, criticism, visual arts and political treatises by some of the 20th-century’s most distinguished “race men” and women. Negro Anthology was also one of the earliest, most influential, and most ambitious publications dedicated to the cause of Pan-Africanism.
From the outset Cunard’s concept for this book was idiosyncratic and wide-ranging; an early circular announced that Negro Anthology
will consist of at least 4 separate sections: 1) The contemporary Negro in America, S. America, West Indies, Europe (writers, painters, musicians and other artists and personalities. With photographs. 2) Musical section. Last century and modern American Negro compositions (Spiritual, Jazz, Blues, etc.)—Reproduced. As much African tribal music as obtainable...This section is in charge of the composer George Antheil. 3) African. Ethnographical. Reproductions of African Art...4) Political and sociological (the colonial system, Liberia, etc.) by French, English, and American writers–the French translated beside the original text. Accounts of lynching, persecution and race prejudice...The book is also to contain ...poems by Negroes...A list of Museums containing African Art...[and] Articles, essays and...new documentary facts on Africa and the question of Color in the U.S.A. and Europe” (Nancy Cunard, by Anne Chisholm, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1979, pp. 191-192).
A quick scan of the contents demonstrates how well Cunard accomplished her task: it boasts a vast assemblage of statistical data, rare graphics, and searing original commentary and other contributions by such luminaries as Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Nicholas Guillen, Ezra Pound, Norman Douglas, George Padmore, Walter White, and W.E.B. DuBois. Cunard wrote in a letter to potential authors: “This is the first time such a book has been compiled in this manner. It is primarily for the Colored people and is dedicated to one of them. I wish by their aid to make it as inclusive as possible” (op. cit.). Negro Anthology remains one of the most thorough, thoughtful and inclusive books on race ever published in the 20th-century by any author, white or black.
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