Nancy Cunard and the Heterotopic Stage

In 2011, the Gucci fashion house announced Nancy Cunard as the inspiration for its “Hard Deco” collection. The clothing line played off Cunard’s preferences for geometric designs, fitted lines, and kohl eye makeup, causing a New York Times columnist to comment on the ubiquity of the “ghost of Nancy Cunard.” Similarly, Dior’s June show that same year also appropriated Cunard, prompting a Condé Nast writer to suggest that “chunky agate earrings and piled-on Plexiglas cuffs à la Nancy Cunard added a futuristic edge.” In the Dior show the male models, too, were dressed in the androgynous fashions Cunard helped popularize, and the effect was to evoke a small army of angular Cunardian reflections.

The runway is a long way from avant-garde coteries or academic circles, yet the fashion industry’s metonymic approach to Cunard, invoking an aspect of her style or an impression of her personality to create a larger image, is strangely familiar. Consistently, the idea of Cunard that circulated in her own time and our own has exceeded the woman in terms of both sensation and circulation, and her motives, activism, and lifestyle have been performed and re-performed on various platforms, referencing her life yet often eliding the autobiographical articulations that might anchor or destabilize these accounts. This is to say that any performance of Nancy Cunard, before it can be crafted into a dramatized account, must first confront the surplus of extant performances created by media, literary culture, and academic profiles alike. An auto/biographical performance of Cunard, moreover, demands particularly careful attention, as it is often the ways Cunard integrated the personal and the political – and how she staged these integrations both on her body and in her writing – that have been especially polarizing.

Why do so many Nancy Cunards exist, uncollated and seemingly irreconcilable, in both popular and scholarly imaginations? Unlike many modernists (and the list is long and marked by their centrality to the canon), Cunard by and large came down on the right side of history: civil rights, colonial self-determination, anti-fascism. And yet the biographical details of Cunard’s life, the unconventional nature of her activities, and the more glaring paradoxes of her activism have evoked reactions of unusual intensity. This history and the conflicted positions within it are well-rehearsed in modernist studies, yet surprisingly unknown outside of this circle, and therefore are worth revisiting before we consider what a staged intervention might offer.

As a one-time wealthy heiress to the Cunard shipping fortune who turned her back on her family – and its money – in order to advocate for democracy and civil rights, she has at once been celebrated as a reformer and declaimed as a dilettante. As a figure of the Dadaist, surrealist circles, as well as the Anglo-American avant-garde, and as a woman who embraced the lifestyle of those groups during the 1920s and ’30s and beyond, she has been variously cast as feminist and promiscuous. As the editor of an 855-page, multi-continent anthology about race, Negro Anthology, she has been named a pioneering intellectual historian of trans-Atlantic black studies (Marcus) and derided for “warped, naïve” thinking that essentializes blackness and exposes the “racist myths” perpetuated by “white liberal thinking” (Archer-Straw 94). As a political organizer, an eyewitness journalist, the editor of the collection Authors Take Sides – which published authors’ stated positions on the Spanish Civil War – and chronicler of the lives of Spanish Republicans in French refugee camps, she has been portrayed as a champion of anti-fascist causes and provoked suspicion or ennui for her “progressive zealotry” (Lawlor 29). Only in Cunard’s own literary writing and publishing has response been relatively neutral, but despite or perhaps because of this neutrality, this work is strangely understudied. And this inattention is odd: though perhaps not prolific or innovative enough to be considered foundational modernist production, the totality of this work is, nonetheless, interesting and revelatory. As the owner, publisher, and printer of the avant-garde Hours Press she published, among others, Laura Riding, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and Samuel Beckett. As a poet she wrote the collections Outlaws (1921), Sublunary (1923), and Parallax (1925), and she wrote the prose memoirs Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas (1954), GM: Memories of George Moore (1956), and These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press (published posthumously, 1969). But this body of publishing and writing has been unable to compete with the spectacle of Cunard, notably photographs that dramatically present Cunard’s obsession with race and African aesthetics – and the scenes of her political activism, alternately played out by her polemical writing (Negro Anthology; Black Man and White Ladyship) and photographs of Cunard that display the white, female body working in proximity to black men. As the list above suggests, and as a study of the writing around Cunard reveals, “Nancy” has been staged in a variety of ways, often according to a series of implicit performance tropes and dramatic narratives that have mobilized her image in ways that more standard historical or literary analysis could not.

The heterogeneity of opinion, activities, and structures within Cunard’s own life and surrounding it challenge the structures of narrative drama. Yet within the theatre are unique opportunities to bring together the disparate materials and ideas that are the marker of Cunard studies. As Erika Fischer-Lichte notes, theatre “can be defined as a performing art that unfolds in different kinds of spaces using heterogeneous materials such as the human body, voice, various kinds of objects, light, music, language, and sounds to create the theatrical performance as its product of work” (13). This emphasis on the component parts of the theatrical event highlights some of the possibilities of pairing divergent representations of Cunard in their various material formats: photographs of Cunard by Man Ray and Barbara Ker-Seymer juxtaposed with her journalism and written memories, for example, or the language of her political pamphlets voiced by actors embodying racial difference. Just as the simultaneity of theatre, in working on H.D., provides the possibility of realizing the “image” and her palimpsestic imagination, and in Loy offers an avenue for the literal enactment of her visual sensibility and writing belied by “subconscious archives,” so in Cunard the juxtapositional possibilities of the stage enable a confrontation between the spectacular Cunard and the autobiographical one.

To see Cunard’s public performances as intertwined with more measured autobiographical writing is to engage in a mode of analysis exemplified by Green, who writes: “Both spectacular writings and writings on spectacle reveal how public acts and private responses, how the realm of the visible and the autobiographical utterance, are necessarily and intimately connected when the feminist body is at stake […] Locating the common performative nature of feminism’s spectacles and its confessions highlights the interrelatedness of these strategies while maintaining their differences” (7). While Cunard’s causes were not in themselves feminist ones, the tension between the spectacular and the autobiographical is keenly felt in examining her work, and the strategy of contrasting the public display with the written word can be unusually well-accommodated by the theatre’s inhabitation of the juncture of act and utterance. Green’s emphasis on the “common performative nature” of spectacles and confessions, moreover, points to the usefulness of performative inquiry in probing this intersection through simultaneous realization.

If the central juxtaposition of autobiographical and spectacular performance can be accommodated onstage, it is only one of many, which speaks to how the fundamental issue of range – both the range of opinion within Cunard studies and the breadth of Cunard’s own activities and geographical trajectory – can be encompassed through dramatization. It is on this point of juxtaposition and heterogeneity that a play about Cunard benefits from the “heterotopic” qualities of the stage that Foucault identifies in “Of Other Spaces.” One of the most frequently cited of Foucault’s examples of the heterotopia is the garden that is its own place and at the same time incorporates other environments through plants from across the globe. Yet the very first example Foucault provides in elaborating the heterotopia’s accommodative powers is the theatre: “the theatre brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another” (6). As Joanne Tompkins sets forth in Theatre’s Heterotopias, the theatre is explicitly heterotopic in that it is always an “alternative space” set in contrast to the real world even while it “resonates” with it. In Cunard’s case, Foucault’s emphasis on visiting a series of foreign places is literally important: the stage allows us to travel to the many and varied locations of her activities. But it is also true that in its heterotopic dimensions the stage can accommodate materials (film, projections, soundscapes) and ideological perspectives that are “foreign” to each other. A heterotopic understanding of the theatre, therefore, seems to be the most useful in conceptualizing a dramatized approach to Cunard and in bringing Cunard’s myriad representations – spectacular, confessional, and beyond – into active play within a single multimedia location: an “alternative space” that is at once distinct from but representative of varied ideologies and geographies. Additionally, the “topos” element contained within the heterotopia reminds us of the theatre’s fundamentally spatial interrogation of ideas. As Benjamin Wihstutz writes, “the founding of theatre studies […] implied a change of perspective which, in the place of the analysis of two-dimensional dramatic texts, established the three-dimensional performance space as the central object of investigation” (1). While this may seem selfevident – the stage is an actual space while the text is largely a metaphorical one – this topological shift is an important aspect of what the theatre can give in revisiting a life like Cunard’s, which was fundamentally caught up in social boundaries and inhabited stances.

The socio-spatial and contradictory elements of Cunard are undoubtedly at their most concentrated in Cunard’s engagements with race, particularly her editorship of Negro Anthology and the consequent cultural and critical discourse around it.1 If reception to the volume was mixed in its time,2 subsequent commentary has been equally divided, from the suggestion that the project is “weirdly dissociative” (North 191) with a “method of organization [that] is simultaneously heavy-handed and hopelessly lax” (193) to the view that Cunard’s methods are a precursor to the “multidisciplinary approach of Black Studies” (Montefiore 112). Most polarized of all, however, have been understandings of Cunard herself in relation to the project. Negative analysis has tended to underline the essentializing rhetoric of Cunard’s celebration of black people as “spontaneous,” “vital,” and “joyful” (Lemke, Archer-Straw), particularly in Cunard’s writings on Harlem. Other assessments of Cunard’s editorship have stressed the anti-essentializing qualities of Cunard’s overall methodology in Negro. Maroula Joannou writes:

Cunard’s major contribution to the black British archive was to present a white readership with documentation in the form of Negro Anthology which called into question the homogenous conceptualization of the African and people of African descent as a totalized non-differentiated mass, denying their history, culture and heterogeneity. In so doing, she rendered problematic the imaging of black people as essentially different from those of white descent and as fixed embodiments of a Eurocentric sense of reality. (143–4)

A dramatized portrait of Cunard should likely not try to reconcile these differences of opinion: both sides have been fairly well-documented and critically defended. Rather, what dramatized inquiry can do is accommodate and probe the contradictions. As noted, this is made possible through the juxtaposition of materials: within These Were the Hours, the Man Ray and Ker-Seymer prints appear, but so too do Cunard’s writings on Scottsboro and the African dimensions of the Spanish Civil War. Cunard’s essentializing views on blackness are included, but they confront her more nuanced meditations on institutionalized forms of racism. Perhaps more crucially, and to return to the arguments made in the introductory chapter, drama’s strength is in showing people and situations, which offers the opportunity to return to and intervene in representations of events that have been portrayed in one light or another. In theoretical recitations of Cunard’s motives for publishing Black Man and White Ladyship, for example, the narratives tend to be quite binary. Lemke argues that the tract was grounded in familial defiance: “Nancy Cunard’s revolt against racism – and the white establishment condoning it – was a rebellion against her family and the silver-spoon society in which she had grown up” (140). Conversely, those sympathetic to Cunard’s political efforts have read the tract within the socio-historical context of its day – including ideas propounded by the surrealists with whom Cunard was closely associated – and see Cunard’s calling out of the hypocrisies of her family as a blow to the system of institutionalized racism: “She broke with her mother to break with empire” (Young, “Nancy Cunard’s Black Man and White Ladyship as Surrealist Tract” 168). Within the frame of the heterotopic stage, these divergent perspectives are brought together with Cunard’s documented articulations. Undoubtedly, the theatre excels in allowing audiences to see the multiple and at times conflicting motives of the individual. The play explores varied motivations through Cunard’s dialogue about the pamphlet with Henry Crowder, a scenario that permits a psychological, political, and emotional consideration of the pressures at work.

In addition to the representational capacities of dramatization, the theatre also allows for an embodied exploration of the ways in which performance itself has been key to – and, therefore, key to unlocking – what has made Cunard so controversial. Green’s comment on the performative nature of spectacularity and confession leads to productive considerations of the link, in Cunard, between the transgressive and the performance of race. While certainly undertaken with more empathy and cultural appreciation than blackface, Cunard’s appropriation of African visual aesthetics – notably the multiple ivories that were her “signature” – her emotional identifications with black people, and her performance of this identification have been perceived as a decadeslong self-miscasting. In probing these contradictions in rehearsal, the performative model is not just metaphor. Rather, in taking on the identity of the other, and in costuming it accordingly, Cunard was engaged in fundamentally performative processes that have been dismissed, at least in part, because of their overt theatricality. As a result, the theatre at once permits a visual and thematic exploration of the juncture of race/spectacle/autobiography, but also, as it is implicated both in the processes of Cunard’s identifications and in the ways they have been received, allows for an applied, practice-based immersion in the psychology of identification and cultural backlash to the inappropriate or insensitive performance.

Finally, performative inquiry into Cunard’s life and historical moment can interrogate – and make manifest – the spectacularity of racial history within its time. A good example of this within the play is the juxtaposition of Cunard’s experience in Harlem with the events of the Scottsboro affair. It is perhaps in Harlem that Cunard’s experience with racial conflict was at its most intense. Harlem also shows Cunard at her most transgressive – she is pursuing an intellectual project that crosses the line for acceptable forms of writing and publication; she is doing it in the company of Henry Crowder, her black lover; and she has based herself in a neighbourhood that defines the idea of black apartness. In the scene examining this event, based on actual transcripts, reporters surround the hotel and the questions Cunard fields are mostly about the body, notably about a presumed sexual relationship with Paul Robeson, also staying at the hotel and a recognizable symbol of black masculinity. Fundamentally, the historical moment and the scene on which it is based are at once about space – who goes where and why – as well as about the presumption of illicit interracial sex. Similarly, Scottsboro is about space – who goes where on the train, who travels with whom and how – and also about presumptive sex and the law’s assumption that nine black young men riding the rails with two young white women, all having illegally entered the same part of the train, could not have done so without some kind of sexual and/or violent act taking place. Likewise, the media frenzy that surrounded and to a certain extent created the conditions of Cunard’s Harlem visit was also central to Scottsboro, as was the public fury ignited by the news. Within the play, juxtaposing Cunard’s time in Harlem with her writing on Scottsboro, and incorporating documentary footage of the courtroom drama, highlights the performativity of race, justice, and controversy not just in the American South but as it animated discussion about civil rights worldwide. As James Miller writes, Scottsboro reminds us of this still “explosive alchemy of race, sex, and violence in American life” (2), a mix that was to have potent ramifications for Cunard. If, as Green argues, the female body is often equated with the civic body, Cunard’s image, which frequently acted as a matrix for sex, race, and class warfare, provides a very stark – if useful – contrast to Scottsboro in considering how these elements combined and played out in the public imagination of the 1930s.

The history of the Scottsboro Boys – including their incarceration and social humiliation – has been dramatized in various ways, most notably through the 2010 musical The Scottsboro Boys. By contrast, a dramatization of Cunard’s story speaks not only to the privilege that protected her from the law but also to the social punishments – meted out by friends, family, and the press – for Cunard’s personal and political involvements.

If dramatized inquiry intrinsically allows for a consideration of the body’s role in public life, it is also implicated in a process whereby the body can usurp the image of itself not just through its ability to speak – and, therefore, to challenge the photograph with articulation – but also through its muscular ability to act. This is to say that in a play about Cunard, the body brings into focus a dimension lost not just through transmission of the image, but also in various textual and intellectual accounts: the unyieldingly physical nature of many of Cunard’s commitments. In her memoir, Cunard describes the running of the press as an intensely physical project, an aspect that by definition can be more viscerally demonstrated onstage. Similarly, dramatizing Cunard’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, notably as a field reporter for the Manchester Guardian, provides an opportunity to explore the physical exigencies of this role. Contrastingly, in directly addressing Cunard’s multiple romantic relationships, which have often been divested of their emotional and intellectual content in a singular insistence on the imperatives of the body, the dialogue highlights how some of these relationships were also profoundly influential sites of intellectual and ideological exchange. In this sense, materializing the physical body onstage and providing it with the power of articulation allows for a multifold response to the one-dimensionality of the image.

It was the spectacular, autobiographical, performative, and physical elements that first drove the investigation into a dramatization of Cunard. However, in conceptualizing and workshopping various drafts, it became clear that the stage also provided an entry point into spatializing the aesthetics of Cunard’s poetry – the three-dimensional “change of perspective” that Wihstutz suggests is key to what theatre can offer. Attracted by the mystical and multilayered topographies of the surrealists, Cunard was also deeply influenced by Pound’s emphasis on historical overlay – not quite the historical fusion that H.D. brings about in her work, and which the stage can literalize through the recreation of the palimpsest, but a temporal sensibility in which various historical times, particularly within the individual life, exist simultaneously: “The years are sewn together with thread of the same story” (Poems of Nancy Cunard from the Bodleian Library, 30); “This is the day / And the night / And the dawn / And the tear” (49); “Living in the past and the future / I see barrages and heart breakings” (39); “At one time, Montparnasse, / And all night’s gloss, / Splendour of shadow on shadow […] Sense of what zones, what simultaneous time sense?” (32). This topography of memory, which was central to Cunard’s early poetic work, would be eerily echoed by her return to Le Puits Carré, her home in La Chapelle Réanville, Normandy, in spring of 1945. After several years abroad, Cunard returned to find the farmhouse ransacked by the Germans and French reservists, as well as her own neighbours. This scene of return to a space that had been ransacked, looted, and vandalized loomed large for Cunard and recurs in several of her autobiographical accounts as well as in the writing of her contemporaries as a turning point in Cunard’s life, one that marked a decline into increasing paranoia and addiction. As Cunard’s friend Kay Boyle notes, the loss of Le Puits Carré and the items within it had both material and symbolic dimensions:

The ivory bracelets, some intricately and handsomely carved, some plain as horn, had been taken from her ransacked house in La Chapelle-Réanville (either by the French or by the Germans), during the Occupation. In the years immediately after the war, Nancy had searched for them through the museums of Europe […] She had even made enquiries in South America, as if finding the armor of our youth would signal the restitution of many usurped things. (79)

In this sense, the landscape of rubble is at once a real, tangible sign of the destruction of war and a symbolic landscape where the forces of fascism, so vivid in Cunard’s mind, literally trammel the most intimate aspects of her home life. Onstage, the materialization of this scene permits an exploration of the intersection of the personal and the political, particularly as Cunard begins to sort through the wreckage of indiscriminately mixed mementos from her early life, the physical vestiges of the avant-garde years in Paris, the collection of documents for Negro, her articles on the Spanish Civil War, photographs, letters, and various other aide-memoires. The ruin is at once a battlefield (quite literally of the Second World War, and symbolically of the conflict in Spain) and, on the other hand, a potent topography of reminiscence. Consequently, this scene mirrors this sense of overlapping realities in her poetry, an almost dreamlike space that corresponds with the way Cunard describes her mental and emotional states on returning to Réanville: “Even now I cannot analyze my strange feeling. It was ‘a discovery of something entirely new, bound up with something entirely past.’ In a dream I wandered alone through the shell of my home. And it was, at first, with the sense of touching the possessions of another” (Hours 201–2). This materialization, in the final scene of These Were the Hours, allows us to understand the import and impact of this event from a biographical perspective, and also allows for an exteriorization of the mnemonic landscape of Cunard’s imagination in its heightened, dreamlike dimensions.

Anchored at Le Puits Carré, the play nonetheless, and in keeping with its heterotopic intent, moves through a series of locations representative of Cunard’s peripatetic existence. Venice, a place where Cunard spent much of her youth and which remained throughout her life a point of aesthetic inspiration, appears in the moment when Cunard first meets Henry Crowder. Similarly, it also seemed important to set at least one scene in America, where Cunard confronted some of the most violent and venomous opposition to Negro, as well as in Spain, where she became committed to the Republican cause. Cunard’s reception in the Caribbean, where she was largely celebrated, was an important point of contrast with her experience in New York, and is here dramatized through an encounter with Hemingway in Havana that Cunard describes in These Were the Hours. Again, because of the suspension of disbelief in the theatre space, there is the possibility of moving across time and among geographies in ways that might be more difficult to accomplish through other modes of representation.

It should be noted that Cunard’s autobiographical writing, which has been the basis for this performative investigation of Cunard’s life and work, is quite different from Loy’s and H.D.’s. Cunard’s scrapbooks, housed at the Harry Ransom Research Center in Austin, Texas, include photographs, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, and various mementos, but the impulse to record her life never extended as far as a freestanding volume of autobiographical writing. Cunard biographer Lois Gordon notes that Cunard wrote: “The thought of settling down to ‘A life’ is unthinkable” (423) and for more reasons than one: “A book of that kind would bring in too many people … who’ve let me down as well as loved me. [They] might be pleased to read what I’d made of them … Others perhaps [might] bring libel actions! No! The choice lies between writing the thing fully, in detail, no holds barred – especially where I myself am concerned – or not writing at all. I choose that” (334). Ford suggests that Cunard’s reluctance to set herself down in writing may well have stemmed from a lingering anxiety about the press after the “ridicule and harassment” of Harlem in 1932 (Nancy Cunard x). Despite the fact that no single volume of autobiography exists, Cunard, nonetheless, includes several autobiographical passages in her “memories” of British writer Norman Douglas (Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas, 1954) and Irish writer and long-time family friend George Moore (GM: Memories of George Moore, 1956). When pressed to convince Cunard to write her memoirs (for which there was substantial interest and money available at a time when Cunard was certainly in need of it), Anthony Thorne writes that he replied: “Well, I think she’s doing so – as she prefers it – in writing the biographies of others”; an answer, he reports, that gained Cunard’s approval (304). In addition to these autobiographies between the lines, Cunard also wrote These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, Réanville and Paris, 1928–1931, an “informal history” of the publishing venture. Together, and combined with Cunard’s mostly unpublished letters, journalism, and archival miscellany, these sources create an intriguing tapestry of autobiographical writing, what Ford has called “conspicuous and welcome lapses” (Nancy Cunard viii) from Cunard’s stated opposition to a written self-rendering.

The first draft of the script of These Were the Hours was knitted out of these autobiographical passages with a particular emphasis on the memoir of the press. In its original form, the play was a one-woman dramatic monologue delivered by Cunard that quite diligently adhered to the descriptions of events provided by her own writing and, in this sense, was adapted in a manner similar to The Tree. The key difference between H.D. and Cunard, however, in addition to matters of form, is that most of the drama in H.D.’s work stems from internal conflict and psychological revisitation. While one could argue that Cunard also experienced a great deal of psychological upheaval, her autobiographical writing largely does not reflect this, as it is mostly written in a measured, descriptive tone that gives a strong sense of event but not of experience. Rather, the intrinsic interest of Cunard’s story – and the dramatic conflict – is rooted in the way she frequently pitted herself against a variety of political and ideological forces – racism, fascism, and, in many ways, the daily structures of conventional life. Also, while I had a strong desire to include Cunard’s autobiographical writing, my interest in heterotopic representation, key to representing the complexity of Cunard studies, required a bridging of Cunard’s writing and critical work around it. As a result, the dramatic and critical imperatives of Cunard’s story seemed to necessitate a different formal approach. In the version of These Were the Hours that appears here, the dialogue is frequently extrapolated from Cunard’s writing and other critical and documentary sources. Time is telescoped. Some scenes have been imaginatively extrapolated beyond what we know (e.g., it is unlikely the mayor visited Cunard though we know of his reputed involvement in the destruction in her home and Cunard’s attempted lawsuit against him). In this sense, the working method in These Were the Hours presents another possibility for dramatized literary inquiry – the speculative drama or play of ideas – which immerses itself in scholarship and quotes selectively even while it relies on more imaginative structures. As a result, These Were the Hours represents a departure from the more heavily quotation-based stagings of H.D. and Loy. However, in the sense that informed invention often makes for more effective dramatic transmission and, indeed, more closely resembles other well-known biographical dramas (of Wilde, Pound, Thoreau, etc.), this form – in both its possibilities and its critical limitations – is worth exploring as another platform for the broader dissemination of literary histories.

In the end, the stage in These Were the Hours operates as intersecting space, a place that can contain and support overlapping realities, geographies, memories, and ideas. It is here that we can examine the relationship between Cunardian spectacle and autobiographical speech, between the avant-garde images produced by others and the words of the subject that undercut them, between the appellations of racist and race reformer that have encircled Cunard and the paradoxical motivations and utterances through which Cunard engaged in her personal and political involvements. Onstage we can not only hear the words Cunard used to explicate herself and her life, but also have a representative body through which we can better understand the physical nature of her commitments, be they controversial sartorial symbols of identification with African aesthetics, or the embodied processes of publishing and on-the-ground political involvement and reporting, or the physical choices that challenged definitions of female behaviour and sexuality. In the sense that Cunard’s story is ultimately about the individual attempting to navigate and intervene, sometimes productively, sometimes not, in a world of racial tensions, oppressive politics, and uncertain outcomes, it also resonates with the idea of the heterotopic theatre as an alternative space that stands outside of the contemporary world even while it evokes it.

NOTES

1A four-year project beginning in 1930 and ending with private publication of a thousand copies in 1934, the anthology includes contributions on race from the United States, South America, Africa, Europe, and the West Indies. Approximately two-thirds of the contributors to the original collection were black and one third white. The project was to be “documentary” (Negro xvii): a compilation of letters, photographs, poems, musical compositions, ethnographic documents, political and sociological tracts, letters (including the hate mail Cunard received while in Harlem), and essays, the aim of which was to be “as inclusive as possible.” The resulting tome included approximately 250 written entries plus 385 illustrations. Almost two-thirds of the book documented the black American experience, with 60 pages on Europe and 315 on Africa. This is to say that Negro was in itself quite wildly heterotopic, making this approach central to Cunard’s life but also to her editorial practice.

2Langston Hughes, an important contributor, was enthusiastic about the finished volume, and novelist William Plomer praised Cunard as “passionately serious” and her work as of “great political importance” (quoted in Ford, Negro: An Anthology 126). Alain Locke, editor of the anthology The New Negro, dismissed Negro Anthology as propaganda, and it was banned as seditious in several West African colonies and the British West Indies.