Unbounded avant-gardes: On the reciprocity of Central European modernism and the movements for African poetics

Abstract

This article demonstrates the reciprocity and similarity between European and African art and literature through the poetry of the Central European Dadaists, Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball, and the theorists of Négritude, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Césaire was fascinated by Dadaist oral performance, and Senghor invoked German poetry in their critiques of ‘Civilisation de l’universel’. They deconstructed the supposed superiority of Western artefacts to perform universality through a ‘politics of resemblance’ which gave readers an intercultural ‘aesthetic experience’ that eliminates groundless asymmetries between north and south.