The immediate post-war years saw the creation of many small-scale journals and publishing houses in metropolitan France. National reconciliation and the revised colonial rhetoric of the Union française under the Fourth Republic were accompanied by voices in print that explored alternatives to this moral rearming of Empire. Those alternatives responded to the growing interest in ‘tiers-mondisme’ and increasingly disillusioned responses to communism and the Parti communiste français (PCF) among intellectuals in the metropole following the death of Stalin and the Prague Spring (Judt, 1992: 282). These were key historical shifts that indirectly, exerted pressure on the literary field in the 1950s and early 1960s. This complex period in the history of ideas was intertwined with an economic boom, population expansion, and a steep rise in consumerism in metropolitan France. The accompanying wave of modernization wielded significant changes in the technology of book production. The results were double-edged for small éditeurs engagés such as Présence Africaine or Éditions de Minuit: on the one hand, the arrival of cheap paperback livres de poche from 1953 heralded improved access to reading material and a greater potential readership; on the other, there were concerns across the political spectrum that this could lead to the commodification of texts and their authors, a dilution of the status and quality of printed books, and, by consequence, the ideas they contained. In his landmark attack on the French left's renewed taste for Marxism, Raymond Aron (1955: 308) wrote: ‘La nécessité de vendre la marchandise intellectuelle ne paraît pas moins insupportable que l'obéissance à l'idéologie de l’État. L'homme de culture se sent acculé au choix entre prostitution et solitude’. In the shadow of Soviet social realism and the political instrumentalization of art and literature, Aron and others argued that an affirmation of intellectual and literary autonomy was required. The extent to which that idealized notion of autonomy was transformed by the effects of decolonization on the Parisian publishing landscape will be explored in what follows.

Présence Africaine was established as a journal in 1947, a Parisian publishing house in 1949, and a Latin Quarter bookshop in 1962. Often defined as primarily a cultural hub and a mouthpiece for ideas of négritude, Présence Africaine contributed decisively to the internationalization of Parisian literary geography by creating a relatively autonomous means of knowledge production and distribution for African, Caribbean, and diasporic authors.