NEGRITUDE.

In the 1930s the poet and politician AiméCésaire (b. 1913), a Martinican who later led his home colony to assimilation as a French department, coined the term negritude. Negritude corresponded to an intellectual movement that emerged during the interwar years in France and promoted culture as a political mode of expression for black identity within the context of Europe's relationship to its colonies. Scholars have traditionally credited Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001, the first president of Senegal), and the French Guianan Léon-Gontran Damas (1912–1978) with developing negritude. However, in the intellectually and politically turbulent Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, many people contributed to elaborating a set of ideas that are neither clearly defined nor completely obvious in their repercussions. The origins and influences of negritude should be understood within their cultural, intellectual, and political contexts. Among the sociopolitical conditions providing a backdrop for this movement were the arrival of colonial men in France during World War I; ensuing anti-imperialism across Europe; and the printing of African- and Caribbean-run newspapers in interwar Paris.

WORLD WAR I AND THE ORIGINS OF ANTICOLONIALISM

World War I transformed France's relationship with its African and Caribbean colonies. For the first time black men were invited to discover the metropole at the center of their empire. Approximately 250,000 conscripted soldiers from Sudan and Senegal were joined by 30,000 from the Caribbean and Madagascar. Moreover, French men called upon to fight were replaced in factories by 200,000 colonial workers.

Colonial soldiers were admired for their fighting skills and suffered high casualty rates. Some of those who survived remained in France after the war as workers, often in exploitative jobs, or students. Remembering fallen comrades and knowing that they had helped France out of a severe crisis in manpower, many from Africa and the Caribbean believed the nation owed them a blood debt. Yet the social prospects momentarily revealed by the war, including possibilities for interracial relationships with French women and the promise of equality as citizens, disappeared during the post-war years. Convinced that France owed them suffrage and freedom, some black men and women organized associations that demanded assimilation as French departments or an end to French colonialism.

Proponents of anticolonialism congregated in port cities across France and Europe, including Bordeaux, Marseille, Toulon, and Le Havre, but played to France's centralized political system by placing headquarters in Paris. A series of organizations succeeded one another, including the Committee for the Defense of the Negro Race (1926), the League for the Defense of the Negro Race (1927), and the Negro Workers' Union (1932). These associations were carefully observed by undercover informants who reported to the police and the Ministry of Colonies, and as a result were divided by paranoia about how to escape the French government's scrutiny. Uncertain to what extent they should allow themselves to be funded by the Communist Party and influenced by directives from Moscow, they fell victim to bickering that broke down along class lines, as well as lines of geographical origin. Intellectuals and workers from the Caribbean and Africa, were often at loggerheads over whether they could trust one another. Nonetheless, these organizations maintained an ongoing presence in Paris and contacts with likeminded European groups throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

EARLY DEFINITIONS OF NEGRITUDE

Police informants were more concerned with members of radical anticolonialist associations than with individuals who are usually credited with elaborating black nationalism through negritude. They made few references to Senghor or Césaire, preferring to comment upon debates within all three associations about whether to describe themselves as Negro or black. Nègre, or Negro, the word that forms the base for negritude, was considered a powerful statement about the desire to take control of a pejorative descriptive previously employed by Europeans in an attempt to affirm white superiority. The January 1927 issue of La race nègre (The Negro race), an organ for the Committee, included an article entitled "The Word Negro." The author explicitly placed the word in opposition to others less charged with race and class, such as men of color or blacks. The scholar Christopher Miller suggests that this article marks the beginning of an attempt to recapture blackness through language, one that has been associated traditionally with the writings of Senghor and Césaire. Repeated references to the divide between black and Negro in newspapers and police notes suggests that cultural and intellectual attempts to redefine the parameters of a debate on race predated those usually associated with negritude.

WOMEN AND NEWSPAPERS IN PARIS

This historiographical development in the understanding of negritude's origins has emerged alongside a growing interest in the women who were part of a movement traditionally associated with men. Senghor and Césaire had few contacts with their radical anticolonialist counterparts, even though they were also fleetingly intrigued by communism. In contrast, there were exchanges between these groups and a woman named Paulette Nardal. The eldest of seven Martinican sisters, Paulette and her sister Jane held a salon that connected Africans, Antilleans, and African Americans. Negritude developed in Paris largely because the city facilitated interracial and intercultural contacts, and the salon encouraged such exchanges.

The Nardal sisters contributed to newspapers linked with their salon that challenged black intellectuals to find their place in Europe while coming to terms with their identity, both essential components of negritude. In a 15 October 1928 article for La dépêche africaine (The black dispatch), Jane explored the dangers of allowing Europeans to project their negrophilia—or passion for all things black—upon colonial men and women who would be reduced to mere "Exotic Puppets." Writing for La revue du monde noir (The review of the black world) in April 1932, Paulette added that women were the first to be truly challenged by their blackness because they were the focal points for exotic gazes projected by Europeans. L'etudiant noir (The black student) appeared only once, in March 1935, but gathered writings by Paulette Nardal, Césaire, and Senghor in a paper that has often been considered the immediate catalyst for negritude. Articles focused, in the vein of Jane and Paulette Nardal's work, upon establishing an identity as both European and black by rejecting stereotyping and defending blackness.

NEGRITUDE'S FOUNDERS ON ITS DEFINITION

Negritude, anticipated in the writings of anti-imperialist blacks and Antillean women, was finally embodied by Césaire's term. But what did it mean? In L'etudiant noir, Césaire wrote that before World War I blackmen wished to become European and assimilated, but the blood debt and France's stern dealings with its colonies in postwar years changed their hopes. This concurrence inspired negritude, which was voiced by black men educated in elite French institutions including the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Senghor emphasized in negritude a cultural heritage common to Africans around the world. Césaire took control of blackness by reclaiming the word nègre in his 1939 work Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land). As poets and politicians, both men sought to explore black consciousness through the French language, inspired by the writings of African Americans Claude McKay (1889–1948), Langston Hughes (1902–1967), and Countee Cullen (1903–1946), as well as by some of the French avant-garde artists known as surrealists. They were stirred, like the Nardal sisters, by a sense of alienation that they saw spreading to an entire race. They answered by articulating fundamental differences between Europeans and Africans. Female, emotional, and rhythmic Africa, all components of a black essence, contrasted in their writings with male, technical, and cold Europe. However their expression of negritude differed slightly since Senghor emphasized the essentialist approach while Césaire argued that differences defining people of African descent were cultural rather than genetic. For Césaire negritude meant the recognition of one's cultural heritage and the communications of that legacy to others in the African diaspora.

NEGRITUDE AND DECOLONIZATION

World War II marked a turning point for colonialism. During the war Césaire resisted in the Vichy-dominated West Indies with the journal Tropiques. Senghor saw service in the French army and was taken prisoner before eventually being released. After the war Senghor and Césaire became increasingly involved in politics. They also continued to write about negritude, encouraging others to find a black consciousness.

Their project and the term negritude were recognized when the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) wrote in a 1948 preface for an anthology of African and Caribbean poetry edited by Senghor. In it he described the movement as an inner experience and a philosophy in its own right that depended upon the black poets' ability to recapture European languages.

Many reacted to negritude after Sartre helped reveal it to a broad public. Negritude was attacked by communists, who believed it withdrew attention from the class struggle. Others believed negritude was racist because it established black men as different, not only physically but also in their essence, through their souls. Some who saw a fundamental break between poet-politicians and their increasingly anti-imperialist people attacked the idea for its elitism. The final criticism appeared in the 1960s: most Africans in France's past and present colonies did not read French and hence could never discover negritude. These critiques suggested an important post–World War II development: politics, not culture, were supposed to lead Africans toward their desired independence.

Negritude was a literary and cultural movement that identified a shift in the relationship between black and French identity. Although not the first expression of black nationalism, since several 1920s organizations presaged its ideas, negritude was the most articulate rejection of white European supremacy. Contrasting Africa's emotive intuition with European rationalism and individualism allowed a cultural movement to reinvent itself politically and inspire others after World War II in their African nationalism. The movement died down in the 1960s because decolonization had largely succeeded and because of internal inconsistencies. Nonetheless, negritude marked a seminal moment in Europe's changing relationship with its colonies, one in which Africans and Antilleans found articulate and passionate voices in defense of their blackness.

See alsoColonialism; French Empire; Racism; Senghor, Léopold Sédar.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Translated and edited by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Middletown, Conn., 2001.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Black Orpheus. Translated by S.W. Allen. Paris, 1976. Translation of Orphée Noir, originally the preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache delanguefrançaise, edited by L. S. Senghor(1948).

Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Liberté. Paris, 1964. Contains most of Senghor's cultural works from reviews and journals published between 1937 and 1964.

Secondary Sources

Dewitte, Philippe. Les Mouvements nègres en France 1919–1939. Paris, 1985. A thorough text portraying, using police archives, the black men who were politically engaged in interwar France.

Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, Mass., 2003. An investigation of the links between African American writers and their French counterparts.

Kesteloot, Lilyan. Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude. Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Washington, D.C., 1991. A classic reference work that includes a number of interviews with negritude's founding thinkers.

Miller, Christopher L. Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture. Chicago, 1998. A collection of essays on the interwar context in which negritude developed.

Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Negritude Women. Minneapolis, Minn., 2002. The most complete study of women who claimed negritude for themselves. Includes translations of primary works.

Jennifer Anne Boittin