Negritude

Negritude is an African diasporic, self-affirming idea that evolved into an artistic and cultural movement and later became a lightening rod for controversy and ideological disputes. The (re)valorization of the black world, the affirmation of the humanity of black people, and the glorification of the richness of black culture had antecedents in the works of earlier thinkers and scholars such as Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912), Martin Delany (1812–1885), and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), and writers of the Harlem Renaissance such as Claude McKay (1890–1948) and Langston Hughes (1902–1967), who reclaimed "blackness" with pride, reinvested it with positive meanings, and rejected the negativity heaped on it by racism, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism.

The strong argument for a rethinking and revaluing of black identity and culture grew in the nineteenth century among black intellectuals and precursors of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, such as Blyden, who were responding to the biological racism of European writers and philosophers, such as G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) from Germany, that placed blacks outside of historical progress and development.

The redefinition of black identity and the celebration of black heritage picked up steam early in the last century and jelled into a cultural movement of the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance, which grew in New York City but had a profound impact beyond the United States, particularly in the Caribbean and Europe, where it fueled the activities of a group of young black students from the colonies. A member of the group, Aimé Césaire (b. 1913) of Martinique, wrote a dissertation on the Harlem Renaissance.

Post-World War I (1914–1918) Europe witnessed a gathering of blacks from the French Caribbean and West Africa who fought alongside French and African-American soldiers in World War II (1939–1945). In the early 1930s, they founded journals and other publications as outlets for their political, cultural, and artistic works—the moderate, proassimilationist Revue du monde noir (Review of the Black World, 1931) was followed three years later by the radical, antiassimilationist, and proliberation review, L'Etudiant noir (The Black Student), founded by Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) of Senegal, and others.

These activities morphed into a cultural and artistic movement of reaffirmation of black identity and heritage that took its name, negritude, from Césaire's 1939 poem "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal" (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land). Césaire's conceptualization of the term negritude was imbued with the historical context of a black world whose unity is "measured by the compass of suffering." But as the movement evolved, some of its proponents invested the concept with new meanings. Senghor for one gave the concept an ontological base that is anchored in black essences. The biologism that was injected into the concept caught on with French intellectuals and artists who championed African art and culture, in particular Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), whose preface to Senghor's 1948 poetry collection presented negritude thinking as the black man's descent into self in search of essences.

Senghor's ontological positioning of the idea of negritude became even more controversial when he went further to engage in a comparative analysis that assigned emotion to the black man and reason to Europe. This racialized dichotomy earned Senghor some criticism from black Francophone intellectuals and writers (e.g., Stanislas Adotevi) that became even more acerbic in the writings of intellectuals from Anglophone Africa, including Nigerian author Wole Soyinka (b. 1934), South African author Ezekiel Mphahlele (b. 1919), and others.

see also Assimilation; Decolonization, Sub-Saharan Africa; Nationalism, Africa; Pan-Africanism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adotevi, Stanislas Spero. Négritude st Négrologues (new edition). Paris: Le Castor Astral, 1998.

Kesteloot, Lilyan. Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude. Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1991.

Senghor, Léopold Sédar. The Foundations of "Africanité or "Néritude" and "Arabité" Translated by Mercer Cook. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1971.