Négritude

Négritude, term invented by Aimé Césaire in Paris in 1934, in order to emphasize the important role of black creativity in human history, a role that had been denied by colonialism and Christianity. In the magazine L'étudiante Noir, Césaire claimed that he possessed a miraculous weapon, a poetry that spoke not to the reason but to the heart. Césaire was then one of a group of black students from the Caribbean and Africa who studied in Paris and were interested in the work of black artists from all over the world, especially Africa. The most famous members of the group were Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–1990?) and Ousmane Socé (1911–1973) from Senegal and Léon-Gontran Damas (1912–1978) from Guyana.

The group around the magazine was greatly influenced by the controversy over the novel Batouala (1921), written by the Guyanese René Maran. This "really black novel," with its anticolonial allusions, caused a scandal while at the same time winning the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Inspired by this controversy, some students founded the antico-lonalist magazine Légitime Défense (1932–1934), which borrowed its name from surrealism and engaged in the debate about communism and sociopolitical alternatives. Of course, for Senghor, Damas, and Césaire this alternative was closely involved with the process of political decolonization, an orientation that distinguished their concept of "marvelous realism" from that of André Breton and André Masson, two exponents of French-oriented surrealism.

Senghor felt closer to the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, who debated French colonialism in his magazine Les Temps Modernes and wrote the famous preface "Black Orpheus" for Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (1945). Senghor became the first president of the Republic of Senegal in 1960 and served for two decades as head of the government. Nevertheless, he continued working on the elaboration of the poetical concept of négritude, in order to confront western ideological models with humanistic African traditions.

Black pride, considered by Senghor and Césaire as the sine qua non for négritude, maintained its influence in the younger generation of students coming from Africa and especially, from the Caribbean. Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, both former students of Césaire's in Martinique, developed their own ideas, although they did not adopt the term négritude. Fanon was very much involved with the independence movement in Africa, which inspired his Les Damnées de la terre (1961), again published with a preface by Sartre. Glissant searched for a broader view of cultural networks under the label "poétique de la rélation," which literally means a poetics of networks.

In the French- and Creole-speaking areas of Africa and the Caribbean, the term continues to offer an important motif for discussion, especially in relationship with nation-building and political independence. The writer René Dépestre from Haiti, a country with a long tradition of négritude and marvelous realism since the 1920s, took the concept up in his long essay "Bonjour et adieu à la négritude," published in the anthology Africa en las Américas (1977). Three years later, in a revised version of this text edited in Paris as a collection of essays, Dépestre declared that négritude was meant to demystify the terms "black" and "white" imposed by the colonial past. He believed that such concepts would one day be replaced by a syncretistic mutation he termed créolité. This implies a decentralization of European views and the possibility of a new imaginative faculty. With the decline of national social identities, Dépestre claims that créolité would be a worldwide process of escape from slavery and radical denial of oppressive models of colonialism. The critic James Clifford commented on this process and its relation to Césaire's négritude: "Césaire makes rebellion and the remaking of culture—the historical maroon experience—into a verb. A necessary new verb names the New World poetics of continuous transgression and cooperative cultural activity."

The extensive literature on négritude continues to grow. It describes cultures inspired by African values, emphasizing their importance in contemporary situations and their creative capacities, all too often kept from public view in the past.

See alsoCésaire, Aimé; Race and Ethnicity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Markmann, (1989); and Les Damnés de la terre (1968).

Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté. Vol. 1, Négritude et humanisme (1964) and Vol. 3, Négritude et civilisation de l'universel (1977).

Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Africa en América Latina (1977).

A. James Arnold, Modernism and Négritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (1981).

René Dépestre, Bonjour et adieu à la négritude (1990).

James Clifford, "A Politics of Neologism: Aimé Césaire," in The Predicament of Culture (1988), pp. 175-182.

Édouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (1981).

Additional Bibliography

Jack, Belinda Elizabeth. Negritude and Literary Criticism: The History and Theory of "Negro-African" Literature in French. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996.

                                             Ineke Phaf