Beyond Negritude

Key text never before in English by central figure of the Negritude movement.

The Negritude Movement provides readers with not only an intellectual history of the Negritude Movement but also its prehistory (W.E.B. Du Bois, the New Negro Movement, and the Harlem Renaissance) and its posthistory (Frantz Fanon and the evolution of Fanonism). By viewing Negritude as an “insurgent idea” (to invoke this book’s intentionally incendiary subtitle), as opposed to merely a form of poetics and aesthetics, The Negritude Movement explores Negritude as a “traveling theory” (à la Edward Said’s concept) that consistently crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean in the twentieth century: from Harlem to Haiti, Haiti to Paris, Paris to Martinique, Martinique to Senegal, and on and on ad infinitum. The Negritude Movement maps the movements of proto-Negritude concepts from Du Bois’s discourse in The Souls of Black Folk through to post-Negritude concepts in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Utilizing Negritude as a conceptual framework to, on the one hand, explore the Africana intellectual tradition in the twentieth century, and, on the other hand, demonstrate discursive continuity between Du Bois and Fanon, as well as the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude Movement, The Negritude Movement ultimately accents what Negritude contributed to arguably its greatest intellectual heir, Frantz Fanon, and the development of his distinct critical theory, Fanonism. Rabaka argues that if Fanon and Fanonism remain relevant in the twenty-first century, then, to a certain extent, Negritude remains relevant in the twenty-first century.

Beyond Collective Memory analyzes how two African places became icons of collective memory for certain publics, yet remain marginal to national and continental memory discourses. Thiaroye, a Senegalese location of colonial-era massacre, and District Six, a South African neighborhood destroyed under apartheid, have epitomized a shared "memory" of racist violence and resistant community. Analyzing diverse cultural texts surrounding both places, this book argues that the metaphor of collective memory has obscured the structural character of colonial and apartheid violence, and made it difficult to explore the complicit positions that structures of violence produce. In investigating the elisions of memory discourses, Beyond Collective Memory challenges the dominance of collective memory, and calls attention to the African pasts, metaphors, and imaginaries that exist beyond it.

Race Women Internationalists explores how a group of Caribbean and African American women in the early and mid-twentieth century traveled the world to fight colonialism, fascism, sexism, and racism. Based on newspaper articles, speeches, and creative fiction and adopting a comparative perspective, the book brings together the entangled lives of three notable but overlooked women: American Eslanda Robeson, Martinican Paulette Nardal, and Jamaican Una Marson. It explores how, between the 1920s and the 1960s, the trio participated in global freedom struggles by traveling; building networks in feminist, student, black-led, anticolonial, and antifascist organizations; and forging alliances with key leaders. This made them race women internationalists—figures who engaged with a variety of interconnected internationalisms to challenge various forms of inequality facing people of African descent across the diaspora and the continent.

In The Haitian Revolution, the Harlem Renaissance, and Caribbean Negritude: Overlapping Discourses of Freedom and Identity, Tammie Jenkins argues that the ideas of freedom and identity cultivated during the Haitian Revolution were reinvigorated in Harlem Renaissance texts and were instrumental in the development of Caribbean Negritude. Jenkins analyzes the precipitating events that contributed to the Haitian Revolution and connects them to Harlem Renaissance publications by Eric D. Walrond and Joel Augustus “J.A.” Rogers. Jenkins traces these movements to Paris where black American expatriates, Harlem Renaissance members, and Francophones from Africa and the Caribbean met once a week at Le Salon Clamart to share their lived experiences with racism, oppression, and disenfranchisement in their home countries. Using these dialogical exchanges, Jenkins investigates how the Haitian Revolution and Harlem Renaissance tenets influence the modernization of Caribbean Negritude's development.

Examines Bergson’s work from the perspectives of critical philosophy of race and decolonial theory, placing it in conversation with theorists from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Latin America. Building upon recent interest in Henri Bergson’s social and political philosophy, this volume offers a series of fresh and novel perspectives on Bergson’s writings through the lenses of critical philosophy of race and decolonial theory. Contributors place Bergson’s work in conversation with theorists from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Latin America to examine Bergson’s influence on literature, science studies, aesthetics, metaphysics, and social and political philosophy within these geopolitical contexts. The volume pays particular attention to both theoretical and practical forms of critical resistance work, including historical analyses of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist movements that have engaged with Bergson’s writings—for example, the Négritude movement, the Indigenismo movement, and the Peruvian Socialist Party. These historical and theoretical intersections provide a timely and innovative contribution to the existing scholarship on Bergson, and demonstrate the importance of his thought for contemporary social and political issues. “This is an exceptionally strong volume that excites and inspires the philosophical imagination; it shows the centrality of questions of race and gender to philosophical inquiry and appropriation.” — Keith Ansell-Pearson, author of Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition

How/why négritude came to be defined by Aimé Césaire the way it did, including the author’s personal notes from interactions with Léon G. Damas, Aimé Césaire and Leopold S Senghor. (Author’s note: I was carrying Léon G. Damas’s ashes to (French Guyana) Guyane (Damas had been one of the my advisors re Négritude doctoral dissertation.) and was making a stop in Fort de France for Cesaire’s eulogy. Césaire was at the airport to meet me and while waiting for my bags, we exchanged our experiences with the cremation procedures of dear friends. In my case it was that Marietta Damas had had it with people moving her husband and had given me specific directions. One of them was that Damas should not be moved anymore and should be cremated in the massive oak casket (that Houphouet Boigny had bought for her.) In Southeast Washington, DC, the cremation technician, to show me he was following instructions to the letter, opened the door of the oven; then lifted the lid of the casket for me to see that he had moved nothing; even the roses that Marietta had placed on the body were still there. The procedure of cremation had started already and I could see blue flames as though from welding torches shooting everywhere, attacking the body. After a moment of reflection, Césaire, in turn, told me of his exper- ience with Richard Wright and hearing his friend’s bones explode during the procedure. To a reflection regarding what négritude had become at the time of Damas’s death, Césaire gave me a long soliloquy, starting with Paris’s effervescence around the Paris Colonial Exposition back in the 30s and concluding with Sartre’s Black Orpheus. Black Orpheus broke the mold, turning négritude into an aesthetic of literature stripped of socio-political value. The crux of which was that négritude had become another academic subject of post- colonial studies. That was not what Senghor intended. After Black Orpheus, no one could write about négritude without mentioning ontology, epistemology, esthetics, Hegel, integrism and so on. “You heard what I said in Dakar in 66, I don’t like the word négritude. It’s disruptive.” Then too, it bothered him that négritude had gotten disconnected from people’s reality. He then compared that disconnect with what he had witness in Haiti in 1944. The disconnect between the people and the intelligentsia. (Césaire’s interest in Haiti was immense. It was like a duty to visit him whenever I had been to Haiti.) (Author’s note: In 1980 I was the Cultural Attaché at the US Embassy in Dakar. Randall Robinson of Trans-Africa was visiting, and I arranged an interview with him for the Dakar daily, Le Soleil. Among subjects discussed was the Western Sahara issue. Robinson explained his support for the Saharawis and the Polisario Front. The interview never ran. Instead, then President Senghor asked me to his office. When he said, “I have a great weakness for France,” he meant it. It made no difference if I saw him everyday. I could never meet him without being taken aback by how much Francité he exuded. But not this time. This time it was a furious Senghor I was meeting. He could not let views inimical to Morocco’s interests in the Senegalese media. He then gave me a long lecture about Arab racism, Morocco excepted. It didn’t help that the slave state of Mauritania right across the Senegal River insisted on an Arab designation. He grew bitter. I was astounded, for no one was more guarded than Senghor. But here he let it rip, perhaps because he was a few months from announcing his retirement. )

Simone de Beauvoir and the Colonial Experience: Freedom, Violence, and Identity interprets the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir and her intellectual trajectory through the perspective of French colonial history. Nathalie Nya considers Beauvoir through this lens not only to critique her position as a colonizer woman or colon, but also as a means of situating her in one of France’s most vexing and fraught historical moments. This terminology emphasizes the weight of French colonialism on Beauvoir’s identity as a white French woman, as well as the subjective and interpersonal dialectic of colonialism. Nya argues that while the French republic was systematizing colonialism, all of its white citizens were colons whereas natives from France’s colonies were the colonized.Simone de Beauvoir and the Colonial Experience presents a gendered and female perspective of French colonialism between 1946 and 1962, a time when French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon rallied against the political system, and which ultimately brought about an end to French colonialism. It adheres to a reading of Beauvoir as foremost an intellectual woman, one who reflected upon the legacy of French colonialism as an author and whose nation-bound status as a colonizer played a role in the alliance she created with Gisele Halimi and Djamila Boupacha. Beauvoir’s colonial reflections can help us to better gauge how women—White, Asian, Arab, Caribbean, Latina, mixed race, and Black—decipher the crimes and injustices of French colonialism.