Negritude

The Negritude movement, which signaled the awakening of a pan-African consciousness among black French intellectuals, has been understood almost exclusively in terms of the contributions of its male founders: Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Leon G. Damas. This masculine genealogy has completely overshadowed the central role played by French-speaking black women in its creation and evolution. In Negritude Women, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting offers a long-overdue corrective, revealing the contributions made by four women -- Suzanne Lacascade, Jane and Paulette Nardal, and Suzanne Roussy-Cesaire -- who were not merely integral to the success of the movement, but often in its vanguard. Through such disparate tactics as Lacascade's use of Creole expressions in her French prose writings, the literary salon and journal founded by the Martinique-born Nardal sisters, and Roussy-Cesaire's revolutionary blend of surrealism and Negritude in the pages of Tropiques, the journal she founded with her husband, these four remarkable women made vital contributions. In exploring their influence on the development of themes central to Negritude -- black humanism, the affirmation of black peoples and their cultures, and the rehabilitation of Africa -- Sharpley-Whiting provides the movement's first genuinely inclusive history.

Negritude has been defined by Léopold Sédar Senghor as "the sum of the cultural values of the black world as they are expressed in the life, the institutions, and the works of black men." Sylvia Washington Bâ analyzes Senghor's poetry to show how the concept of negritude infuses it at every level. A biographical sketch describes his childhood in Senegal, his distinguished academic career in France, and his election as President of Senegal. Themes of alienation and exile pervade Senghor's poetry, but it was by the opposition of his sensitivity and values to those of Europe that he was able to formulate his credo. Its key theme, and the supreme value of black African civilization, is the concept of life forces, which are not attributes or accidents of being, but the very essence of being. Life is an essentially dynamic mode of being for the black African, and it has been Senghor's achievement to communicate African intensity and vitality through his use of the nuances, subtleties, and sonorities of the French language. In the final chapter Sylvia Washington Bâ discusses the future of Senghor's belief that the black man's culture should be recognized as valid not simply as a matter of human justice, but because the values of negritude could be instrumental in the reintegration of positive values into western civilization and the reorientation of contemporary man toward life and love. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Doit-on considérer la Négritude comme un mouvement ancré dans la fin de la période coloniale et sur lequel il n’y a plus lieu de revenir ? C’est une des questions que le colloque qui s’est tenu à l’Université des West Indies à la Barbade en l’honneur du centenaire de la naissance de Senghor s’efforce d’explorer. Lylian Kesteloot nous rappelle encore récemment dans son étude Césaire et Senghor un pont sur l’Atlantique l’importance de ce mouvement qui entre les années trente et soixante a participé à la naissance de la littérature africaine. La question du particularisme que le mot Négritude implique et de son opposé l’universel sera largement débattue dans les pages de cet ouvrage. Les articles de cet essai discutent les défauts essentialistes de la Négritude senghorienne, mais également le fait que dans les termes de Senghor « la Négritude est un mythe », donc une construction identitaire, l’expression d’une invention. Il envisageait par exemple l’avènement d’un socialisme africain, dans une interprétation unique du marxisme. En tant que mouvement poétique, philosophique, littéraire, ou en tant que réponse idéologique à une oppression, les auteurs africains et antillais étudiés ici et qui traitent de thèmes très contemporains, démontrent la vivacité d’une Négritude toujours d’actualité dans sa présentation des cultures. Il faut bien entendu dépasser la notion raciale contenue dans le terme et insister sur le culturel, le philosophique et l’esthétique, pour accepter que la Négritude ait une pertinence actuelle. Notamment nous verrons que la Négritude s’est métamorphosée aux Antilles où au Brésil en d’originaux projets idéologiques et esthétiques. Should Negritude be seen as a movement that originated at the end of the colonial era and merits no further study in this contemporary world? This is one of the questions explored in the Colloquium held at the University of the West Indies, Barbados, to mark the centenary of the birth of Léopold Sedar Senghor. In a recent study, Césaire et Senghor: Un pont sur l’Atlantique, Lylian Kesteloot reminds her readers of the importance of Negritude which contributed to the emergence of African literature between 1930 and 1960. The idea of essentialism which the word Negritude implies, as well as the opposite idea of universalism, will be widely discussed in the pages of this work. This collection of essays acknowledges the essential shortcomings of Senghor’s Negritude, but, at the same time, underlines the fact that in Senghor’s words, “Negritude is a myth” and therefore has to do with the construction of (an) identity and is the expression of an imaginary creation. It envisaged, for example, the creation of an African form of socialism within a unique interpretation of Marxism. In this volume, African and Caribbean writers who are concerned with contemporary issues, demonstrate the vitality of Negritude as a poetic, philosophical and literary movement and as an ideological response to oppression that is still relevant in its presentation of cultures. Clearly, it is necessary to go beyond the notion of race implied in the term and to focus on the cultural, philosophical and aesthetic elements in order to appreciate the relevance of Negritude today. Most notably in the Caribbean or Brazil, Negritude has been transformed into original ideological and aesthetic projects.

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.

Cold War Negritude is the first book-length study of francophone Caribbean literature to foreground the political context of the global Cold War. It focuses on three canonical francophone Caribbean writers—René Depestre, Aimé Césaire, and Jacques-Stephen Alexis—whose literary careers and political alignments spanned all three “worlds” of the 1950s Cold War order. As black Caribbean authors who wrote in French, who participated directly in the global communist movement, and whose engagements with Marxist thought and practice were mediated by their colonial relationship to France, these writers expressed unique insight into this bipolar system as it was taking shape. The book shows how, over the course of the 1950s, French Caribbean Marxist authors re-evaluated the literary aesthetics of Negritude and sought to develop alternatives that would be adequate to the radically changed world system of the Cold War. Through close readings of literary, theoretical, and political texts by Depestre, Césaire, and Alexis, I show that this formal shift reflected a strikingly changed understanding of what it meant to write engaged literature in the new, bipolar world order. Debates about literary aesthetics became the proxy battlefield on which Antillean writers promoted and fought for their different visions of an emancipated Caribbean modernity. Consequent to their complicated Cold War alignments, these Antillean authors developed original and unorthodox Marxist literary aesthetics that syncretized an array of socialist literary tendencies from around the globe.

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.

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. )

Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity’s potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Césaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.