Négritude (from French "nègre" and "-itude" to denote a condition that can be translated as "Blackness"; ) is a framework of critique and literary theory, mainly developed by francophone intellectuals, writers, politicians, and visual artists in the African diaspora during the 1930s, aimed at raising and cultivating "black consciousness" across Africa and its diaspora. The progenitors of Négritude included the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Abdoulaye Sadji, Léopold Sédar Senghor (the first President of Senegal), and Léon Damas of French Guiana. Négritude intellectuals disavowed colonialism, racism and Eurocentrism. They promoted African culture within a framework of persistent Franco-African ties. The intellectuals employed Marxist political philosophy, in the black radical tradition. The writers drew heavily on a surrealist literary style, and some say they were also influenced somewhat by the Surrealist stylistics, and in their work often explored the experience of diasporic being, asserting one's self and identity, and ideas of home, home-going and belonging. Visual artists inspired by the Négritude philosophy created works based on the same themes.

Négritude inspired the birth of many movements across the Afro-Diasporic world, including Afro-Surrealism, Créolité and Antillanité in the Caribbean, and black is beautiful in the United States. Frantz Fanon often made reference to Négritude in his writing.

Etymology

' is a constructed noun from the 1930s based upon the French word nègre, which, like its English counterpart, was derogatory and had a different meaning from "black man". The movement's use of the word Négritude was a way of re-imagining the word as an emic form of empowerment. The term was first used in its present sense by Aimé Césaire, in the third issue (May–June 1935) of L'Étudiant noir, a magazine that he had started in Paris with fellow students Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas, as well as , Leonard Sainville, Louis T. Achille, Aristide Maugée, and Paulette Nardal. The word appears in Césaire's first published work, "Conscience Raciale et Révolution Sociale", with the heading "Les Idées" and the rubric "Négreries", which is notable for its disavowal of assimilation as a valid strategy for resistance and for its use of the word ' as a positive term. The problem with assimilation was that one assimilated into a culture that considered African culture to be barbaric and unworthy of being seen as "civilized". The assimilation into this culture would have been seen as an implicit acceptance of this view. Nègre previously had been used mainly in a pejorative sense. Césaire deliberately incorporated this derogatory word into the name of his philosophy. Césaire's choice of the -itude suffix has been criticized, with Senghor noting that "the term négritude has often been contested as a word before being contested as a concept", but the suffix allows Césaire to trope the vocabulary of racist science. This essay, "Internationalisme noir", focuses on race consciousness in the African diaspora and cultural metissage, double-apparentance; seen as the philosophical foundation for the Négritude movement.The Dakar School art movement in Senegal, active from 1960 to 1974, was directly influenced by the philosophy of Négritude, and was also founded under the paternalism of Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor. The School of Fine Arts was created to further define and shape the visual movement of the Négritude philosophy.

Visual Artists

Papa Ibra Tall that served as the introduction to a volume of francophone poetry named Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, compiled by Léopold Senghor. In this essay, Sartre characterizes négritude as the opposite of colonial racism in a Hegelian dialectic and with it he helped to introduce Négritude issues to French intellectuals. In his opinion, négritude was an "anti-racist racism" (racisme antiraciste), a strategy with a final goal of racial unity.

Négritude was criticized by some Black writers during the 1960s as insufficiently militant. Keorapetse Kgositsile said that the term Négritude was based too much on Blackness according to a European aesthetic, and was unable to define a new kind of perception of African-ness that would free Black people and Black art from Caucasian conceptualizations altogether.

The Nigerian dramatist, poet, and novelists Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka opposed Négritude. They believed that by deliberately and outspokenly being proud of their ethnicity, Black people were automatically on the defensive. Wole Soyinka wrote: "A tiger doesn't proclaim its tigerness; it jumps on its prey." Soyinka in turn wrote in a 1960 essay for the Horn, "the duiker will not paint 'duiker' on his beautiful back to proclaim his duikeritude; you'll know him by his elegant leap."

After a long period of silence there has been a renaissance of Négritude developed by scholars such as Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia University), Donna Jones (University of California, Berkeley), and Cheikh Thiam (Ohio State University) who all continue the work of Abiola Irele (1936–2017). Cheikh Thiam's book is the only book-length study of Négritude as philosophy. It develops Diagne's reading of Négritude as a philosophy of art, and Jones' presentation of Négritude as a lebensphilosophie.

Additional Information

American physician Benjamin Rush, a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence and early abolitionist, is often said to have used the term "Negritude" to imagine a rhetorical "disease" that he said was a mild form of leprosy, the only cure for which was to become white. But this attribution has been disputed as a misreading of secondary sources., specifically at the advent of the Atlantic slave trade migrations; popularizing the condition of having phenotypical ‘negroid’ features, possessing the socioeconomic status as caste, and being fluent in black linguistic vernaculars.

The word is also used by the rapper Youssoupha in his eponymous album "Négritude."

See also

  • Black Skin, White Masks
  • Black Consciousness Movement
  • Black Surrealism
  • Black Arts Movement
  • Black Power Movement
  • Angolanidade ("Angolan-ness")
  • Authenticité
  • Afro-pessimism
  • Afro-Surrealism

Notes

References

  • Christian Filostrat, "La Négritude et la 'Conscience raciale et révolution sociale' d'Aimé Césaire". Présence Francophone, No. 21, Automne 1980, pp. 119–130.
  • Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Orphée Noir". Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. ed. Léopold Senghor. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, p. xiv (1948).
  • .
  • Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. "Femme Négritude: Jane Nardal, La Dépêche Africaine, and the Francophone New Negro." Souls (Boulder, Colo.), vol. 2, no. 4, Taylor & Francis Group, 2000, pp. 8–17,

Bibliography

Original texts

  • Césaire, Aimé: Return to My Native Land, Bloodaxe Books, 1997,
  • Césaire, Aimé: Discourse on Colonialism, Monthly Review Press (1950), 2000,
  • Damas, Léon-Gontran, Poètes d'expression française.Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1947
  • Damas, Léon-Gontan, Mine de Rien, Poèmes inédits.
  • Diop, Birago, Leurres et lueurs. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1960
  • Senghor, Léopold Sedar, The Collected Poetry, University of Virginia Press, 1998
  • Senghor, Léopold Sédar, Ce que je crois. Paris: Grasset, 1988
  • Tadjo, Véronique, Red Earth/Latérite. Spokane, Washington: Eastern Washington University Press, 2006

Secondary literature

  • Filostrat, Christian. Negritude Agonistes, Africana Homestead Legacy Publishers, 2008,
  • Irele, Abiola. "Négritude or black cultural nationalism." Journal of Modern African Studies 3.3 (1965): 321–348.
  • Le Baron, Bentley. "Négritude: A Pan-African Ideal?." Ethics 76.4 (1966): 267–276 online.
  • Reilly, Brian J. "Négritude Contretemps: The Coining and Reception of Aimé Césaire's Neologism". Philological Quarterly 99.4 (2020): 377–98.
  • Rexer, Raisa. "Black and White and Re(a)d All Over: L'Étudiant noir, Communism, and the Birth of Négritude". Research in African Literatures 44.4 (2013): 1–14.
  • Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Negritude Women, University of Minnesota Press, 2002,
  • Stovall, Tyler, "Aimé Césaire and the making of black Paris." French Politics, Culture & Society 27#3 (2009): 44–46
  • Thiam, Cheikh. Return to the Kingdom of Childhood: Re-envisioning the Legacy and Philosophical Relevance of Negritude (Ohio State University Press, 2014)
  • Thompson, Peter, Negritude and Changing Africa: An Update, in Research in African Literatures, Winter 2002
  • Thompson, Peter, Négritude et nouveaux mondes—poésie noire: africaine, antillaise et malgache. Concord, Mass: Wayside Publishing, 1994
  • Wilder, Gary. The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude & Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005)
  • Wilder, Gary. Freedom time: Negritude, decolonization, and the future of the world (Duke University Press, 2015).
  • Kemi Séba, Supra-négritude, Fiat-Lux éditions 2013,

Filmography

  • Négritude: Naissance et expansion du concept a documentary by Nathalie Fave and Jean-Baptiste Fave, first minutes online, with the interventions of Amadou Lamine Sall, Racine Senghor, Lylian Kesteloot, Jean-Louis Roy, Jacqueline Lemoine, Gérard Chenêt, Victor Emmanuel Cabrita, Nafissatou Dia Diouf, Amadou Ly, Youssoufa Bâ, Raphaël Ndiaye, Alioune Badara Bèye, Hamidou Dia, Georges Courrèges, Baba Diop; Maison Africaine de la Poésie Internationale. Shot in Sénégal in 2005, 56' (DVD)
  • Noir, Journal Mensuel de l'Association des Etudiants Martiniquais en France, Premiere Annee N. 3 May–June 1935 ,
  • Césaire et l'introduction de la notion "négritude"