Emerging in France in the 1930s and 1940s, the Negritude Movement comprised French-speaking Caribbean and African writers who sought to challenge European dominance and create Black consciousness. Its principal founders include Aimé Césaire of Martinique, who coined the term négritude in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939); Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, whose essay “Negritude: A Humanism of the 20th Century” (1970) remains a definitive expression of Negritude ideology; and Léon Damas of French Guiana, whose Pigments (1937) became one of the earliest poetic expressions of Negritude thought. The Negritude Movement would evolve during the 1950s and 1960s, growing to include more than two dozen writers and to influence countless others.

Negritude poets were heavily influenced by Harlem Renaissance writers; by anticolonial antecedents; by the student group led by Etienne Léro, which published Légitime Défense (1931), a scathing rejection of French cultural assimilation (Kennedy 40); and often by Marxism or communism. Early Negritude writing was published in L’Étudiant noir (The Black Student), founded in 1934 by Césaire, Senghor, and Damas while students in Paris; in Présence Africaine, founded in 1948 by Alioune Diop; in Césaire’s Poètes d’expression française d’outremer (1947) and Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948), which included Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface “Orphée noir”; and in various individuals’ collections of poetry.

The Negritude Movement aimed to create Black pride, to initiate political transformation, to challenge stereotypes of Blacks, and to celebrate African and diasporan culture. Negritude thinkers asserted that Africa and the Black diaspora are rooted in a valid cultural matrix that differs from the European cultural tradition. This matrix, “the sum of the cultural values of the Black world” (Senghor, “Negritude” 28), has its own conceptions of spirituality and art; it is characterized by harmony and rhythm (Senghor 31–34) and by “integration and wholeness” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 21), rather than European dualism and dichotomy, logic, and reason.

Negritude writers simultaneously rejected Eurocentric values, especially those denigrating Blackness and allowing European colonization, this being a “bridgehead in the campaign to civilize barbarism” (Césaire, Discourse 176), destroying “societies that were not only ante-capitalist . . . but also anti-capitalist,” democratic, and cooperative (178). Negritude thought thus preceded the various independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s in which many Negritude poets would serve as activists.

In addition to its founders (as recognized by Ellen Conroy Kennedy), Negritude writers came from across the French-speaking Caribbean and Africa and included René Maran (Martinique/French Guiana); Léon Laleau, Jacques Roumain, and Charles Pressoir (Haiti); Guy Tirolien and Paul Niger (Guadeloupe); Fily-Dabo Sissoko (Mali); Antoine-Roger Bolamba, Tchicaya U’Tam’si, and Martial Sinda (Belgian Congo, now Democratic Republic of the Congo); David Diop (Senegal); Jacques Rabémananjara and Flavien Ramaivo (Madagascar); as well as those immediately influenced by their ideas, such as Edouard Glissant (Martinique), René Depestre (Haiti), Elolongue Epanya Yondo (Cameroon), and Edouard J. Maunick (Mauritius).

Its underlying premises are expressed throughout the poetry of the Negritude Movement. For example, Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land overtly challenges European hegemony and Eurocentric notions of logic and reason; its persona asserts that “we hate you / and your reason” (49), arguing that “[n]o race has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on strength” (77). Black pride is seen when the persona proclaims, “I accept . . . my race” (73), and announces a wish to “bind my black vibration” in “brotherhood” (85).

Analogously, the speaker in Laleau’s “Betrayal” (Black Music, 1931) describes having a “haunted heart . . . from Senegal” that “chafes within the grip of / Borrowed feelings, European ways” (15), thereby identifying an underlying African identity across the diaspora and also the devastation wrought by colonization.

Such sentiments are echoed in Damas’s Pigments (1937), especially in the lead poem, “Bargain.” The persona of “Sell Out” also angrily proclaims, “I feel ridiculous / in their drawing rooms . . . my hands hideously red / with the blood of their / ci-vi-li-za-tion” (51); and the speaker of “Blues” angrily rejects “their laws” (52): “Give my black dolls back to me / So that I can . . . become myself once more” (52).

Similarly, Roumain’s “Dirty Niggers” (Ebony Wood, 1945) proclaims, “we’re simply / done . . . with being / your negroes / your niggers / your dirty niggers” (23), challenging Eurocentric stereotypes and oppression leveled against Blacks. Likewise, the persona of Tirolien’s “A Little Black Boy’s Prayer” laments, “I’d rather listen to . . . some old man / telling about Zamba and Br’er Rabbit / and lots of other things that aren’t in books” (34). His “Ghetto” notes European artists influenced by African art and asserts that “all men . . . are made in my image” (36). In such poems from Golden Bullets (1961), Tirolien celebrates African culture, thereby calling for Black pride.

Analogously, Senghor’s “Return of the Prodigal Son” (Songs of Darkness, 1945) celebrates indigenous African culture through a persona who is “[h]omesick for the Black land” (135). Likewise, in “Prayer for Peace” (Black Host, 1948), Senghor’s persona expresses rage against European colonization: “Oh, I know she too is Europe, she too . . . / raped my children to fatten cane and cotton fields” (137). This rage is also expressed in Rabémananjara’s chant for freedom from false imprisonment by French colonial rule in Song (1947).

Diop’s “The Time of Martyrdom” (Pounding, 1956) expresses a similar rage—“The white man killed my father / For my father was proud. The White man raped my mother / For my mother was beautiful” (182)—and a similar indictment of European colonization—“The white man turned to me, / His hands red with black blood, . . . / And with the voice of a master called: ‘Hey, boy! . . .’ ” (182). Likewise, his “Africa” solicits Black pride for an “Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannas” (186).

While little has been written on women in the Negritude Movement, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Negritude Women (2002) points to the activities and writing of Jane, Andrée, and Paulette Nardal (sisters whose salon instigated publication of La revue du monde noir, 1931–32) and of Suzanne Césaire, as well as others.

The Negritude Movement also had its critics and shortcomings. In celebrating Black culture, Negritude thinkers at times replicated the very stereotypes they sought to destroy, and in their attempt to define an African cultural matrix they replicated the dualistic (either-or) thinking of Europe: “The danger was that . . . it functioned only as the antithesis of the thesis of white supremacy . . .” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 21). Martinique-born revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon suggests that Negritude thought accepts European fictions of race that inaccurately define all Blacks within a single, monolithic rubric (127, 136), that it sentimentalizes and inaccurately renders African history (130–131), and that it manifests that same neurotic urge to prove equality to a “white world” that is characteristic of colonized peoples (18, 139).

Writers such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin challenged the idea of a single Black culture, as did Wole Soyinka, who mockingly coined the notion of “tigritude” (Kennedy xxiii–xxv).

Notwithstanding such criticisms, the Negritude Movement, though similar in tone and rhetoric to the Black Arts Movement in the United States, significantly preceded its American counterpart and has achieved a continuing influence on African and diasporan writers.

Bibliography

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Full-length edition. 1947. In Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, 35–85.

———. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972, 9–25. Reprinted in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 172–180.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967.

Jack, Belinda Elizabeth. Negritude and Literary Criticism: The History of “Negro-African” Literature in French. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996.

Kennedy, Ellen Conroy, ed. The Negritude Poets: An Anthology of Translations from the French. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1975.

Kestelloot, Lilyan. Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude. Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974. Reprint. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1991.

Leiner, Jacqueline. “Africa and the West Indies: Two Negritudes.” European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Albert S. Gérard, editor. Budapest: Akad Kiadó, 1986, 135–1152.

Moore, Gerald. “The Politics of Negritude: Frantz Fanon, Leopold Senghor, Leon Damas, Aime Césaire, David Diop, and Tchicaya U’Tamsi.” In Protest and Conflict in African Literature, edited by Cosmo Pieterse and Donald Munro. New York: Heinemann, 1969, 26–42.

Rodriguez-Luis, Julio, et al., eds. A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Vol. 1, Hispanic and Francophone Regions. Amsterdam: Banjamins, 1994.

Senghor, Léopold Sédar. “Negritude: A Humanism of the 20th Century.” In The Africa Reader: Independent Africa. London: Vintage, 1970, 179–192. Reprinted in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 27–35.

Shapiro, Norman R. Negritude: Black Poetry from Africa and the Caribbean. New York: October House, 1970.

Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Negritude Women. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2002.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, World Literature

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