Négritude

Négritude is a literary and political movement developed in the 1930s by a group that included the future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and Léon Damas. The Négritude writers found solidarity in a common black identity as a rejection of French colonial racism. They believed that the shared black heritage of members of the African diaspora was the best tool in fighting against French political and intellectual hegemony and domination.

Related Topics:
1930s - Senegal - President - Léopold Sédar Senghor - Martinican - Poet - Aimé Césaire - Léon Damas - Black - French colonial - African diaspora - French - Hegemony

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The movement was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, and particularly the works of American writer Langston Hughes, whose work addresses the themes of "blackness" and racism. During the 1920s and 1930s, a small group of black students and scholars from France's colonies and territories assembled in Paris where they were introduced to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance by Paulette Nardal and her sister Jane. Paulette Nardal and the Haitian Dr. Leo Sajou founded La revue du Monde Noir (1931-32), a literary journal published in English and French, which attempted to be a mouthpiece for the growing movement of African and Caribbean intellectuals in Paris.

Related Topics:
Harlem Renaissance - Langston Hughes - Paulette Nardal - Haitian

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The term négritude (which most closely means "blackness" in English) was first used in 1935 by Aimé Césaire in the 3rd issue of L'Étudiant noir, a magazine which he had started in Paris with fellow students Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas, as well as Gilbert Gratiant, Leonard Sainville, and Paulette Nardal. L'Étudiant noir also contains Césaire's first published work, "Negreries," which is notable not only for its disavowal of assimilation as a valid strategy for resistance but also for its reclamation of the word "nègre" as a positive term. "Nègre" previously had been almost exclusively used in a pejorative sense, much like the English word "nigger"

Related Topics:
1935 - L'Étudiant noir - Paris - Gilbert Gratiant - Leonard Sainville - Assimilation - English - Nigger

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In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a famous analysis of the négritude movement in an essay called "Orphée Noir" (Black Orpheus) which served as the introduction to a volume of francophone poetry called Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, compiled by Léopold Senghor. In this essay, Sartre characterizes négritude as the polar opposite of colonial racism in a Hegelian dialectic. In his view, négritude was an "anti-racist racism" (racisme antiraciste) necessary to the final goal of racial unity.

Related Topics:
1948 - Jean-Paul Sartre - Hegelian - Dialectic

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The term Negritude was also used by American Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and early abolitionist, to describe a hypothetical hereditary disease which he believed to be the cause of "blackness". http://www.cchr.org/racism/pooaa1.htm

Related Topics:
Benjamin Rush - The Declaration of Independence

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