Négritude (ne.ɡʁi.tyd), noun, French. A literary and political movement begun in 1930s Paris by Black francophone students, among them Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas, that affirmed African heritage against French colonial assimilation.
Origin
Césaire came from Martinique, Senghor from Senegal and Damas from French Guiana. They met as students in Paris and launched the journal L’Étudiant noir. The word itself is credited to Césaire. Its aim was to reclaim a Black identity that colonial schooling had taught them to set aside.
Debate
Négritude was praised and contested from the start. Senghor contrasted African emotion with Greek reason in a famous, much-criticized line, casting intuition as a form of knowledge. Wole Soyinka quipped that a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude: identity, he argued, is shown in action, not declared. Frantz Fanon, Césaire’s former student, came to see Négritude as too distant from the armed struggle in Algeria. V. Y. Mudimbe called it an extraordinary protest, but one born of a European moment of cultural relativism.
Afterlife
In 1947, Alioune Diop founded Présence Africaine in Paris, a journal and publisher central to the movement. Senghor served as Senegal’s first president from 1960 to 1980, and in 1966 he hosted the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar.
See also: Pan-Africanism, the Harlem Renaissance, Tigritude.
Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Ce que l’homme noir apporte” (1939); Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961); V. Y. Mudimbe, The Scent of the Father (Polity, 2023).
Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), the long poem that made the word famous.
Journal No. 01: What does it cost to set the West at a distance?