Négritude

Négritude was a literary and intellectual movement created in the 1930s by black French-speaking students and writers in Paris, above all Aimé Césaire of Martinique, Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal and Léon Damas from French Guiana. Taking the French slur nègre and turning it into a term of pride, it rejected colonialism, racism and Eurocentrism and celebrated African history and culture. It shaped francophone literature and, through Senghor and Césaire, post-war politics in Africa and the Caribbean.

The movement drew on earlier black thought. In 1885 the Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin answered Arthur de Gobineau's racial theories with a book on the equality of human races, and Césaire later described Haiti, home of the Haitian Revolution, as the place where Négritude first stood up. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s was a direct influence. In Paris the Martinican sisters Paulette and Jane Nardal ran a salon at Clamart where students from France's colonies met African American writers such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. Jane Nardal's 1929 essay "Internationalisme noir" is seen as a philosophical foundation of the movement, and Paulette helped launch La Revue du Monde Noir in 1931. In 1960 Paulette complained that the sisters' part had been forgotten.

Césaire, Senghor and Damas, together with Paulette Nardal and other students, founded the magazine L'Étudiant noir in Paris. In its third issue, of May–June 1935, Césaire first used the word négritude in its present sense, rejecting assimilation into a French culture that dismissed African culture as barbaric. On a visit to Yugoslavia in 1934 he had begun his long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, one of the first expressions of the idea; it appeared in the Paris periodical Volontés in 1939 and as a book in 1947. The movement's writers borrowed the style of Surrealism and drew on Marxist ideas, exploring identity, exile and belonging.

After the Second World War two anthologies carried the movement to a wider audience. Damas published one of French-language poets, which included writers from Madagascar and Indochina, and in 1948 Senghor published his Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry in French. Its preface, "Black Orpheus", by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, introduced Négritude to French intellectuals; Sartre described it as an "anti-racist racism", a stage on the way to racial unity.

Neither Césaire nor Senghor at first sought independence from France. Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy for Martinique in 1945, and in 1946 steered through the law that made Martinique a French department; his Discourse on Colonialism followed in 1950. Senghor sat in the French National Assembly, and on 5 September 1960 was elected first president of independent Senegal. For him Négritude meant giving African culture its place among the cultures of the world. His rule became authoritarian after 1962, but he retired voluntarily at the end of 1980, and in 1983 became the first African member of the Académie française. The Dakar School of painters, active from 1960 to 1974 under his patronage, carried Négritude into the visual arts.

In the 1960s some black writers judged Négritude insufficiently militant or too dependent on European ideas of blackness. The Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka opposed it; Soyinka wrote: "A tiger doesn't proclaim its tigerness; it jumps on its prey." Yet the movement inspired the Caribbean currents of Créolité and Antillanité and the "black is beautiful" current in the United States, and Frantz Fanon, who had been taught by Césaire in Martinique, often referred to it. Scholars such as Souleymane Bachir Diagne have recently revived its study as philosophy.

Our 1938 map shows France's African empire, including French West Africa, and our 1960 map the newly independent states, among them Senegal.