NÉGRITUDE, global twentieth-century cultural movement, formulated by a coterie of expatriate writers and intellectuals of the African diaspora, calling for a “decolonization of the mind” among Black populations worldwide. It was the largely the brainchild of the poet-politicians Aimé Césaire of Martinique, Léon-Gontran Damas of French Guiana, and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal (who would later become the country’s first president), Black students from three different French colonies who met in Paris in the 1920s and discussed their shared experience of colonial racism, their rejection of the subjugating and self-subjugating structures of Eurocentric assimilationism, and the need for revolution. Inspired by Surrealism and the Harlem Renaissance in America, they hosted salons in Paris that attracted Black artists, writers, and intellectuals from the African diaspora. It was Césaire who coined the term Négritude, provocatively reclaiming the derogatory French term nègre. As the movement flourished, three key tenets emerged:
Political liberation: In his letter of resignation to the French Communist Party in 1956 Césaire argued that the universalist emphasis of the party as currently constituted did not sufficiently account for the unique social and political challenges faced by Black people worldwide. Rather than having their needs subsumed within a broader doctrine, then, Black people needed their own political organizations. Senghor similarly proposed an African-inflected socialism that would infuse Marxist liberationism with African notions of spirituality and communalism.
Shared identity: One of the founding manifestos of Négritude, the Martinican writer and philosopher Jeanne Nardal’s 1928 article “Internationalisme noir” discusses the concept of a transcendent “Negro spirit” activated by “remembering common origins.” Césaire on this notion, stating, “Négritude. . . is a way of living within history: the history of a community whose experience appears to be unique, with its deportation of populations, its transfer of people from one continent to another, its distant memories of old beliefs, its fragments of murdered cultures. How can we not believe that all this . . . constitutes a heritage?” For his part Senghor often utilized this rhetoric in his political speeches and articles, aiming to “engineer a philosophy in which all Blacks, in Africa and throughout its diaspora, could look to revitalize their shared ‘soul.’”
Reclamation of heritage: The theorists of the Négritude movement criticized Eurocentric hegemonic epistemologies that disparaged and minimized the contributions of African culture. Concepts such as “primitivism,” for example, diminished the value of African art, seeing it merely as a source of inspiration and appropriation for European artists like Picasso. Senghor argued that the essence of African art lay not in reproducing or embellishing forms but in establishing a connection with what he termed “sub-reality,” the universe of vital forces. African art was characterized first and foremost by rhythm—“the architecture of being”—which acted through sculpture to “make us enter into the spirituality of the object.” Moreover, Senghor encouraged Négritude artists to utilize identifiable Pan-African motifs, such as masks, elongated figures, patterns, expressionistic textures, and earthy color palettes, viewing this as a “reworking” or “hybridization” of primitivism. In thus “reclaiming and reinventing traditions and sensibilities that colonialism distorts, disfigures, and destroys,” Négritude counteracted the dehumanizing aesthetic philosophies of the colonial West.
Many Black intellectuals nevertheless criticized the tenets of Négritude, viewing it as a contemporary manifestation of neocolonialism. In the notion of a shared Black consciousness and a Pan-African aesthetic they saw an “export-oriented” philosophy that both reaffirmed existing conceptions of Africanism made by colonial structures and essentialized the diversity of the Black diaspora, serving it up in “digestible” form for the international community. Regardless, Négritude reverberates across the annals of cultural history as a beacon of empowerment, resistance, and solidarity for Black communities worldwide. The movement’s considerable literary and artistic productions, moreover, not only affirmed the value and dignity of Black cultural heritage but also served as a powerful tool of anti-colonial resistance and liberation.
Négritude’s influence extended beyond geographical and linguistic boundaries, inspiring Pan-African solidarity and leaving an indelible mark on civil-rights movements globally.