What Was Négritude?

Négritude emerged as a philosophical, anti-colonial movement in the 1930s. Its incredibly influential leading figures included Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, and Abdoulaye Sadji. Négritude rose quickly in popularity through its central ideas of pride in African heritage identity and self-determination, resonating deeply with many members of the Black diaspora in the face of colonialism’s weakening power. The movement was largely literary, with many of its ideas conveyed through poetry and novels and in the motifs of the author’s writings.

Négritude emerged as a movement among Francophone intellectuals, initially predominantly based in Paris. Its name can be roughly translated to English as “Blackness,” though, similarly to its English equivalent, “négre” is a derogatory term in French. The movement’s founders deliberately chose to use “négre,” attempting to reclaim and reshape the concepts projected onto the Black identity for themselves.

Négritude spread across Black thought as colonial rule began to weaken and provided an alternative framework of thought in contrast to the supposed “truths” perpetuated by the colonial state.

The fact that négritude emerged in the Francophone world is no coincidence. Events such as the Haitian revolution, remarkable feats of Black solidarity, and rebellion were still present in the French conscience.

Alongside this, many of the issues being grappled with in wider French philosophy ran parallel to the struggles faced by the colonized population, with questions of identity, selfhood, and purpose being debated more widely.

Struggles Against Colonialism

The success of colonial thought hinged on the idea of the universal, in which whiteness was asserted as the “norm” and the colonized subject became the “other.” This framework taught specific narratives of history and progress as unquestionable truths. To decolonize both the self and processes of thought, an alternative system of truths must be established.

The three central figures at the heart of négritude were Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas and Léopold Sédar Sénghor. All three were born in French colonies, with Césaire coming from Martinique, Damas from Guiana, and Senghor from French West Africa (now Senegal). Senghor became the first president of Senegal, ruling from 1960–1980. With each thinker coming from such a different region of the French empire, each brought their unique perspective on the potential solidarity of the Black population and the universal colonial experience of those subject to its rule.

The Harlem Renaissance, which occurred between the 1920s and 30s, saw the flourishing of African American culture and pride in the Black identity. The shifts occurring in New York massively impacted Paris-based African and Caribbean intellectuals, fuelling their discussions of Black pride and celebration of the Black cultural identity.

As Francophone intellectuals began to delve further into the question of what it was to be Black, they also broke down the systems of thought asserted by colonialism. Certain motifs and themes became apparent as négritude began to spread, particularly within literary circles. Ideas such as a distant, romantic homeland (usually referencing Africa) and battles with questions of identity and the self were prominent. These literary texts would go on to become the most prominent works of négritude and integral to its legacy.

Aimé Césaire & Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

One of the most crucial texts in the négritude movement was Aimé Césaire’s 1939 book-length poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. The title translated means “Notebook of a Return to My Native Land” and follows Césaire as he delves into concepts of identity and the self within the colonial setting. In this work, Césaire dubbed the term “négritude,” which means “the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our history and culture.”

Césaire’s use of the term “négre” was a conscious and provocative choice. In a 1971 interview with René Depestre, the incredibly influential Haitian poet, Césare reflected

“Our fight was against alienation. And that’s how négritude was born. Since West Indians were ashamed of being Negroes, they tried their best to avoid the term ‘Negro.’ One spoke of black-men, brown-skinned people and it in other silly ways… and then, we took the word Negro as a sign of defiance. It was a name designed to express defiance.”

Leon Damas’ poetry collection, Pigments (1937), was also seminal in establishing the négritude tradition. Its central arguments were against slavery, colonialism, segregation, and racial oppression. This text became a kind of manifesto, distilling many of the movement’s core ideas.

The publishing of Leopold Senghor’s 1948 Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et Malagache de Langue Française is a pivotal moment in the history of négritude, and was introduced by none other than Jean-Paul Sartre. This anthology highlights the French language’s crucial use by the négritude movement poets. In his introduction to the collection Black Orpheus, Sartre discussed the ways in which this decision made négritude unique.

Instead of reclaiming their native tongue, the colonial subjects inverted the colonizer’s language for their own cause. This acted as an assertion of their right to use the language and a blow to the colonizer, as well as any claims of authority they had over Francophone thought.

Sartre explored the ways in which the colonial subject had encountered oppression and subjugation and faced the need to reinvent himself using the roots of African imagery. He believed that négritude was a smaller strand of a larger movement for class equality and a wider retaliation against all forms of oppression.

This essay, and the wider anthology, launched négritude into wide popularity but sowed the seeds of the problematic belief that this was only a poetic and literary movement with no historical significance.

The Decline of Négritude

Négritude’s decline began in the 1950s, though the wider movement served as a jumping-off point from which various strands of nuanced and massively impactful political thought emerged.

Critics reproached the oversimplified narratives of Blackness, which left individuals from different continents and backgrounds feeling misrepresented or isolated from aspects of the cause. Many Caribbean migrants, for example, found the romanticized ideal of Africa and the use of African aesthetics disjointing, as they had never visited the continent and were only connected by previous generations’ heritage.

There were also critiques of Césaire’s use of the term “négre” in the title, though its provocative nature was part of his intention when dubbing it. Even Senghor noted that “the term négritude has often been contested as a word before being contested as a subject,” distracting from the movement’s wider goals.

The legacy of négritude echoed throughout the Black world, expanding beyond Francophone circles to capture the imagination of the wider diaspora. A key example is the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) in London, founded in 1966. Members of the movement often held lectures discussing négritude poets and the ways in which the movement succeeded in some areas and failed in others.

John La Rose, the founder of New Beacon Books, the first Caribbean publishing company in Britain, was fascinated by the literature of négritude. He described the use of the romantic homeland in négritude poetry as a liberating tool through which the colonial subject could resist the colonial process in which he is turned “away from himself and towards the great universalizing Eurocentered tradition.”

In a wider diasporic sense, the ways in which négritude poets and authors challenged and inverted the colonizer’s language was a momentous shift in literary history. It has been argued that the use of dialect by writers such as George Lamming, Sam Selvon, and Linton Kweisi Johnson can be traced back to the impact of négritude poets on the use of language.

In this regard, négritude was a momentous shift in European and Caribbean political thought, as it enabled a wider process of recognizing the systems of thought put in place by colonialism and provided an alternative. Leading political philosophers, including Frantz Fanon, regularly referenced négritude in their massive works. The Diasporic unity and framework that négritude began to establish enabled the development of wider Black political thought, which in turn fuelled movements such as pan-Africanism.

As Césaire recalled in a 1971 interview with Rene Depestre,

“I would say that négritude is above all the achievement of a concrete against an abstract, awareness of a situation. What I recalled a short while ago must always be borne in mind, that’s to say, the environment of assimilation in which the negro was ashamed of himself. The atmosphere of rejection in which we lived conditioned to feelings of inferiority. I always thought that the black man was in search of identity and it seemed to me that the first thing one had to do to affirm this identity was to achieve a concrete consciousness of one’s situation, of the primary fact, that one is Negro, that we were blacks who had a past.”

Négritude provided a framework that was integral to the development of a wider anti-colonial movement. This is seen in the significance of thinkers like Césaire to leading anti-colonial scholars like Edward Said, who quoted Césaire’s Cahier in the closing lines of his text The Politics of Dispossession.

Though it was an imperfect movement, it provided an alternative framework of thought from which a number of anti-colonial movements and theologies bloomed.