Negritude: A Neologism of the Twentieth Century

Hello mates, here are a few words about Negritude just as our mate Imy wished...

Let's take an excerpt from Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, in which the writer quotes Leopold Senghor (first president of Senegal):

"…Negritude… is neither racialism nor self-negation. Yet it is not just affirmation; it is rooting oneself in oneself, and self-confirmation: confirmation of one's being. Negritude is nothing more or less than what some English-speaking Africans have called the African personality. As the American Negro poet Langston Hughes wrote after the first world war: "we, the creators of the new generation, want to give expression to our black personality without shame or fear…" Perhaps our only originality, since it was the West Indian poet Aimé Césaire who coined the word negritude, is to have attempted to define the concept a little more closely; to have developed it as a weapon, as an instrument of liberation…It is obvious that peoples differ in their ideas and their languages, in their literature and their art. Who would deny that Africans too, have a certain way of conceiving life and of living it? A certain way of singing and dancing; of painting and sculpturing…? Nobody…
What, then, is negritude? It is—the sum of the cultural values of the black world; that is, a certain active presence in the world, or better, in the universe. "

Negritude has been defined as a literary movement of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s that began among French-speaking African and Caribbean writers living in Paris as a protest against French colonial rule and the policy of assimilation. Its leading figures (les trois pères) are Aimé Césaire (who coined the word Negritude in his poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal), Leopold Sadar Senghor of Senegal and Léon Damas.
The movement was influenced and inspired by the American New Negro Movement, or Negro Renaissance (known as the Harlem Renaissance). Senghor wrote: "In the Latin Quarter, in the 1930s, we were influenced, above all, by the ideas and actions of the Negro Renaissance, some of whose dynamic representatives we met in Paris… For my part I regularly read the Crisis (edited by W.E.B Du Bois, the Black American writer)…but also The Journal of New African History which devoted a numerous articles to material about Africa…The poets of the Negro Renaissance who influenced us most were Langston Hughes and Claude McKay"(whom Senghor considered the true inventor of Negritude). Furthermore, Senghor sums up his view of the importance of the development in America for development in Paris when he writes: It is thus in terms of the general meaning of the word Negritude—the discovery of Black values and the recognition for the Negro situation-was born in the United States of America.

The poets of Negritude rejected the humiliation of the Black people and the prejudices that tainted Western culture which assumed the superiority of European culture and civilisation over that of Africa (or assumed that Africa had no history or culture). And that a return to the African's roots, traditions and ancestors would rehabilitate and assert the dignity of the Africans. Negritude poems expressed a process of self-discovery whereby one rediscovers ones' roots and accepts the fact of his "negritude" or blackness.

But the question we may ask is why the movement was fiercely condemned and criticised since it aimed to restore the cultural identity of the Black Africans?

To be continued
...


Sources: Britannica online Encyclopedea, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, Belinda Elizabeth Jack, Negritude and literary Criticism

Thanks a lot EZINMA.And this is what i have promissed too.I'll post more about this subject soon.

Negritude is a literary and political movement founded in parisin 1930's by a group of students from the French Carribbeanand africa.The founding members:AIME CESAIRE,LEOPOLD SENGHOR,and LEON DAMAS hoped to eliminate the barries between black students from the various French colonies.They were not only concerned with the cooperation between black within the group,but also with the well-being and unity of the black race.This concern sparked the cultural movement we call "NEGRITUDE" .


The founders of NEGRITUDE werein part inspired by their encounters with members of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE ,many of whom were living in France at the timeto escape racism and segrigation in the u.s.Amongest the most influential of those were LANGSTON HUGHES and RICHARD WRIGHT.



NEGRITUDE strives to be universal,encompassing all people of Afrrican descent .Yet it is a complex movement which denounces colonialism,rejects western domination and promotes acceptance of the blackself.It is through literature that both CESAIRE and SENGHOR brgan tofindtheir political voices,and each proceedsto takeon animportant rolein his respective region after the end of colonialism.

N.B:this article is from FRENCH source.

Hello, thank you Imy.
Let's carry on and I'll try to answer the question I asked last time.

"We had been taught, by our French masters at the lycée, that we had no civilisation, we were tabula rasa, or better still… The only hope of salvation you could hold out to us was let ourselves be assimilated…It was the French who first forced us to seek the essence of Negritude…when they enforced their policy of assimilation and thus deepened our despair" Senghor, Negritude and African Socialism (quoted from The African Philosophy Reader, by Pieter Hendrik Coetzee, A. P. J. Roux.)

From this words sprang Senghor's aims, and his thoughts were shaped to contribute to the creation of the negritude movement, with its emphasis on the pivotal role of traditional African culture and heritage in the reclamation of the "African personality without shame or fear". Moreover, blackness for Senghor becomes not a defect and inferiority, but a term" one lays claim to it with pride, one cultivates it lovingly".
Additionally he attempted to define negritude as "the whole of the values of civilisation—cultural, economic, social, political—which characterize the Black people, more exactly the Black-African world" and as "the sum total of the qualities possessed by all men everywhere". These qualities or essential fixed properties characterize and differentiate the Black 'race' from the white race, and it is from a book entitled Fanon: Postcolonial Imagination by By Nigel C. Gibson, that I found a "schematic chart"* ( you'll find it at the bottom of the post) which sums up Senghor's viewpoint, and explains for us why he was attacked by Fanon and Wole Soyinka for instance.

Frantz Fanon considers the problems of negritude as detrimental and the reasons for its annihilation. On the one hand, he denounces the fixed essences given by Senghor to the black race which place the blacks as the antithesis of the whites (who become the thesis in this dialectical process of struggle for an African identity). And therefore, asserting the whites superiority and supremacy over the Blacks. This dialectical process characterizes also Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis of negritude, and whose outlook fueled Fanon's critique. On the other hand, Fanon claims that "Knowledge as a form of consciousness of the self, cannot take place in a passive and essentialist (and dialectical) form like negritude" D.A Mosolo, African Philosophy in Search of Identity.
However, Fanon made it clear in On National Cultural saying "It is around the people's struggles that African-Negro culture takes on a substance and not around songs, poems or folklore" which merely demonstrate and glorify passively the Black people's ontological essence i.e. blackness. Hence, the Europeans continue their exploitation of Africa and Africans, even after gaining independence. Negritude generated a field of debate, and Wole Soyinka appeared next to Fanon as another major critic of the movement.

Soyinka, the Negerian playwright and poet, believed that black people's direct pride in their colour will place them constantly as the negative pole in the white/black dualism, saying that "A tiger doesn't proclaim its tigerness, it jumps on its prey". Furthermore, he criticized negritude claiming that it "stayed within a pre-set system of Eurocentric intellectual analysis of both man and society, and tried to re-define the African and his society in those externalized terms". Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World.

That's all for the moment, and for further information about this topic, read this wonderful essay: Click here

The chart: (sorry I couldn't insert a table, just match the numbers with the letters)

White Race
1-Reason is Hellenic
2-Discursive reason
3-Analytic resson through utilization
4-Mathematics and science
5-Objectivity in thought
6-I think therefore I am

Black Race
a-Energetically overtaken by emotion
b-Emotion is Negro
c-Intuition:intuitive reason through participation
d-Literature and arts dance and music
e-Subjectivism
f-I feel therefore I am