Negritude 233form of philosophical, social, and political tracts in addition
to a magnitude of literary works in poetry, prose, theater,
and fi ction. Distinguished by multifarious interpretations
of the methods and meanings of black consciousness and
black humanism, the Negritude writers did not subscribe
to a unifi ed theory for black cultural advancement. Even
in the midst of its development, Negritude faced criticism
from within and outside the movement for what appeared
to be an essentialist outlook on black identity. Despite the
critiques of Negritude, which have consistently questioned
its methods for the past 65 years, it is widely recognized as a
paramount literary, cultural, and sociopolitical movement.
Students from the West Indies islands of the French
Antilles, who were attending universities in Paris, founded
the Negritude movement. Th e publication of two stu-
dent journals, each of which produced only a single issue,
punctuated the early history of Negritude. Th e fi rst, Légi-
time Défense, written by René Ménil, Jules Monnerot, and
Etienne Léro in 1932, represented the more politically ori-
ented facet of Negritude. Th e Marxist-Leninist theory that
was popular among the French intelligentsia of the time
and the surrealist circle of André Breton heavily infl uenced
the writing of Légitime Défense. Addressed to their fellow
students, the Légitime Défense group’s manifesto was a
shocking cry against their very own French bourgeois
backgrounds and the capitalist oppression of the prole-
tariat in the Caribbean. Reaching both West Indian and
African immigrants in Paris and causing quite a stir in the
Caribbean, Légitime Défense was one of the inspirations
behind the publication of the second student journal that
defi ned Negritude’s early years. Titled L’Etudiant noir, and
published in 1935, it contained contributions by Antilleans
Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas and the Senegalese Léopold
Sédar Senghor. In the pages of L’Etudiant noir, these three
writers, who became the central voices of the Negritude
movement, appealed to a Pan-African community, both
locally and abroad, fractured by the tactics of assimila-
tion used by European colonizers to assert their own cul-
tural superiority over that of the cultures they colonized.
L’Etudiant noir served as a foundation for the unifi cation
of colored people from diverse backgrounds, supported by
the Negritude writers in the form of a search for cultural
memory and a revitalization of authentic, African cultural
forms. Unlike the writers of Légitime Défense, Senghor, Cé-
saire, and Damas did not believe that communism or sur-
realism were eff ective tools for bringing about the changesthat, in 1838, when Philadelphians continued to press the
issue of removing racial distinctions, Samuel Cornish, edi-
tor of the Colored American newspaper, became enraged
and criticized the Philadelphians for arguing about minor
issues rather than focusing on the real issues, such as slav-
ery and the denial of citizenship, that plagued the black
community.
Even so, the debate over names that commenced in the
1830s haunted African Americans well into the 21st cen-
tury, as activists struggled to determine how they wanted to
defi ne themselves as a race.
See also: Cornish, Samuel; Whipper, William
Leslie M. AlexanderBibliography
Alexander, Leslie. African or American? Black Identity and Politi-
cal Activism in New York City, 1 784– 1861. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2008.
Rael, Patrick. Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebel-
lum North. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2002.
Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Th eory and the Foun-
dations of Black America. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987.
Negritude
Negritude was a Pan-African literary, philosophical, cul-
tural, and sociopolitical movement characterized by the
writings of young, black, French intellectuals from the
1930s well into the 1950s. Fostered by some of France’s
leading intellectuals through the 1940s and 1950s, Negri-
tude grew to worldwide recognition as a pivotal moment
in the historical trajectory of black consciousness thought.
Inspired by the artists, writers, and thinkers of the Harlem
Renaissance as well as black writers of various disciplines
from the French colonies, Negritude intellectuals advo-
cated the search for an authentic black voice that stemmed
from the awareness of a rich African cultural heritage. Ne-
gritude writers implored Africans and African descendents
from all over the world to throw off the shackles of Euro-
pean colonial imperialism, which they considered not only
devastating to their African inheritance but also stifl ing to
the artistic creation and cultural and social autonomy that
this history precipitated. Negritude manifested itself in the