Negritude 235a mythic, romantic vision of a lost Africa that represented
both his youth and Africa’s pre-colonial innocence. Seng-
hor maintained a belief in the harmonious coexistence and
integration of Western and African cultures, where each
mutually benefi ted from the other.
Th e enhanced audience that Negritude writers began
to receive in the late 1940s brought with it a concomitant
critical eye that accounts for the relative downplay the move-
ment has experienced ever since. Th e most notable critique
was Sartre’s dialectical, Marxist take on Negritude in his
“Orphée noir,” which labeled Negritude a form of “antira-
cist racism” that, though constituting an invaluable phase in
the triumph over racial oppression, would have to eventu-
ally be superceded by a raceless worldview. Senghor would
later agree with Sartre on the racism inherent in Negritude
that led the writers to adopt the rhetoric of the colonizers
in order to spur the black masses into a consciousness of
their own state. Rather than point out how whites actively
portrayed stereotypic characteristics of assimilated blacks,
Negritude sought to liberate these guises that had uncon-
sciously been internalized by blacks. By angrily and vi-
ciously affi rming their authentic cultural achievements and
potentials, as well as pointing out the methods through
which those qualities had been systematically erased from
cultural memory, the Negritude writers sought to revitalize
and reestablish black culture as a worthy and natural form
of production. However, the Negritude writers (Senghor in
particular) are oft en criticized for adopting an essentialist
view of black experience where, in order to unite a Pan-
African community, they neglect the specifi c, diverse, and
localized situations faced by subaltern subjects. Whatever its
shortcomings, Negritude stands as an important precursor
to post-colonial thought, and it is recognized today as being
a vital force in the advancement of black consciousness.
See also: Harlem Renaissance; New Negro MovementMatthew Evans TetiBibliography
Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers
in France, 1 840– 19 80. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1991.
Jack, Belinda Elizabeth. Negritude and Literary Criticism: Th e
History and Th eory of “Negro-African” Literature in French.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Kasteloot, Lilyan. Black Writers in French: A Literary History of
Negritude. Trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Philadelphia: Tem-
ple University Press, 1974.of the surrealist author Robert Desnos. Césaire’s Cahier
d’un retour au pays natal, the most highly regarded work
of Negritude poetry, did not appear in a full edition until
1947, with the endorsement of André Breton. In 1948, Sen-
ghor published two books of his own poetry, Hosties noires
and Chants d’ombre, in addition to an anthology of French-
language black poetry, prefaced by the philosopher Jean-
Paul Sartre’s controversial essay “Orphée noir.” Negritude
appealed to the postwar French literati because it shared
in common with European modernism sentiments of
alienation, fragmentation, and a distrust of enlightenment
philosophy and inherited cultural norms. Negritude’s per-
ceived link to primitive expression also reinforced a clas-
sic theme of modernism, which sought to expose cultural
diff erence and posit a universal primitivism at the heart of
European culture. Another reason for the postponed recep-
tion of the Negritude writers was the climate of interwar
France. It was not until aft er World War II that the French
colonial administration and the public at large were ready
to start accepting decolonization. Black voices began to be
heard aft er the war, not because they were previously silent,
but because the world was fi nally ready to listen to them.
Aside from the initial split between Negritude’s po-
litically and culturally minded camps, the three canonical
Negritude theorists—Damas, Césaire, and Senghor—them-
selves diff ered in their approaches to the questions of black
identity. Damas and Césaire mounted scathing, anguished
critiques of slavery, colonialism, and the terminal condi-
tion of assimilation, insisting instead on an authentic black
identity rooted in the West Indies and pre-colonial Africa.
Assimilation amounts, for Damas, to the negation of indig-
enous African culture and casts whoever participates in a
conspiratorial role, one guilty of the bloodshed in the name
of colonial domination. Césaire hails the purportedly sav-
age, fi ctively brutal tendencies ascribed to blacks over the
reason and logic of Western civilization in an eff ort to radi-
cally combat assimilation. Th ese racial stereotypes, readily
accepted by many Westernized blacks, become ridiculous
tropes in Césaire, exposing the fallacious assumptions in-
herent in a discourse sympathetic to assimilation. Césaire
would rather embrace the negative racial stereotype im-
posed on him and in turn relish in a seemingly more au-
thentic blackness that participate in a culture that dismissed
and tried to eradicate his heritage. Senghor, on the other
hand, had grown up in Senegal, and his poetry refl ected a
close tie to African roots while at the same time lamenting