What is Negritude ?

Name: Baraiya Bhavna P.

Roll No: 3

Sem: 4

Paper: African Literature

Topic: What is Negritude?

Submitted To : Department of English

                       M.K. Bhavanagar University

v What is Negritude?

Ø Negritude is a literary and ideological movement, developed by francophone black intellectuals, writers, and politicians in France in the 1930s. Its founders included the future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and the Guianan Léon Damas.

Ø The word négritude derives from the French word

        "Nègre" and literally means "negro-ness."

Ø The Négritude writers found solidarity in a common black identity as a rejection ofFrench colonial racism. They believed that the shared black heritage of members of the African diaspora was the best tool in fighting against French political and intellectual hegemony and domination. They formed a realistic literary style and formulated their Marxist ideas as part of this movement.

Ø The Negritude movement was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and artistic flowering that emerged among a group of black thinkers and artists (including novelists and poets) in the United States, in New York City, during the 1920s. The group was determined to throw off the masking (to use the word of critic Houston A. Baker, Jr.) and indirection that had necessarily attended black expression in a hostile society.

Ø Negritude is a strongly political literary movement that started in the French-speaking African colonies. The movement aims to promote black culture, and the consciousness of and pride in being black ('Negritude' means 'the fact of being black', in French). It tries to define what is black/African identity, in itself and by saying what it is not (not white culture, not the culture of the colonialists). That intellectual research is intricately tied to militantism, and often expresses itself through radical leftist politics.

Fanon rejected the movement as the insufficiently radical product of hesitant intellectuals, believing that violent revolution was the only way of ending colonial oppression:
                  

                  "I have no wish to be the victim of the Fraud of a black world. My life should not be devoted to drawing up the balance sheet of values. There is no white world, there is no white ethic, any more than there is a white intelligence. [...]"

                   

                - [Fanon, 'Black Skin, White Masks']

But at the same time he considered Negritude to be racist, and himself advocated 'non-racist humanism';

Ø He is also the author of Discourse on Colonialism (1950), a book of essays which has become a classic text of French political literature and helped establish the literary and ideological movement Negritude, a term Césaire defined as

             

            "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."

Ø Here is part of a poem by Aime Cesaire:

my negritude is not a stone
nor a deafness flung against the clamor of the day
my negritude is not a white speck of dead water
on the dead eye of the earth
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral 

v Conclusion:

Here a quote defining the movement, by Senghor:

              "Negritude is the totality of the cultural values of the Black world."

Such a way Negritude is the quality or fact of being of black African origin.