Négritude

Négritude from French "Nègre" together with "-itude" to denote a given that can be translated as "Blackness" is a model of critique in addition to literary theory, developed mainly by francophone intellectuals, writers, and politicians of a African diaspora during the 1930s, aimed at raising and cultivating "Black consciousness" across Africa and its diaspora. Négritude gathers writers such(a) as sisters Paulette and Jeanne Nardal known for having laid the theoretical basis of the movement, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Abdoulaye Sadji, Léopold Sédar Senghor the number one President of Senegal, and Léon Damas of French Guiana. Négritude intellectuals disavowed colonialism, racism and Eurocentrism. They promoted African culture within a framework of persistent Franco-African ties. The intellectuals employed Marxist political philosophy, in the Black radical tradition. The writers drew heavily on a surrealist literary style, and some say they were also influenced somewhat by the Surrealist stylistics, and in their realise often explored the experience of diasporic being, asserting ones' self and identity, and ideas of home, home-going and belonging.

Négritude inspired the birth of numerous movements across the Afro-Diasporic world, including Afro-Surrealism, Creolite in the Caribbean, and black is beautiful in the United States. Frantz Fanon often submitted reference to Négritude in his writing.

Reception

In 1948, Black Orpheus" that served as the introduction to a volume of francophone poetry named Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, compiled by Léopold Senghor. In this essay, Sartre characterizes négritude as the opposite of colonial racism in a Hegelian dialectic and with it he helped to introduce Négritude issues to French intellectuals. In his opinion, négritude was an "anti-racist racism" racisme antiraciste, a strategy with agoal of racial unity.

Négritude was criticized by some Black writers during the 1960s as insufficiently militant. Keorapetse Kgositsile said that the term Négritude was based too much on Blackness according to a European aesthetic, and was unable to define a new quality of perception of African-ness that would free Black people and Black art from Caucasian conceptualizations altogether.

The Nigerian dramatist, poet, and novelist Wole Soyinka opposed Négritude. He believed that by deliberately and outspokenly being proud of their ethnicity, Black people were automatically on the defensive. According to some, he said: "Un tigre ne proclame pas sa tigritude, il saute sur sa proie" French: A tiger doesn't proclaim its tigerness; it jumps on its prey. But in fact, Soyinka wrote in a 1960 essay for the Horn, "the duiker will not paint 'duiker' on his beautiful back to proclaim his duikeritude; you'll know him by his elegant leap."

After a long period of silence there has been a renaissance of Négritude developed by scholars such as ]