Négritude: Césaire, Senghor, and the Affirmation of Black Identity

Négritude emerged in Paris in the early 1930s among a circle of Black francophone students who founded the short-lived journal L'Étudiant noir (1935): the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), the Senegalese poet and future statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), and the Guianese poet Léon-Gontran Damas (1912–1978). The word "négritude" itself first appears in print in Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), drafted in the mid-1930s and published in its first version in the Parisian review Volontés in 1939, a long surrealist-inflected poem that stages the speaker's return to Martinique and his violent, ecstatic reclamation of Blackness as a value rather than a stigma. Césaire later defined négritude, in a 1967 interview with Haitian critic René Depestre, as "the simple recognition of the fact of being black, and the acceptance of this fact, of our history and our culture" — a deliberately defiant inversion of the term "nègre," a French colonial slur, into a banner of pride. The movement drew heavily on the earlier Harlem Renaissance, and Césaire, Senghor, and Damas read Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen in French translation, while the Martinican-born Paulette Nardal and her sister Jane Nardal ran a literary salon in Paris in the late 1920s that is now widely credited by scholars, including T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, as an essential incubator connecting Caribbean, African, and African American Black intellectuals before the term négritude was even coined.