Négritude Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The future President of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, was in Paris writing about themes of exoticism in Baudelaire when he met Aimé Césaire, one of the future leaders of Martinique.

Both were poets who were working on the journal Étudiant Noir when they developed the concept of négritude, which Césaire first used in 1935. Négritude is the belief that all black people, regardless of location, nationality, and background, share a common essence and outlook. Both Senghor and Césaire were exemplary scholars in the French education system, but their experiences in Paris made both of them acutely aware of their status as second-class citizens.

The intricate connection of négritude to French colonialism is best demonstrated by the fact that both Césaire and Senghor wrote in French: This was the only choice to bring their message of a persisting African identity to a transnational audience. French assimilationist policies meant that talented writers and artists around the world came to study in Paris, but it was this experience that provoked the clear recognition of the boundaries of assimilationist policies. At the same time, recognition of both the diversity and the commonalties of the French colonial experience gave birth to ideas of unified identity. Césaire comments on the collective discovery of négritude:

It was simply that in Paris at that time there were a few dozen Negroes of diverse origins. There were Africans, like Senghor, Guineans, Haitians, North Americans, Antilleans, etc. This was very important for me . . . as well as an awareness of the solidarity among blacks. We had come from different parts of the world. It was our first meeting. We were discovering ourselves. This was very important. (Césaire 1943/2000, 88)

Négritude refers back to an imaginary past, a quality of African life that existed before colonization and through colonization and that will succeed colonization. One interpretation of négritude is that it is a form of primitivism; this view is supported by the fact that Senghor begins his discourse on négritude by presenting thirty pages of anthropological and archeological evidence about early inhabitants of the African continent. However, négritude is not simply primitivism; it also has a very real political utility. Négritude is a strategy of reinterpretation, offering a new frame of reference for understanding personal identity and collective patterns of behavior. Most important, it asserts that black people have not been entirely changed or defeated by the experience of colonization.

Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire’s wife, who was an integral personality in the movement, remarked that surrealism was the revolutionary element within négritude: “Thus, far from contradicting, diluting, or diverting our revolutionary attitude toward life, surrealism strengthens it” (Césaire 1943/2000, 15). Surrealism brought the reality of appearances into question— it asserts things are not always what they seem to be. This is important, because it allows advocates of négritude to claim that black people are not defeated or oppressed, despite how things may appear. Therefore, it became a way to assert pride in one’s identity and renounce subordination.

Négritude also provided a new way of understanding the experience of colonial subordination. Senghor’s work had two very different aspects: The first was a presentation of historical research to provide empirical evidence of shared, African characteristics. The second was a proposal that négritude was accompanied by a unique theory about ontology (the nature of being). Senghor develops his theory of African ontology by contrasting it with a European one. Europeans use what he calls “objective intelligence” and approach the world in the spirit of distinction: “He first distinguishes the object from himself. He keeps it at a distance. He freezes it out of time and, in a way, out of space. He fixes it, he kills it” (Senghor 1965, 29).The political ramifications of this mode of being in the world are that the European views the world as subordinate to self; “he makes a means of it” (ibid., 29).

In contrast, Senghor claims that the African embodies a sort of internal rationality, whereby the self is discovered through convergence with objects, space, and others around him. «Our subject abandons his I to sym-pathize and identify himself with the THOU. He dies to himself to be reborn in the Other. He does not assimilate, he is assimilated” (Senghor 1965, 32). This description provides an alternative explanation for the processes of subordination and objectification that characterized colonialism. Instead of colonialism being a matter of power, inferiority, or superiority, the history can be understood as a distinction between interiority and exteriority.

African ontology also suggests the ultimate contribution that Africans can make to the development of what Senghor calls the “universal civilization.” The African form of perception and being will combine with the European form of knowledge, and their synthesis will create universal culture. Senghor presents a new interpretation of the history of servitude, develops an argument for the shared strengths of Africans based upon this principle, and outlines their future role in world politics.

Bibliography:

Arnold, A. James. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Césaire, Suzanne. “Surrealism and Us: 1943.”
Quoted in Robin D. G. Kelley, “A Poetics of Postcolonialism,” in Aimé Césaire, Discourses on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
Forsdick, Charles, and David Murphy. Postcolonial Thought in the French Speaking World. Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2009.
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Senghor: Prose and Poetry. Edited and translated by John O. Reed and Clive Wake. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Steeves, Edna L. “Négritude and the Noble Savage.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 11, no. 1 (1973): 91–104.

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