Negritude, identity and decolonization (1/2)
Thinking about identity and emancipation
Felwine Sarr
Duke University. Romance Studies. Graduate seminar.
Session 3
This paper focuses on Négritude as a way of thinking about identity and emancipation. Born in Paris in the 1930s, in the context preceding the African decolonisations, this literary, political and philosophical movement was developed by a generation of African, West Indian and Black American intellectuals for whom the fight against colonial alienation first involved the conquest of knowledge about oneself. Through the figures of Senghor and Césaire, but also through the journals and salons that paved the way for their emergence, the aim is to examine how a black identity was invented in literature, how the stigma attached to skin colour was turned into a claim to cultural singularity, and how this operation was part of a strategy of recognition that was both literary and political.
- Setting: Paris, 1930s
The years 1930-1960 constitute the historical moment that preceded the African decolonisations. It was in Europe, and particularly in France, that several anti-colonial movements made up of Africans, West Indians and Black Americans were born at this time. The creation of journals, literary salons and publishing houses provided the focus for the development of these thoughts on emancipation and identity, which aimed to provide the theoretical tools for thinking about disalienation and achieving independence for colonised nations.
The Négritude of Césaire, Senghor and Damas, the work on African history of Cheikh Anta Diop, the theoretical writings and revolutionary praxis of Frantz Fanon all participate in this movement of struggle for liberation, emancipation and disalienation. It was in Paris, in the 1930s, that a space of literary production was formed that was also a political space of identity expression, in a context of a “colonial situation” (Balandier).
As Laurence Proteau reminds us, “the affirmation of a ‘negro identity’ in literature, which saw the light of day in 1930s Paris, was indissociable, at once, from colonial domination, dominant representations of black peoples and a struggle for recognition in the literary field. The new contenders for entry into the literary field were not prepared, because of their academic capital, to occupy the minor position of regionalist and exotic “black writers” assigned to them. Influenced by the “Black Renaissance” movements in the United States, encouraged by the Western “discovery” of “Negro art” and the development of ethnology, they set out to reverse the stigma attached to “Negro identity”. In order to distinguish themselves in the literary field, they invented a “Negro” Culture and Civilisation and attempted to demonstrate both its originality and universality.”
Trade shows, reviews and early publications
The founding meeting of Senghor and Césaire took place in 1931, in Paris, at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. That same year, from May to November, the Colonial Exhibition was held at the Porte Dorée in the Bois de Vincennes. It was against this backdrop that the Nardal sisters – Paulette, Jeanne and Andrée – set up a salon in Clamart, at 7 rue Hébert, where black, Anglophone and Francophone intellectuals met: Margaret Rose Martin, Clara Shepard, René Maran, Langston Hughes, Léon Gontran Damas, Félix Éboué, Louis Achille, Claude McKay and many others. It was from this circle that the Revue du Monde Noir emerged, published in six issues from 1931 to 1932. More focused on cultural issues, it received Césaire only twice.
In 1932 Légitime Défense appeared, a surrealist journal created by Étienne Léro and a group of young Martinican intellectuals, which proposed a critical reflection on Martinican literature and identity. It only saw one issue, but it broke with the exclusively cultural and apolitical leanings of the Nardal sisters’ Revue du Monde Noir.
In 1935, Césaire in turn created L’Étudiant noir, a journal to which Senghor, Damas, Paulette Nardal and Gilbert Gratiant contributed. It was in this collaboration between West Indians and Africans that the symbolic and political reinvestment of the word “nègre” took place. The very term Négritude was coined by Césaire. Négritude assumes the boundaries between races inherited from political power relations, while challenging the dominated position assigned to black people in this system.
- Négritude according to Senghor
In Qu’est-ce que la Négritude? – a lecture given at the Université de Montréal in September 1966 -, Senghor attributed the term to Césaire. But, he points out, the reality covered by the term has existed for forty thousand years, ever since Grimaldi’s statues of the Negroids (Ancienneté des civilisations noires) .
For Senghor, each human group elaborates its means of adaptation to nature, its means of expression, its language and its civilisation, according to a personality of its own, founded on its metaphysics, its ontology and a spirit that constitutes its culture. These elements are themselves daughters of race, geography and history; they explain the ways of feeling, thinking and acting specific to each human group.
Negro-Africans, like all other ethnic groups on earth placed in a given situation, have produced an original, unique and irreplaceable civilisation. No doubt some of its qualities can be found in other peoples, but not all together, certainly not in this light, in this balance and to the same degree: that is the whole question of specificity.
A weapon of combat and humanism
Négritude, as Senghor defines it, is at once a weapon of combat, an instrument of liberation and a contribution to the humanism of the XXᵉ century. It is the set of civilisational values of the Black world, as expressed in the lives and works of Black people. It corresponds to what the Negroes of the Anglo-Saxon world call African Personality, or, in the formula of John Reed and Clive Wake, “a way of relating oneself to the world and the others”. It is a certain active presence in the world: essentially a relationship and movement towards the world, contact and participation with others. It is in this that it is necessary to the world today: it is a humanism of the XXᵉ century.
Senghor’s discourse thus focuses on the difference between civilisations and their ways of apprehending the world. He deploys a reflection on the ontology of the vital force, on the contribution of Negro aesthetics, on its contribution to the civilisation of the Universal and to the humanism of the XXᵉ century (lecture delivered at the University of Beirut in May 1966 under the title ” La Négritude est un Humanisme du XXᵉ siècle “).
Senghor also returns to what he calls the revolution of 1889, i.e. Bergson’s Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. He sees it as a rehabilitation of intuition and a departure from the matter-object dichotomy. This vision found expression in Negro art, but also in Picasso and Braque. It resonates with new discoveries in physics about the nature of energy and matter – wave and corpuscle – as well as with the concepts of radial energy and tangential energy.
- Negritude according to Césaire
Césaire gives the following definition of Négritude: “it is the awareness of being black, the simple recognition of a fact that implies acceptance, taking charge of one’s destiny as black, of one’s history and culture”. He goes on to say: “our struggle was the struggle against alienation (…) and so we took the word negro as a word of challenge (…), since we were ashamed of the word negro, we took back the word negro”. However, Césaire was careful to distinguish his approach from any essentialist interpretation: ‘my conception of negritude is not biological, it is cultural and historical’ (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, pp. 46-47 and p. 50).
Césaire elaborates the poetics of Négritude in ” ” Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, and he develops its critique of colonialism – understood as a process of de-civilisation – in ” Discours sur le colonialisme “. Le Cahier d’un retour au pays natal is the poetic manifesto of Négritude. In it, Césaire expresses the pain of uprooting, the violence of cultural alienation, the historical drama of the slave trade and existential doubt. In the “Cahier “, he kills the servile Negro in him to proclaim his rebirth. In it, he invents a new poetic aesthetic and, in terms of form, attacks traditional French poetry, shaking up its established structures.
- Race, stigma and its reversal
In 1930s Europe, skin pigmentation acquired a differential and classificatory value: it assigned a position in the social and intellectual order. Black people were over-determined from the outside. Fanon would say that “the Jew is hated only from the moment he is detected” and would sum up the condition imposed as follows: “I am not a slave to the idea that others have of me but to my appearance” (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952).
The arbitrariness of the demarcation lies in the fact that the traits claimed as proper and singular, specific to a group, draw on what seems the least contestable, the most obvious, the most “natural”: the physical manifestation of a difference. It was in this context that Damas published “Pigments” in 1937. Skin colour was, in the Europe of the time, the “seal” of race.
To cease being suffered, this “appearing” impossible to hide is on the contrary claimed by the authors of Negritude. The operation is alchemical: it consists in embodying this body-support in a body-memory, the only one capable of authorising collective existence and transforming the physical into the metaphysical. Where black only signifies a difference in appearance, the Negro invents a difference in being (Laurence Proteau).
Gaining self-knowledge
To be socially and symbolically effective, the claim to the power to classify oneself cannot do without the construction of knowledge about oneself. It is necessary to expropriate knowledge about oneself from the Other – this is the struggle against assimilation – and to reappropriate the limits of one’s “anthropological being”, hitherto imposed from outside – this is the struggle for differentiation.
Instituting difference presupposes composing a genealogy and a mythology, socialising time and naturalising the social, claiming a history and its permanence (de-historicisation), fixing events and individuals as founders of collectives. By inverting the stigma attached to skin colour, the authors of Negritude convert the signs of a supposed natural curse into emblems of a cultural singularity, and impose themselves by imposing the definition of their difference.
“I would tear banania laughter from all the walls of France”, wrote Senghor. This operation of subversion was encouraged by the “discovery” of Negro art by Western artists and by the development of ethnology. Drawing on the work of Western ethnologists – Frobenius, Griaule, Balandier, Leiris – Senghor and Césaire show the paradox of having to draw the foundations of their reified collective identity from the imaginary of the dominant in order to invent themselves as a people and give themselves historical and cultural legitimacy.
- Literature and politics: a dual struggle for recognition
Difference must impose itself as a criterion of distinction, both in the political field and in the literary field – this is a struggle for recognition. The context was one of political isolation for black intellectuals: black nations did not yet exist politically or legally. Involvement in the cultural problematic therefore appeared to be the only possible path, one that made it possible to postulate a common cultural identity between black peoples who had experienced slavery and colonisation.
Denied their own literary heritage, and in order to escape the position of the dominated and the absolute minor, the authors of Negritude had to impose recognition of their literary originality on Paris, the capital of letters and “universal culture”. Their literary strategy was to distance themselves from exotic, regionalist and Parnassian colonial literature – what they called the poetry of decalcomania. And it was through a masterstroke that they made their mark on the Western literary field: “they invented themselves Negroes in literature by claiming their share of the universal by brandishing their singularity”.
- Criticisms and responses
Is there a Negro cultural identity? The question arises, and it leads us to question the socio-anthropological unity of Negritude. The socio-political unreality of an ontological Negritude is put forward: is it not, in the end, an attempt to rediscover a mythical unity? The differences that emerged at the 1956 Congress, between African-Americans and Africans, testify to the fragility of this postulated unity. Identity, in this respect, appears as an anthropological fiction that roots by postulating an original authenticity – a golden age and a commonplace – homeland, unique culture.
Another difficulty lies in the fact that “African nature” had already been postulated by the West: innate sense of rhythm, music and dance, closeness to nature, assignment to body language and gesture rather than speech, set in opposition to Western rationalism. Hence the ambiguity of the way in which the authors of Négritude take up this assignment, making it their own and setting it up as an expression of their singularity.
Senghor’s responses to the critics of Négritude
To the criticisms levelled at Négritude, Senghor responded at length during his lecture at the Université de Montréal on 29 September 1966. A civilisation, he argued, is made up of a sum of answers to the enigmas of nature. Each human group develops its own means of adapting to nature and adapting nature to itself, its own means of expression, its own language. A civilisation is founded on a metaphysics, an ontology, a spirit that is its culture, and it includes morals, science, technology, the arts and literature. It is the offspring of race, geography and history, which explain the ways of feeling, thinking and acting specific to each human group.
Yet, despite this obvious fact, Négritude was not immediately understood. It was sometimes identified with racism, sometimes with an inferiority complex, when it was nothing more than a desire to be oneself in order to flourish.
Despite the passion of the early days, there was never any question of isolating ourselves from other civilisations, ignoring them, hating them or despising them. On the contrary, in symbiosis with them, it was about helping to build a humanism that was authentically human because it was totally human – totally human because it was made up of all the contributions of all the peoples of the whole planet.
Others have gone so far as to deny the unity of black culture, proclaiming that there are only “Negro civilisations”. As if the French, English, Italian, Russian or Swedish civilisations were not also the diverse faces of a Western culture with a Greco-Latin tradition, the unity of which no one has ever thought of denying. There is similarly, Senghor maintains, a set of fundamental values common to all black peoples, and which make these peoples united.
Senghor declared “For more than thirty years, then, the ideas I am going to develop have been developed by many militants of Négritude. These writings were undoubtedly polemical at the outset, aroused by a certain passion. First of all, it was necessary to fight vigorously, to bite hard, in order to gain a place in the sun. Faced with the prejudices of some, the cowardice of others, the mockery, we had to strike hard to get our culture admitted to the Banquet of the Universal. This was the sine qua non of our participation in building a new humanism. Incidentally, this cultural struggle was then coupled with a political struggle: Negritude was also a weapon in the fight for decolonisation.”