If you are new to Francophone literature, you will encounter the word Négritude very quickly. It appears in the biography of almost every major French-speaking African or Caribbean writer of the 20th century. But what exactly is it, and why does it matter?
A movement born in Paris
Négritude began in Paris in the 1930s among a group of Black students from France’s overseas territories. The three founders were Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal, and Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana.
What it stood for
At its core, Négritude was a rejection of French colonial assimilation — the policy of absorbing colonized peoples into French culture and erasing their own. Against this, the founders asserted the beauty and value of Black African civilizations, oral traditions, music, and ways of knowing.
Why it still matters
Négritude shaped an entire generation of African and Caribbean writers and thinkers. It is the intellectual ancestor of postcolonial theory, Afrocentrism and much of contemporary Afropolitan writing. To understand it is to understand the fault lines of French-language literature from Africa and the Caribbean.
