Négritude

First published Mon May 24, 2010; substantive

revision Wed May 23, 2018

Towards the end of his life, Aimé Césaire

has declared that the question he and his

friend Léopold Sédar Senghor came to

raise after they first met was: “Who am I?

Who are we? What are we in this white

world?” And he commented: “That’s quite

a problem” (Césaire 2005, 23). “Who am

I?” is a question Descartes posed, and a

reader of the French philosopher naturally

understands such a question to be

universal, and the subject who says “I”

here to stand for any human being. But

when “who am I?” has to be translated as

“who are we ?” everything changes

especially when the “we” have to define

themselves against a world which leaves

no room for who and what they are

because they are black folks in a world

where “universal” seems to naturally

mean “white”.

“Négritude”, or the self-affirmation of

black peoples, or the affirmation of the

values of civilization of something defined

as “the black world” as an answer to the

question “what are we in this white

world?” is indeed “quite a problem”: it

poses many questions that will be

examined here through the following

headings:

1. The genesis of the concept

2. Négritude as revolt / Négritude as

philosophy

3. Manifestos for Négritude

4. The inescapable disappearance of

Eurydice

5. Négritude as ontology

6. Négritude as aesthetics

7. Négritude as epistemology

8. Négritude as politics

9. Négritude beyond Négritude

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1. The genesis of the

concept
The concept of Négritude emerged as the

expression of a revolt against the

historical situation of French colonialism

and racism. The particular form taken by

that revolt was the product of the

encounter, in Paris, in the late 1920s, of

three black students coming from different

French colonies: Aimé Césaire (1913–2008)

from Martinique, Léon Gontran Damas

(1912–1978) from Guiana and Léopold

Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) from Senegal.

Being colonial subjects meant that they all

belonged to people considered uncivilized,

naturally in need of education and

guidance from Europe, namely France. In

addition, the memory of slavery was very

vivid in Guiana and Martinique. Aimé

Césaire and Léon Damas were already

friends before they came to Paris in 1931.

They were classmates in Fort-de-France,

Martinique, where they both graduated

from Victor Schoelcher High School. Damas

came to Paris to study Law while Césaire

had been accepted at Lycée Louis Le

Grand to study for the highly selective test

for admission to the prestigious École

Normale Supérieure on rue d’Ulm. Upon

his arrival at the Lycée on the first day of

classes he met Senghor who had already

been a student at Louis le Grand for three

years.

Césaire has described his first encounter

with Senghor as friendship at first sight

which would last for the rest of their fairly

long lives. He has also added that their

personal friendship meant the encounter

between Africa and the African Diaspora.

Césaire, Damas and Senghor had

individual lived experiences of their

feeling of revolt against a world of racism

and colonial domination. In the case of

Césaire that feeling was expressed in his

detestation of Martinique which, as he

confessed in an interview with French

author Françoise Vergès, he was happy to

leave after high school: he hated the

“colored petit-bourgeois” of the island

because of their “fundamental tendency to

ape Europe” (Césaire 2005, 19). As for

Senghor, he has written that in his revolt

against his teachers at College Libermann

high school in Dakar, he had discovered

“négritude” before having the concept: he

refused to accept their claim that through

their education they were building

Christianity and civilization in his soul

where there was nothing but paganism

and barbarism before. Now their

encounter as people of African descent

regardless of where they were from would

lead to the transformation of their

individual feelings of revolt into a concept

that would also unify all Black people and

overcome the separation created by

slavery but also by the prejudices born out

of the different paths taken. Césaire has

often evoked the embarrassment felt by

people from the Caribbean at the idea of

being associated with Africans as they

shared Europe’s ideas that they were now

living in the lands of the civilized. He

quotes as an example a “snobbish” young

Antillean who came to him protesting that

he talked too much about Africa, claiming

that they had nothing in common with

that continent and its peoples: “they are

savages, we are different” (Césaire 2005,

28).

Beyond the encounter between Africa and

the French Caribbean Césaire, Senghor

and Damas also discovered together the

American movement of Harlem

Renaissance. At the “salon”, in Paris,

hosted by sisters from Martinique, Jane,

Paulette and Andrée Nardal, they met

many Black American writers, such as

Langston Hughes or Claude McKay. With

the writers of the Harlem Renaissance

movement they found an expression of

black pride, a consciousness of a culture,

an affirmation of a distinct identity that

was in sharp contrast to French

assimilationism. In a word they were

ready to proclaim the négritude of the

“new Negro” to quote the title of the

anthology of Harlem writers by Alain

Locke which very much impressed

Senghor and his friends (Vaillant 1990,

93–94).

An important precision needs to be made

here about the space created by the Nardal

sisters for Negritude. Thus, T. Deanan

Sharpley-Whiting calls attention to the fact

that a “masculinist genealogy constructed

by the poets and shored up by literary

historians, critics, and Africanist

philosophers continues to elide and

minimize the presence and contributions

of black women, namely their francophone

counterparts, to the movement’s

evolution” (Sharpley-Whiting, 2000, 10).

And she quotes a letter from Paulette

Nardal, written in 1960, in which she

“‘bitterly complained’ of the erasure of her

and Jane Nardal’s roles in the

promulgation of the ideas that would later

become the hallmarks of Césaire, Damas,

and Senghor” (Sharpley-Whiting, 2000,

10). It must be recalled, in particular,

concerning the “genealogy” of the

movement, that an article by Jane Nardal,

entitled “Internationalisme noir”,

published in 1928, predated by more than

ten years the first important theoretical

article published by Senghor: “What the

Black Man Contributes” (published in

1939). What Jane Nardal says in her short

article about a “Negro sprit” transcending

the differences inevitably created by the

course of history, about the importance of

“turning back toward Africa (…) in

remembering a common origin”, or about

the significance, first and foremost for the

Africans themselves, of the discovery by

Europeans (first the “snobs and artists”

among them) of “Negro art” and, more

generally, “the centers of African

civilizations, their religious systems, their

forms of government, their artistic

wealth” (Nardal, 2002, 105–107), are all

notions and themes that will be developed

by Senghor, Césaire, and Damas.

2. Négritude as revolt /

Négritude as philosophy

The proclamation of Negritude would be

done when the three friends founded the

journal L’Etudiant noir, in 1934–1935 where

the word was coined by Aimé Césaire. It

was meant to be (and, above all, to sound

like) a provocation. Nègre , derived from the

Latin “niger”, meaning “black”, is used in

French only in relation to black people as

in “art nègre”. Applied to a black person it

had come to be charged with all the

weight of racism to the point that the

insult “ sale nègre” (dirty nègre) would be

almost redundant, “sale” being somehow

usually understood in “nègre”. So to coin

and claim the word “Négritude” ( Négrité ,

using the French suffix – ité instead of - itude

was considered and dropped) as the

expression of the value of “blackness” was

a way for Césaire, Senghor and Damas of

defiantly turning “nègre” against the

white supremacists who used it as a slur.

In sum the word was and has continued to

be an irritant. Indeed the “fathers” of the

movement themselves would often confess

how irritated they were too by the word.

Thus, Césaire declared at the beginning of

a lecture he gave on February 26, 1987, at

the International University of Florida in

Miami: “…I confess that I do not always

like the word Négritude even if I am the

one, with the complicity of a few others,

who contributed to its invention and its

launching” adding that, still, “it

corresponds to an evident reality and, in

any case to a need that appears to be a

deep one” (Césaire 2004, 80). “What is that

reality?” Césaire proceeded then asking.

That is indeed the question: is there a

content and a substance of the concept of

Négritude beyond the revolt and the

proclamation? In other words, is Négritude

mainly a posture of revolt against

oppression the manifestation of which is

primarily the poetry it produced, or is it a

particular philosophy characteristic of a

black worldview? One of the most

eloquent expression of Négritude as a

posture primarily is to be found in an

Aimé Césaire’s address delivered in

Geneva on June 2 1978 on the occasion

of the creation by Robert Cornman of a

cantata entitled Retour and inspired by the

Notebooks of a Return to the Native Land . In that

address reproduced in Aimé Césaire, pour

regarder le siècle en face, the poet from

Martinique declares:
… when it appeared the literature of

Négritude created a revolution: in the

darkness of the great silence, a voice

was raising up, with no interpreter,

no alteration, and no complacency, a

violent and staccato voice, and it said

for the first time: “I, Nègre.”

A voice of revolt

A voice of resentment

No doubt

But also of fidelity, a voice of

freedom, and first and foremost, a

voice for the retrieved identity.

(Thébia-Melsan 2000, 28)

In fact both answers have been given to

that question of posture of revolt vs.

philosophical substance, at different

moments and in different circumstances

by Négritude writers. Nevertheless, it can

be said that Césaire and Damas have put

more emphasis on the dimension of poetic

revolt while Senghor has insisted more on

articulating Négritude as a philosophical

content, as “the sum total of the values of

civilization of the Black World”, thus

implying that it is an ontology, an

aesthetics, an epistemology, or a politics.

3. Manifestos for

Négritude

Following the example of Alain Locke,

Leon Damas in 1947 and Léopold Sédar

Senghor a year later published Anthologies

of poetry to manifest the existence of

Négritude as an aesthetics and as a

literary movement.

In the “Introduction” to his Poètes

d’expression française 1900–1945 , Damas

proclaimed that “the time of blocking out

and inhibition” had now given place to

“another age: that in which the colonized

man becomes aware of his rights and of

his duties as a writer, as a novelist or a

story-teller, an essayist or a poet.” And he

stated the literary and political

significance of his Anthology in non

ambiguous terms: “Poverty, illiteracy,

exploitation of man by man, social and

political racism suffered by the black or

the yellow, forced labor, inequalities, lies,

resignation, swindles, prejudices,

complacencies, cowardice, failures, crimes

committed in the name of liberty, of

equality, of fraternity, that is the theme of

this indigenous poetry in French” (Damas

1947, 10). It is important to notice that he

meant his anthology to be a manifesto, not

so much for Négritude, than for the

Colonized in general, as he insisted that

the sufferings of colonialism were the

burden of “the black and the yellow” and

as he featured in the selection poets from

Indochina and Madagascar. Or rather

Damas understood the concept of

Négritude (in fact the word does not

appear in the “Introduction” to the

anthology) to encompass people of color in

general as they were under the

domination of European colonialism. This

is a broader meaning of Négritude that the

“fathers” of the movement always kept in

mind. Damas’ view about the substance of

the poetry he was presenting, about what

the poets gathered in his book had in

common besides living the same colonial

situation, is generally the same as Etienne

Léro’s, whose “Misère d’une

poésie” (“Poverty of a Poetry”) he quotes

abundantly. In a vitalistic language that

characterizes Négritude Léon Damas

opposes, using Léro’s language, the vitality

of this “new poetry” to what he

denounced as “white literary

decadence” (to be contrasted with the

revolutionary nature of surrealist

philosophy and literature). He quoted in

particular Léro’s denunciation of writers

from the Caribbean “mulatto society,

intellectually … corrupt and literarily

nourished with white decadence” to the

point that some of them would make it a

matter of pride that a white person could

read their whole book without being able

to tell “what their actual complexion

was” (Damas 1947, 13). The “Introduction”

was indeed a manifesto for Négritude as a

vital poetic force that Damas (and Léro)

identified as “the wind rising from Black

America” which in turn expresses “the

African love for life, the African joy in

love, the African dream of death” (Damas

1947, 13).

Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre

et malgache de langue française , (An Anthology

of the New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in

French), published in 1948, would

eventually overshadow Damas’ anthology

and his “Introduction” to it as a manifesto

for the Négritude movement. Senghor’s

own “Introduction” is just five short

paragraphs as it devoted only to the

technicalities of selecting the poets

gathered in the book (interestingly, unlike

Damas, his choice is restricted to the

“Blacks”, the Malagasies being according

to him “ mélaniens” (Senghor 1948, 2)). But

what contributed greatly to the fame of the

Anthology and propelled Négritude into the

broad intellectual conversation was the

“Preface” written for it by French

philosopher and public intellectual Jean-

Paul Sartre (1906–1980). The title of the

“preface”, Black Orpheus, referring to the

Greek myth about the evocative force of

poetry but also about its eventual

impotence in front of fate and death, fully

expresses what can be called the kiss of

death the existentialist philosopher gave to

the movement.

4. The inescapable

disappearance of Eurydice

By writing Black Orpheus as an account of

the ultimate meaning of the black poetry

gathered in the Anthology Sartre

transformed Négritude into an illustration

of his own philosophical theses and

durably set the terms in which the concept

was to be discussed from then on.

One important point made by Sartre was

that Négritude was first and foremost a

black poetic appropriation of the French

language. Unlike other nationalisms, he

explained, which reclaimed the tongue of

the people against the imperialist

imposition of the language by which they

were governed, black people had to use

the language of domination imposed by

French colonialism as cement for their

shared Négritude and as “miraculous

weapons” against that same

domination. In so doing they radically

transformed it, manifesting through their

poetry that there was nothing natural and

unquestionable in the way in which the

language would identify Being with Good,

Beautiful, Right and White. The simple

song of a black poet chanting in French

the beauty of the naked blackness of the

woman he loved, Sartre wrote, would then

appear to the ears of French people a

fundamental violence against their

linguistic and indeed ontological self

assurance; in spite of the fact that the

poem was not even meant for them, or

rather because of that. In the poetry of

Négritude they would be struck by the

discovery of their own language as

unfamiliar and hitherto unheard of,

especially when that poetry makes the best

of surrealist writing as it “smashes [the

words] together, breaks their customary

associations, and couples them by

force” (Sartre 1976, 26). But then again

one knows that such an unsettling of

language and indeed its “auto destruction”

is the “profound aim of French poetry …

from Mallarmé to the Surrealists” (1976,

25). Therefore, Sartre concludes, Négritude

has achieved that goal: the poets of

Négritude have taken to its end what

surrealist writers had been calling for.

So while he praised Négritude as the

revolutionary poetry of the time, Sartre

maintained the traditional Marxist view

about the proletariat being the sole true

revolutionary class and actor of history.

Just as Eurydice was the creation of

Orpheus’ power of evocation, Négritude

was a creation of poetry, a “Myth dolorous

and full of hope” and like “a woman who

is born to die” (Sartre 1976, 63). History

and its laws had already condemned

Négritude to be just a Poem, indeed a

swan song: the future of liberation was in

the hand of the proletariat, the universal

class who was going to bring effective

revolution and liberation from all

oppressions. When all is said and done

and Négritude has permitted the blacks to

“raise relentlessly the great negro cry until

the foundations of the world shall

tremble” (Césaire’s Les armes miraculeuses

quoted by Sartre as the last words of Black

Orpheus), it will have to be shed “to the

profit of the Revolution” (1976, 65) by the

only true actor of history which is the

proletariat. In other words the “being-in-

the-world of the Negro” as Sartre defined

Négritude using Heideggerian language is

“subjective” while class is “objective”: the

notion of race is concrete and particular,

Sartre writes, while that of class is

universal and abstract; in the terminology

of Karl Jaspers the first resorts to

“comprehension” while the latter resorts

to “intellection” (1976, 59).

Again, Sartre’s preface was a real kiss of

death as it played an immense role in

popularizing the Négritude movement and

contributed to establishing Senghor’s

Anthology as its manifesto, but at the same

time dismissed its historical significance

by emphasizing that its being was

ultimately only poetic, without real

substance. And in fact, ironically, Black

Orpheus contained and announced most of

the criticisms that would be directed at

Négritude afterwards. First the criticism

which very quickly came from certain

Marxists who accused Négritude of

creating the distraction of “race” where

there should be only a focus on objective

social contradictions in the historic phase

of the struggle of the Proletariat to bring

authentic liberation to the oppressed

workers in Europe and the dominated

peoples in the world. To that criticism

some would add that by emphasizing the

particular and the concrete of race over

the objective and the universal of the

struggle against capitalism and

imperialism, the “fathers” of Négritude,

Senghor more specifically (since he led his

country to independence and became its

president for twenty years), seemed to

imply that some cultural recognition and

reconciliation was all that was needed:

they accused Négritude of being, for that

reason, an ideology for neocolonialism.

Sartre’s “preface” also foreshadowed the

accusation of being an unfounded

essentialism promoting the notion that

black people shared a common identity,

partaking in some enduring African-ness

that defines them beyond differences in

historical trajectories and circumstances,

personal or collective.

The paradox of Sartre’s preface to the

Anthology by Senghor is that in many

respects the Négritude movement had,

after Black Orpheus , to define itself against

Sartre’s positioning of its philosophical

meaning. It did so (1) by insisting that it

was not a mere particularism defined as

the antithesis to a white supremacist view

(with black self affirmation using the

figure of inversion that Sartre

characterized as an anti-racist racism

(1976, 59)), before some dialectical post-

racial synthesis ; (2) by showing that there

was something substantial (and not just

poetic) in the reference to African values

of civilization by which Senghor had

defined Négritude: that Négritude was

indeed an ontology, an epistemology, an

aesthetics and a politics.

5. Négritude as ontology

When it comes to defining the substance of

Négritude, there is an important difference

between the three “fathers” of the

movement. Damas, a poet more than a

theorist, spoke of it in the “introduction”

of his anthology as the vital force behind

any new and true—that is liberating—

poetry. As to Césaire, he has often insisted

that Négritude was primarily the

reclaiming of a heritage in order to regain

initiative. He declared:

Négritude, in my eyes, is not a

philosophy. Négritude is not a

metaphysics. Négritude is not a

pretentious conception of the

universe. It is a way of living history

within history: the history of a

community whose experience appears

to be … unique, with its deportation

of populations, its transfer of people

from one continent to another, its

distant memories of old beliefs, its

fragments of murdered cultures. How

can we not believe that all this, which

has its own coherence, constitutes a

heritage? (2004, 82)

Unlike Damas and Césaire, Senghor

affirmed that Négritude was also the

expression of a philosophy to be read in

the cultural products of Africa; and above

all in African religions. Different as they

are from one region to another, from one

culture to another, there is still

ethnographical evidence that many of

them share to be founded on an ontology

of life forces. “The whole system”, Senghor

declares, in a lecture “On Négritude”

delivered at Lovanium University in

Kinshasa, “is founded on the notion of

vital force. Pre-existing, anterior to being,

it constitutes being. God has given vital

force not only to men, but also to animals,

vegetables, even minerals. By which they

are. But it is the purpose of this force to

increase” (1993, 19). Senghor then

explains that in the human being the

increase of the force is the process of her

becoming a person “by being freer and

freer within an interdependent

community” (1993, 19). He adds that the

ultimate meaning of religion is to assure

the continuous increase of the vital force

of the living, in particular through the

main ritual of the sacrifice of an animal.

This ontology of life forces has been

summarized by Belgian philosopher Leo

Apostel in the following propositions:

1. To say that something exists is to say

that it exercises a specific force. To be

is to be a force.

2. Every force is specific (as against a

pantheistic interpretation, since what is

asserted here is the existence of

monadic, individual forces).

3. Different types of beings are

characterized by different intensities

and types of forces.

4. Each force can be strengthened or

weakened [rein-forced or de-forced , as

Senghor puts it].

5. Forces can influence and act upon each

other in virtue of their internal natures.

6. The universe is a hierarchy of forces

organized according to their strengths,

starting from God and going all the way

down to the mineral through the

founding ancestors, the important dead,

living humans, animals and plants.

7. Direct causal action involves the

influence of more-being or stronger

force, on less-being, weaker force.

(Apostel 1981, 26–29)

Point 6 in particular constitutes a good

summary of the view shared by many

African religions characterized as

“animism” while the other points help

understand the particular type of causality

that has been labeled magical thinking. As

early as in 1939, at a time when Leon

Damas had already published his first

collection of poems, Pigments (1937) and

Césaire had just finished a version of his

Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (“Notebook of a

return to my Native Land” (Césaire

2000a)), Senghor had published an essay

on the philosophy of Négritude entitled

“Ce que l’homme noir apporte” (“What the

Black Man Contributes”). As he explored in

that essay the notion of rhythm as

constitutive of what he called “the negro

style”, Senghor was trying to say that the

productions of African art were to be

understood first and foremost as the

language of an ontology of vital forces.

So it is not surprising that he was so

enthusiastic when, six years later, he

discovered a book by Reverend Father

Placide Tempels diving a clear exposition

of Bantu Philosophy as resting upon such an

ontology (Tempels 1945). Tempels was a

Belgian Franciscan priest who went to the

Congo as a missionary. He had the view

that in order to be more efficient

preaching the Gospel to the Bantu people

he had first to understand the principles

underlying their belief system, their

customary law, their cultural habits, and

so on. He explained that he came to realize

that one could and should go beyond mere

ethnographical description of those

characteristics of the people’s lives and dig

out a set of ontological principles on which

they were founded. In other words that

there existed a Bantu philosophy of being

underlying their laws, behaviors, beliefs,

politics, etc. The book, first written in

Flemish then published in French in 1945

by Présence africaine under the title La

philosophie bantoue, became quite an event: it

was one of the very first times that an

African people was associated with

philosophy, an intellectual pursuit

considered at least since Hegel to be the

unique telos of Western civilization.

Nothing probably is more indicative of the

difference between Léopold Sédar Senghor

and his friend Aimé Césaire than their

respective reactions to the widely

celebrated book by Father Tempels. While

Senghor embraced it as going along the

same lines he was exploring in his 1939

essay, Césaire’s reaction was one of

rejection. It is not that Césaire did not

accept the substance of Tempels’ theses. In

fact the summary he makes of them is

perfectly adequate: “Now then, know that

Bantu thought is essentially ontological”,

he writes in his 1955 Discours sur le

colonialisme ,“that Bantu ontology is

based on the truly fundamental notions of

a life force and a hierarchy of life forces;

and that for the Bantu the ontological

order which defines the world comes from

God and, as a divine decree, must be

respected” (Césaire 2000b, 58). In fact

what provoked Césaire’s skepticism and

sarcasm vis-à-vis Tempels’ work was its

implications as a tool to justify and

perpetuate the colonial order. “Since

Bantu thought is ontological”, he tittered,

“the Bantu only ask for satisfaction of an

ontological nature. Decent wages!

Comfortable housing! Food! These Bantu

are pure spirits, I tell you …” (Césaire

2000b, 58) Above all, there is for Césaire,

the way in which the colonial order is

made by Tempels a new part of Bantu

ontology and therefore legitimized and

even sanctified in the eyes of the Bantu

themselves: “As for the government, why

should it complain?” Since the Rev.

Tempels notes with obvious satisfaction,

“from their first contact with the white

man, the Bantu considered us from the

only point of view that was possible to

them, the point of view of their Bantu

philosophy” and “ integrated us into their

hierarchy of life forces at a very high

level” (Césaire 2000b, 58). The final result

being then that “the Bantu god will take

responsibility for the Belgian colonialist

order, and any Bantu who dare to raise

his hand against it will be guilty of

sacrilege” (Césaire 2000b, 58).

In sum, in the eyes of Senghor, Tempels’

Bantu philosophy , along with Bergson’s

philosophy of élan vital , provided the

language of life philosophy which he

considered characteristic of the cultures of

Africa and those of African origin. For

him Négritude is an ontology of life forces

to be described as a vitalism. Césaire who

was more skeptical about a philosophical

content of the word dismissed Tempels’

enterprise not on the basis of its substance

but because of what he considered the

intention behind the text of Bantu philosophy :

an attempt to reform colonialism in order

to perpetuate it.
6. Négritude as aesthetics

The aspect on which Senghor insists the

most is that of Négritude as a philosophy

of African art. One of the main activities of

Senghor when he first arrived in Paris at

the end of the 1920s was to visit the

ethnographical museum at Place

Trocadéro in Paris. By then the vogue of

art nègre (black art) had already produced

its effects on modern European art. Pablo

Picasso, in particular, in 1906 had made

the turn of making African sculptures and

masks part of his artistic pursuit: his

Demoiselles d’Avignon , painted in 1906,

manifested that move. The 1930s, the

years when Senghor, Césaire and Damas

started writing, is the time when what was

labeled “primitive objects” were now more

widely perceived as art, beyond the circles

of the artistic avant-garde. The Universal

Exposition in Paris in 1931 showed that

new “sensibility”.

Senghor wanted Négritude to be the

philosophy of the geometrical forms so

characteristic of African masks and

sculptures across different regions and

cultures. He would often explain that the

raison d’être of art in Africa is not to

reproduce or embellish reality but to

establish the connection with what he

labeled the sub-reality that is the universe of

vital forces. What modern art understood

from the consideration of art nègre is that

the issue was not anymore to simply

reproduce sensible appearances but to

deal with the forces hidden beneath the

surface of things. That is why the African

objects at the Trocadéro museum were at

once religious and artistic artifacts.

Plastic forms are life forces, they are

rhythms. So objects such as masks or

sculptures are to be read as combinations

of rhythms as we can see in the following

aesthetic analysis by Senghor of a

feminine statuette from Baule culture (in

today Ivory Coast): “In it, two themes of

sweetness sing an alternating song. The

breasts are ripe fruits. The chin and the

knees, the rump and the calves are also

fruits or breasts. The neck, the arms and

the thighs are columns of black

honey.” This reading establishes the

object as a composition of two rhythmic

series (what is referred to here, poetically,

as two themes of sweetness): the concave

forms of the breasts, chin, knees, rump

and calves, on the one hand; on the other

hand, the cylindrical forms that are the

neck, the arms and the thighs. This

example indicates what Senghor

understands by “rhythm” and illustrates

what he sees as its omnipresence in Black

aesthetic products, as he certainly

remembers here the notion expressed, ten

years before by Jane Nardal, of a “rule of

rhythm, the sovereign master of [black]

bodies” (Nardal, 2002, 105). In his first

essay on Négritude, “What the Black Man

Contributes”, Senghor wrote:

This ordering force that constitutes

Negro style is rhythm . It is the most

sensible and the least material thing.

It is the vital element par excellence.

It is the primary condition for, and

sign of, art, as respiration is of life –

respiration that rushes or slows

down, becomes regular or spasmodic,

depending on the being’s tension, the

degree and quality of the emotion.

Such is rhythm, originally, in its

purity, such is it in the masterpieces

of Negro art, particularly in

sculpture. It is composed of one

theme – sculptural form – that is

opposed to a brother theme, like

inhalation is opposed to exhalation,

and that is reprised. It is not a

symmetry that engenders monotony;

rhythm is alive, it is free. For reprise

is not redundancy, or repetition. The

theme is reprised at another place, on

another level, in another

combination, in a variation. And it

produces something like another

tone, another timbre, another accent.

And the general effect is intensified

by this, not without nuances. This is

how rhythm acts, despotically, on

what is least intellectual in us, to

make us enter into the spirituality of

the object; and this attitude of

abandon that we have is itself

rhythmic. (Senghor 1964, 296)

Seventeen years later he would reiterate

the same credo:

What is rhythm? It is the architecture of

being, the internal dynamism that

gives it form, the system of waves it

emanates toward the Others , the pure

expression of vital force. Rhythm is

the vibrating shock, the force that,

through the senses, seizes us at the

root of being . It expresses itself

through the most material and

sensual means: lines, surfaces, colors,

and volumes in architecture,

sculpture and painting; accents in

poetry and music; movements in

dance. But, in doing so, it organizes

all this concreteness toward the light

of the Spirit . For the Negro African, it

is insofar as it is incarnate in

sensuality that rhythm illuminates

the Spirit.

In 1966, L.S. Senghor, then the President

of Senegal since the country became

independent in 1960, organized in Dakar

an international event that he obviously

intended to be a great moment of

celebration of what he had been pursuing

his whole life: the World Festival of Black

Arts, meant to be the concrete

manifestation of black aesthetics in all its

dimensions. Aimé Césaire, one of the most

celebrated guests of honor at the Festival,

was invited to give a “Lecture on African

Art” (“Discours sur l’art africain”). He

first insisted on the question of the role

and significance of art in general in the

modern world, quoting the poet Saint-John

Perse: “When mythology falls apart, it is

in poetry that the divine finds refuge … it

is from poetic imagination that the fierce

passion of people seeking light gets its

flame” (Thébia-Melsan 2000, 22). What

Négritude poets did even if he does not

like the word Négritude at all, declares

Césaire, and in spite of their failings, was

just that: to be light bearers for Africa.

Then he proceeded to ask whether African

art of the past will be a catalyst for

African art in the present and the future

the way it had been for European art at

the beginning of the twentieth century.

That was a way for him of calling the

attention on the questions at the core of

his thinking about aesthetics (but also

politics): how to regain initiative ? How to

avoid the lack of authenticity of sheer

imitation or mimesis: mimesis of Europe as

well as mimesis of one’s own artistic

tradition.

As to his philosophy of art as such,

Césaire’s views follow consistently from

his surrealist poetics and eventually

converge with his friend Senghor’s.

Césaire’s notion of the primordial role that

should be played by the Dionysian in art

versus the Apollonian . These are categories

that Césaire and Senghor adopted from

Nietzsche’s philosophy (Nietzsche’s Birth of

Tragedy) to express the opposition between

the primal, obscure force of life considered

as an organic whole (the Dionysian) on

the one hand, and on the other hand the

plastic beauty or the form which brings

into light the individuality of the object

(the Apollonian): the Dionysian speaks to

our emotion while the Apollonian speaks

to our intellectuality. Césaire evokes such

a contrast when he states that: “The

poetically beautiful is not merely beauty of

expression or muscular euphoria. A too

Apollonian or gymnastic idea of beauty

paradoxically runs the risk of skinning,

stuffing, and hardening it.” This is the

seventh and final thesis of the propositions

summarizing his views about Poetry and

Knowledge and it is in perfect resonance

with Senghor’s view of African art as the

language of the ontology of vital forces.

In conclusion, Négritude as aesthetics is

predicated on such oppositions as those

between sub-reality (or sur-reality) and

appearance, force and form, emotion and

intellect, Dionysian and Apollonian.

Césaire, Damas (as shown in the preface of

his anthology ) and Senghor all agreed that

art was a vital response to the mechanistic

and de-humanizing philosophy that

produced (and was produced by) modern

Europe. And like Nietzsche, they believed

that art was another approach by which a

sense of the world as totality would be

restored. These lines from Césaire’s

“Discourse on African Art” delivered in

Dakar on April 6, 1966, at the opening of

the “World Festival of Negro Arts”

summarize Négritude philosophy of the

significance of art, especially black art:

“Through art, the reified world becomes

again the human world, the world of

living realities, the world of

communication and participation. From a

collection of things, poetry and art remake

the world, a world which is whole, which

is total and harmonious. And that is why

poetry is youth. It is the force that gives

back to the world its prime vitality, which

gives back to everything its aura of

marvelous by replacing it within the

original totality” (Thébia-Melsan, 2000,

21).

And it can be argued that it is because of

that significance of art that Négritude also

presented itself as another type of

knowledge or epistemology and as another

politics.

7. Négritude as

epistemology

In the same 1939 essay in which he

explored what he called the “rhythmic

attitude” by which we enter in profound

connection with the object of art, its

reality or its sub-reality, Senghor wrote

the statement which is probably the most

controversial of all his formulations of the

philosophy of Négritude: “Emotion is

Negro, as reason is Hellenic” (“L’émotion est

nègre, comme la raison héllène ”). (Senghor

1964, 288) The criticism was that the

formula was an acceptance of the

ethnological discourse of the Levy-

Bruhlian type making a distinction

between western societies suffused with

rationality and the colonized world of

what he labeled “inferior societies”, under

the rule of “primitive mentality”. While

rationality is defined by the use of the

logical principles of identity, contradiction

and excluded middle and the empirical

notion of causality, primitive mentality

functions according to a law of

“participation” and magical thinking. The

law means that a person can be herself

and at the same time be –or rather

participate in the being of—her totem

animal ignoring (or rather indifferent to)

the principle of contradiction, and magical

thinking, superposing a supernatural

world to reality, allows for example action

from distance in the absence of any causal

link between two phenomena. (Levy-Bruhl

1926) For his critics, Senghor’s formula

did ratify the view of Lucien Levy-Bruhl,

while the ethnologist himself eventually

recanted them in his Notebooks of Lucien

Levy-Bruhl posthumously published ten

years after his death in 1939. Aimé

Césaire’s famous lines from The Notebook for

a Return to the Native Land echo Senghor’s

formula:

Those who have invented neither

powder nor the compass

Those who have tamed neither gas

nor electricity

Those who have explored neither the

seas nor the skies

But they abandon themselves,

possessed, to the essence of all things

Ignoring surfaces but possessed by

the movement of all things

Heedless, taking no account, but

playing the game of the world.

Truly the elder sons of the world

Porous to every breath of the world

Flesh of the flesh of the world

throbbing with the very movement of

the world.

Jean-Paul Sartre who quoted these verses

in Black Orpheus, (1976, 43–44) immediately

after made this remark: “Upon reading

this poem, one cannot help but think of

the famous distinction which Bergson

established between intelligence and

intuition” (1976, 44). That remark makes

an important point: “emotion” and

“intuition” as approaches to reality in

Négritude philosophy have more to do

with Bergsonian philosophy than with

Levy-Bruhlian ethnology. Donna Jones

rightly speaks of Negritude as an “Afro-

Bergsonian epistemology”. (Jones, 2010)

Senghor did use the language of the

author of Primitive Mentality , (Levy-Bruhl

1923) for example when he wrote in his

1956 article on “Negro African Aesthetics”

that “European reason is analytical by

utilization, Negro reason is intuitive by

participation” (1964, 203). But he also

stated clearly, as early as in 1945, six

years after the essay in which the

(in)famous formula was written: “But are

the differences not in the ratio between

elements more than in their nature?

Underneath the differences, are there not

more essential similarities? Above all, is

reason not identical among men? I do not

believe in ‘prelogical mentality.’ The mind

cannot be prelogical, and it can even less

be alogical” (1964, 42). This affirmation is

clearly directed at Levy-Bruhl. So the

influence on his thinking claimed by

Senghor is rather Henri Bergson’s. The

poet often refers to the importance of the

“1889 Revolution”, in reference to the year

of publication of Bergson’s Essay on the

immediate data of consciousness. Bergson, for

Senghor, has given a philosophical

expression to a new paradigm which,

unlike Cartesianism and, even before it,

Aristotelianism, makes room for a type of

knowledge which does not divide by

analysis the subject from the object and

the object into its constitutive separated

parts: different from the reason-that-

separates, says Senghor following Bergson,

there is a reason-that-embraces, which

makes us experience “the lived identity of

knowledge and the known, the lived and

the thought, the lived and the real” (1971,

287). That approach of reality is the other

side of our analytical intelligence:

according to Bergson, the push of life in

evolution, the élan vital, has produced

consciousness. Now “consciousness, in

man, is pre-eminently intellect. It might

have been, it ought, so it seems, to have

been also intuition. Intuition and intellect

represent two opposite directions of the

work of consciousness: intuition goes in

the very direction of life, intellect goes in

the inverse direction, and thus finds itself

naturally in accordance with the

movement of matter. A complete and

perfect humanity would be that in which

these two forms of conscious activity

should attain their full

development” (Bergson 1944, 291–292).

Clearly Bergson does not see “intuition”

and “intelligence” as dividing humanity

into different types: he calls for their equal

development in a fully accomplished

humanity.

Two conclusions can be drawn from

Senghor’s Bergsonism. First, the

epistemology of Négritude, what he calls a

Negro way of knowing does not simply

reproduce Levy-Bruhl’s radical cognitive

dualism which ultimately divides

humanity into two categories, the

European and the non-European. It is

rather a way of emphasizing the role

played by what Bergson has called

“intuition” in the production of African

cultural objects, more particularly African

art. Because, and this is the second

conclusion, when he speaks of an African

epistemology in fact Senghor is still

speaking about art and aesthetics. He is

speaking about art as knowledge, art as a

particular approach to reality, art as the

realm par excellence of intuitive

knowledge or emotion. The meaning of

“emotion” in Senghor’s formula

corresponds to its definition by Jean-Paul

Sartre as a way of seeing the world as a

“non-instrumental totality”: “in this case,

writes Sartre, the categories of the world

will act upon consciousness immediately.

They are present to it without

distance ” (Sartre 1989, 52,90).

We can now conclude with a

reexamination of Senghor’s infamous

formula, which he kept explaining again

and again: “Emotion is Negro as Reason is

Hellenic”. To pay attention to the context

in which it was written is to recall that

Senghor, in the late 1930s was absorbing

not only ethnological literature but also

writings about “art nègre”. In particular a

book that he refers to in a simple footnote

but which was very influential on his

thinking: Primitive Negro Sculpture by Paul

Guillaume and Thomas Munro, published

in the US in 1926 and translated into

French in 1929. One of the main points

made in the book was to contrast Greco-

Roman statuary expressing the ideal of the

beautiful form as it exists in reality even if

it is transfigured by art and African

sculpture as a manifestation of the life

force beneath the appearances of things.

When that context is taken into account, it

becomes clear that Senghor’s neatly

crafted formula (it is an alexandrine in

French) can be read as an analogy:

Hellenic art is to analytic reason what

African art is to emotion. And thus it

becomes less scandalous as the simple

expression of the Nietzschean way in

which Senghor’s Négritude has considered

art as knowledge and aesthetics as

epistemology. As Abiola Irele has rightly

remarked: “Senghor’s theory of the

African method of knowledge and his

aesthetic theory” are not just “intimately

related [but] even coincide” (Irele 1990,

75).

8. Négritude as politics

In 1956 Aimé Césaire wrote a resounding

public letter to Maurice Thorez, then the

General Secretary of the French

Communist Party, telling him that he was

resigning from the party. He had been a

member for more than ten years and had

been elected in 1946 as a communist

mayor of Fort-de-France then as a

Representative of France in the French

Assembly. The three “fathers” of Négritude

found themselves members of the same

French Parliament: Senghor who had been

elected a deputy from Senegal in 1946 was

sitting with the Socialists and so was Léon

Damas who got elected to represent

Guiana in 1948.

In his Letter to Maurice Thorez , Césaire

started by enumerating his many

grievances against a communist party that

had uncritically pledged total allegiance to

Russia before he came to “considerations

related to [his] position as a man of

color.” As a person of African descent,

he declared, his position expressed the

singularity of a “situation in the world

which cannot be confused with any other

… of … problems which cannot be reduced

to any other problem … [and] of [a]

history, constructed out of terrible

misfortunes, that belong to no one

else” (Césaire, 2010, 147). That is why

“black peoples”, he argued, needed to

have their own organizations, “made for

them, made by them, and adapted to ends

that they alone [could]

determine” (Césaire, 2010, 148). Césaire

insisted also that Stalinist “fraternalism,”

with its notions of the “advanced people”

who must help “peoples who are behind,”

says nothing different than “colonialist

paternalism.” (Césaire, 2010, 149)

Ultimately, what Césaire was seeking in

formulations such as “it should be

Marxism and communism at the service of

black peoples, not black peoples at the

service of the doctrine” was to define the

notion of a people by means of culture

rather than politics. And consequently he

was refusing to just dilute the cultural

dimension of the existential response of

black peoples to colonial negation in

Marxist universalism: Césaire’s “letter”

was also, eight years later, a political

response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Black

Orpheus. Is my decision an expression of

“provincialism”, Césaire asked at the end

of his letter. “Not at all”, he answered. “I

am not burying myself in a narrow

particularism. But neither do I want to

lose myself in an emaciated universalism.

There are two ways to lose oneself: walled

segregation in the particular or dilution in

the ‘universal’” (Césaire, 2010, 152).

Césaire called then for the promotion of

an “African variety of communism” as a

way of avoiding both pitfalls. Senghor also

has insisted on an African socialism born

of a “Negro African re-reading of Marx.”

This African socialism of Senghor could be

presented briefly in two fundamental

points: first the insistence that it is the

early Marx who can truly inspire an

African doctrine of socialism, second the

understanding that socialism is a natural

development of African societies and

cultures. So in article titled “Marxism and

humanism” and published in 1948 in Revue

socialiste (a Journal sponsored by the

French Socialist Party) Senghor notes that

which will later be the point of departure

for Louis Althusser’s reading of Marx:

between the early Marx and the Marx who

writes The Capital , there is an

epistemological break. It is to be recalled

here that in 1844 in Paris, Marx wrote a

certain number of texts that he just

abandoned afterwards to “the criticism of

the mice”. Those texts, known as The 1844

Manuscripts were later discovered and

published in Leipzig in 1932. They

manifest that Marx’s thinking and

language were then fundamentally ethical

as he was outraged by human condition

under capitalist regime characterized by

reification and alienation: human beings

are alienated because, Marx writes, the

product of their work sucks out their life

force and stands in front of them as

strange and hostile artifacts. Alienation is

the sentiment of living in exile and

imprisoned in a de-humanized world. The

Marx who writes the Capital will abandon

that moral language and analyze the

condition of the working class through

technical concepts, for example that of

extortion of surplus value. While

Althusser considered this break the advent

of Marxist science as an “anti-humanist

theory” Senghor saw it as self-betrayal by

Marx repudiating his identity as a

philosopher and giving to his views the

appearance of dogmatic economic

petrifactions. The task of an African re-

reading of Marx is then

1. To save Marx the humanist,

metaphysician, dialectician and artist

from a narrowly materialist,

economistic, positivist, realist Marxism;

2. To invent an African path to socialism

which is inspired by black spiritualities,

and which continues the tradition of

communalism on the continent.

The concept of alienation in particular, so

central in the writings of the early Marx

are at the heart of Senghor’s reflections on

Marxism and liberation. Liberation for

Senghor is liberation from all forces of

alienation, natural and sociopolitical. And

in his 1948 article he writes about the

early works of Marx: “For us, men of 1947,

men living after two world wars, we who

have just escaped the bloodthirsty

contempt of dictators and who are

threatened by other dictatorships, what

profit is to be had in these works of youth!

They so nicely encapsulate the ethical

principles of Marx, who proposes as the

object of our practical activity the total

liberation of man.” In Senghor’s vitalistic

philosophy, total liberation will be reached

when the human being reaches the stage

when her artistic end can now flourish,

when the evolution from homo faber to homo

sapiens has now given birth to homo artifex .

9. Négritude beyond

Négritude

Reflecting on what has been achieved by

the Négritude movement, Lucius Outlaw

notes that for all the criticisms it has

received, “nonetheless, the Négritude

arguments, fundamentally, involved a

profound displacement of the African

invented by Europeans.” And he

continues: “It is this African challenge and

displacement, through radical critique and

counter-construction, that have been

deconstructive in particularly powerful

and influential ways: involving direct

attacks on the assumed embodiment of the

paragon of humanity in whites of Europe,

an attack that forces this embodiment back

upon itself, forces it to confront its own

historicity, its own wretched history of

atrocities, and the stench of the decay

announcing the impending death of the

hegemonic ideal of the Greco-European

Rational Man” (Outlaw 1996, 67).

L. Outlaw acknowledges that that was the

main point of Sartre’s Black Orpheus. It

could now be argued that the question,

today , is no longer that of a “deconstructive

challenge” to “the hegemonic ideal of the

Greco-European Rational Man” but that of

what Outlaw calls “the reconstructive

aspects of this challenge” (Outlaw 1996,

68). Has Négritude anything to contribute,

today , to that reconstructive aspect? What

does it say about the present and future of

Black arts, since Négritude as ontology, as

epistemology, and even as politics takes us

back, according to Césaire and Senghor, to

the philosophy of art considered as a vital

knowledge of a reality conceived as a web

of forces?

To such a question, it can be said that

Césaire had given an answer in the

conclusion of his 1966 Dakar address.

There could be no prescription of what

African art should be. There is no model it

should imitate not even its own past. It

has to continuously invent itself and that

self invention is not to be separated from

the question of Africa’s self invention.

“African art of tomorrow will be worth

what Africa and the African of tomorrow

are worth”, Césaire declared before ending

his lecture with these final words: “… the

future of African art is in our hands. That

is why to the African Heads of States who

say: African artists, work to save African

art, here is what we respond: people of

Africa and first of all you, African

politicians, because you have more

responsibility, give us good African

politics, make us a good Africa, create for

us an Africa where there are still reasons

for hope, means for fulfillment, reasons to

be proud, give back to Africa dignity and

health, and African art will be

saved” (Thébia Melsan 2000, 25–26).

One way of raising the question of political

relevance is to ask: is there any room for a

version of Négritude in what could be

considered as a philosophical foundation

of black solidarity? In September 1956,

at the First Meeting of Black Writers and

Artists held in Paris, at the Sorbonne,

Aimé Césaire gave a lecture on “Culture

and Colonization” (Césaire 1956). This was

quite a historic reflection, at a time of

maturity for the Négritude movement and

just a few months before the shaking of

decolonizations started with the

independence of Ghana, on the

relationship between Négritude and Pan-

Africanism. “What is the common

denominator”, Césaire started his lecture

by asking, “in this assembly gathering

people as diverse as Africans from Black

Africa, North Americans, Caribbeans and

Malagasies?” The first obvious answer, he

declared, was that they all lived in a

situation that could be described as

colonial, semi-colonial or para-colonial. In

fact, he continued, there are two aspects in

the solidarity of people of African descent

gathered then at the Sorbonne: one that

could be characterized as “horizontal” and

one “vertical”. The horizontal solidarity is

political: Pan-Africanism or Black

solidarity between Africans and the

African Diaspora is their common

response to the situation of submission to

colonialism and racism. The vertical

solidarity or “solidarity throughout time”

is the way people of African descent

manifest different faces of an African

civilization . Not to be misunderstood,

Césaire hastens to make the precision,

with cultural commonality. African

cultures in Africa and in the African

Diaporas are at least as different as Italian

culture would be from Norwegian culture.

But they share civilizational traits in the

same way Norwegian and Italian cultures

share European traits. Césaire’s distinction

between cultures (characterized by

difference) and civilization (defined by the

existence of commonalities) would mean

that the “vertical” dimension of Pan-

Africanism is what could be identified as

Négritude. How do we see Pan-Africanism

today?

Our times are dominated by the

postcolonial and anti-essentialist view that

differences should not be subsumed under

a notion of Black identity which might

have worked as a response to colonial

negation but does not have any substantial

meaning (just what Sartre said in 1948,

when he labeled Négritude an “anti-racist

racism”, which Senghor and Césaire

forcefully dismissed, insisting that their

antiracist combat should never be

confused with racism, even a counter or a

reverse one). As an example, the créolité

movement in the Caribbean claimed

creoleness as a continuous process of

hybridization (“Neither Europeans, nor

Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim

ourselves Creoles”, the Créolité writers

famously stated at the beginning of the

manifesto (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and

Confiant 1990, 75)) turning its back on

Césaire’s Négritude and his claim of an

African heritage as constitutive of his

identity: Négritude is ante- creole, they

wrote. This movement established itself as

following from Edouard Glissant’s

philosophy of creolization. This philosophy

is based on a distinction between what

Glissant calls “atavistic cultures” grounded

in some “creation myth of the world” (a

group to which sub-Saharan African

cultures belong), and what he calls

“composite cultures” “born from

history” (Glissant 2003, 111). Thus, he

asks, “my own genesis, what is it if not the

belly of the slave ship?” Not Africa, then,

where the ship was coming from with its

hideous freight, but the journey itself, the

unpredictable becoming of the voyage to

new shores, to new continuously

proliferating, rhizomatic identities. The

Africanness of African-Americans could be

another example. The demand to be called

African-Americans after having been

“Negroes” then “Blacks” has certainly

more to do with the internal identity

politics of being Americans in the same

way Irish-Americans or Chinese-Americans

are than with any claim of substantial

solidarity with Africans. Pan-Africanism

that is engagement and solidarity with the

African continent has always been the

concern of a tiny elite among African

Americans (even if it is associated with

considerable names such as Marcus

Garvey or W.E.B. Dubois).

Within the African continent, there is

today a renewed attempt at reviving Pan-

Africanism under the form of African

unity, what is referred to sometimes as

“the United States of Africa”. The African

Union has thus divided the continent into

six great regions that should achieve

economic and political integration in a

near future as a significant step towards

continental unity. It is significant that the

decision was made to consider the African

Diasporas a symbolic sixth region. Is that a

gesture which will remain simply

symbolic, a last tip of the hat from the

new pragmatic Pan-Africanism to the

lyricism of Négritude about Black

Solidarity (it should be noted that Pan-

Africanism means that the divide between

sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb has

no significance and that Africans are black

as well as of European or Asian descent)?

In 1956, Césaire seemed to have been

conscious that a “horizontal solidarity” as

a response to a shared condition of living

under colonial and racist domination was

less problematic than a vertical solidarity

throughout time binding together peoples

who have come to develop very different

cultures or, within the same nations, very

different subcultures. He still believed in

that shared “Négritude” as a “civilization”

under which those differences would be

subsumed. But above all he believed,

against any “incarcerating conception of

identity” (2004, 92) that Négritude,

ultimately, amounts to the continuing fight

against racism: “one can renounce the

heritage”, he declared in his Miami

address but “has one the right to renounce

the fight” when one understands that what

is at stake today is not Négritude but

racism, “seats of racism” here and there

which need to be confronted if we are to

“conquer a new and larger fraternity”?

(2004, 90–92)

To dismiss too quickly Négritude as an

essentialism of the past, which might have

been necessary as a “deconstructive

challenge” to an oppressive colonial order

but has nothing to say when it comes to

the call for cosmopolitanism and

creolization, would miss an important

dimension of that multifaceted movement.

The essentialist language is pervasive

in Négritude literature, no doubt, but so is

the language of hybridity which can be

seen as undermining it the way Penelope

used to undo at night what she had woven

during the day. Senghor is as much a

thinker of “métissage” (mixture) than he is

a thinker of Négritude. His watchword,

“everyone must be mixed in their own

way” is as central to Négritude as the

defense and illustration of the values of

civilization of the black world. There is in

fact a de-racialized use of the word

“nègre” by Senghor which is crucial to

understand why painter Pablo Picasso,

poets Paul Claudel, Charles Péguy or

Arthur Rimbaud, philosopher Henri

Bergson, etc. have been somehow enrolled

by Senghor under the banner of

“Négritude”. The message being,

ultimately and maybe not so paradoxically,

that one does not have to be black to be a

“nègre”.