Negritude - Influences, Philosophy And Practice: Césaire, Philosophy And Practice: Senghor, Bibliography
senegal black french martinique
An aesthetic and literary movement inaugurated in the 1930s that centers on the creative potential of black consciousness, negritude was one of the premier cultural phenomena of the twentieth century. Curiously, negritude has no originating text as such; it took root and flourished in Paris in the mid-1930s, fed by the writings of two black scholars from the French colonies, Aimé Césaire (b. 1913) of Martinique and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) of Senegal. Both of these figures would go on to become major writers, and each would play a leading role in the political life of his respective country of origin. Senghor became the first president of an independent Senegal, and Césaire served simultaneously
as mayor of the Martinican capital, Fort-de-France, and as Martinique's representative to the French National Assembly for more than forty-five years.
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Negritude became internationally recognized with the publication of Césaire's book-length poem, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Return to my native land) in 1939. The Césaire-Senghor collaboration that led up to this moment was indeed serendipitous. They met as colonial scholarship students in Paris. Each had been strongly influenced by the scope for rehabilitating black …
Drawing on a binary structure that, as we shall see, would ultimately lead to its undoing, negritude sought to ground and, indeed, to legitimize the difference of the black aesthetic in a set of biological concepts meant to firmly separate the black experience from the white experience. Initially, however, from an artistic perspective, its founders drew heavily on French surrealism. This radical m…
Senghor differed from Césaire in both his vision and his practice of negritude; for him, opposing the values of Europe to those of the African world led him to valorize life forces as the essential framework grounding his poetic portraits of African civilization. Arriving in Paris in 1928 on a partial scholarship in literary studies, he studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the Sorbonn…
Arnold, A. James. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. Bâ, Sylvia Washington. The Concept of Negritude in the Poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973. Cailler, Bernadette. Proposition poétique: une lecture de l'oeuvre d'Aimé C…
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User Comments
8 months ago
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8 months ago
African literature can not easily be defined but use the book "criticism and ideology",because even African writers failed to meet a complete conclusion on what is African literature,am in Tanzania taking bachelor of art in literature,check me on my email
8 months ago
African literature can not easily be defined but use the book "criticism and ideology",because even African writers failed to meet a complete conclusion on what is African literature,am in Tanzania taking bachelor of art in literature,check me on my email
9 months ago
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12 months ago
Negritude can be seen as a concept and also as a movement.Aime Cesaire was the first person to use the word--Negritude in his poem Cahier un d'retour du bays natal(Return to My Native Land).
Leopold Senghor was also a follower--or co-propounder of the theory.
CALEB ADOH
ENGLISH DEPT.
UNIVERSITY OF LAGOS,NIGERIA