## 1. The genesis of the concept



The concept of Negritude 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: Aime Cesaire
(1913-2008) from Martinique, Leon Gontran Damas
(1912-1978) from Guiana and Leopold Sedar 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. Aime
Cesaire and Leon 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 Cesaire had been
accepted at Lycee Louis Le Grand to study for the highly
selective test for admission to the prestigious Ecole Normale
Superieure on rue d'Ulm. Upon his arrival at the
Lycee on the first day of classes he met Senghor who had
already been a student at Louis le Grand for three years.



Cesaire 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.[1]
 Cesaire, Damas and Senghor had individual lived experiences of
their feeling of revolt against a world of racism and colonial
domination. In the case of Cesaire that feeling was expressed
in his detestation of Martinique which, as he confessed in an
interview with French author Francoise Verges, 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" (Cesaire 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
"negritude" 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. Cesaire 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" (Cesaire 2005, 28).



Beyond the encounter between Africa and the French Caribbean
Cesaire, 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
Andree 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 negritude 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 Cesaire, 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, Cesaire, and Damas.


## 2. Negritude as revolt / Negritude as philosophy



Conventionally, the founding moment of the Negritude movement was the
creation, in 1934-1935, of the journal *L'Etudiant
noir* (The Black Student), to take the place of another
periodical, *L'Etudiant martiniquais* (The Martiniquan
Student), a move from the consideration of a regional origin to the
affirmation of the call made by Jane Nardal for a "black
internationalism". That is when Aime Cesaire
coined for that conscience of a global blackness the concept of
"negritude". It was meant to be aggressive, provocative,
disturbing, as it turned around, reclaimed, and appropriated the
French word "negre" which, from its etymological
meaning as "black", had become a racist slur. The
philosophers of Negritude have often said that they too were sensitive
to the provocative nature of the word. But they were also conscious of
the force of a concept constructed to be an irritant about which
Cesaire has 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
Negritude 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"
(Cesaire 2004, 80). "What is that reality?"
Cesaire proceeded then asking. Indeed, that is the question: is
there a content and a substance of the concept of Negritude
beyond the revolt and the proclamation? In other words, is
Negritude mainly a posture of revolt against oppression the
manifestation of which is primarily the poetry it has produced, or
does it have the substantial significance of a philosophy that gives
different expressions to an African presence, to a distinctive black
way of being-in-the-world? The answer oscillates between the two
terms of the alternative. Negritude as both a resounding poetic scream
and the philosophical project to retrieve and explore an identity
found the most eloquent expression in an address Aime
Cesaire gave in Geneva on June 2nd 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 *Aime
Cesaire, pour regarder le siecle en face*, the poet
from Martinique declares:



> 
> ... when it appeared the literature of Negritude 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,
> Negre."
>   
> 
> 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. (Thebia-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 Negritude writers. Nevertheless, it
can be said that Cesaire and Damas have put more emphasis on
the dimension of poetic revolt while Senghor has insisted more on
articulating Negritude 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 Negritude



Following the example of Alain Locke, Leon Damas in 1947 and
Leopold Sedar Senghor a year later published
*Anthologies* of poetry to manifest the existence of
Negritude as an aesthetics and as a literary movement.



In the "Introduction" to his *Poetes
d'expression francaise 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 Negritude, 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 Negritude (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 Negritude
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
Lero's, whose "Misere d'une
poesie" ("Poverty of a Poetry") he quotes
 abundantly.[2]
 In a vitalistic language that characterizes Negritude
Leon Damas opposes, using Lero'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 Lero'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 Negritude
as a vital poetic force that Damas (and Lero) 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 poesie
negre et malgache de langue francaise*, (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
Negritude 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
"*melaniens*" (Senghor 1948, 2)). But what
contributed greatly to the fame of the *Anthology* and
propelled Negritude 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 Negritude 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 Negritude 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
Negritude and as "miraculous
 weapons"[3]
 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
Negritude 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 Mallarme to the Surrealists" (1976, 25).
Therefore, Sartre concludes, Negritude has achieved that goal:
the poets of Negritude have taken to its end what surrealist
writers had been calling for.



So while he praised Negritude 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, Negritude 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 Negritude 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 Negritude has
permitted the blacks to "raise relentlessly the great negro cry
until the foundations of the world shall tremble"
(Cesaire'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 Negritude 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 Negritude 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.[4]
 And in fact, ironically, *Black Orpheus* contained and
announced most of the criticisms that would be directed at
Negritude afterwards. First the criticism which very quickly
came from certain Marxists who accused Negritude 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.[5]
 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 Negritude, 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 Negritude 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 Negritude 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 Negritude: that
Negritude was indeed an ontology, an epistemology, an
aesthetics and a politics.


## 5. Negritude as ontology



When it comes to defining the substance of Negritude, there is
an important difference between the three main heralds 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
Cesaire, he has often insisted that Negritude was
primarily the reclaiming of a heritage in order to regain initiative.
He declared:



> 
> Negritude, in my eyes, is not a philosophy. Negritude is
> not a metaphysics. Negritude 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)[6]
> 



Unlike Damas and Cesaire, Senghor affirmed that
Negritude 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
Negritude" 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)[7]



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 Cesaire had just finished a
version of his *Cahier d'un retour au pays natal*
("Notebook of a return to my Native Land" (Cesaire
2000a)), Senghor had published an essay on the philosophy of
Negritude 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 *Presence 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
Leopold Sedar Senghor and his friend Aime
Cesaire 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,
Cesaire's reaction was one of rejection. It is not that
Cesaire 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*
[8],"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" (Cesaire 2000b, 58). In
fact what provoked Cesaire's skepticism and sarcasm
vis-a-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
..." (Cesaire 2000b, 58) Above all, there is for
Cesaire, 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"* (Cesaire 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"
(Cesaire 2000b, 58).



In sum, in the eyes of Senghor, Tempels' *Bantu
philosophy*, along with Bergson's philosophy of
*elan vital*, provided the language of life philosophy
which he considered characteristic of the cultures of Africa and those
of African
 origin.[9]
 For him Negritude is an ontology of life forces to be
described as a vitalism. Cesaire 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. Negritude as aesthetics



The aspect on which Senghor insists the most is that of
Negritude 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 Trocadero
in Paris. By then the vogue of *art negre* (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, Cesaire 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".[10]



Senghor wanted Negritude 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'etre 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
negre* 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
Trocadero 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."[11]
 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
Negritude, "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.[12]
> 



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. Aime Cesaire, 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").[13]
 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"
(Thebia-Melsan 2000, 22). What Negritude poets did even
if he does not like the word Negritude at all, declares
Cesaire, 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, Cesaire's views
follow consistently from his surrealist poetics and eventually
converge with his friend Senghor's. Cesaire's
notion of the primordial role that should be played by the
*Dionysian* in art versus the *Apollonian*. These are
categories that Cesaire 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. Cesaire 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*[14]
 and it is in perfect resonance with Senghor's view of African
art as the language of the ontology of vital forces.



In conclusion, Negritude 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. Cesaire, 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 Cesaire's
"Discourse on African Art" delivered in Dakar on April 6,
1966, at the opening of the "World Festival of Negro Arts"
summarize Negritude 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" (Thebia-Melsan, 2000, 21).



And it can be argued that it is because of that significance of art
that Negritude also presented itself as another type of
knowledge or epistemology and as another politics.


## 7. Negritude 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 Negritude:
"Emotion is Negro, as reason is Hellenic"
("*L'emotion est negre, comme la raison
hellene*"). (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. Aime
Cesaire'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 Negritude 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 *elan
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 Negritude, 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. That concept is to be understood in relation to
the distinction made by Henri Bergson in his 1932 book on *The two
sources of morality and Religion* between two opposed notions
of "emotion". One that is a reaction, a "stirring of
sensibility by representation" (Bergson 1932 [1977, 43]), and one that
is "a cause and not an effect", that is "pregnant
with representations" (Bergson 1932 [1977, 44]). The first Bergson
calls "infra-intellectual" while the second is
"supra-intellectual" (Bergson 1932 [1977, 44]). Clearly,
Senghor's "emotion" corresponds to the creative one,
the one "pregnant with representations". Its
meaning in Senghor's formula is also consonant
with 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 negre". 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
Negritude 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). Senghor considers that
method, that form of *vital knowledge*, as "the way
of the Africans" and he declares that Bergsonism represents but
"a return" to it (Senghor, 1993, 125).


## 8. Negritude as politics



In 1956 Aime Cesaire 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
Negritude 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 Leon Damas who got
elected to represent Guiana in 1948.



In his *Letter to Maurice Thorez*, Cesaire 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."[15]
 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" (Cesaire, 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" (Cesaire, 2010, 148).
Cesaire 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."
(Cesaire, 2010, 149)



Ultimately, what Cesaire 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: Cesaire's
"letter" was also, eight years later, a political response
to Jean-Paul Sartre's *Black Orpheus.* Is my decision an
expression of "provincialism", Cesaire 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'" (Cesaire, 2010, 152).



Cesaire 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. Negritude beyond Negritude



Reflecting on what has been achieved by the Negritude movement,
Lucius Outlaw notes that for all the criticisms it has received,
"nonetheless, the Negritude 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
Negritude anything to contribute, *today*, to that
reconstructive aspect? What does it say about the present and future
of Black arts, since Negritude as ontology, as epistemology,
and even as politics takes us back, according to Cesaire 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 Cesaire 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", Cesaire 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"
(Thebia Melsan 2000, 25-26).



One way of raising the question of political relevance is to ask: is
there any room for a version of Negritude in what could be
considered as a philosophical foundation of black
 solidarity?[16]
 In September 1956, at the First Meeting of Black Writers and Artists
held in Paris, at the Sorbonne, Aime Cesaire gave a
lecture on "Culture and Colonization" (Cesaire
1956). This was quite a historic reflection, at a time of maturity for
the Negritude movement and just a few months before the shaking
of decolonizations started with the independence of Ghana, on the
relationship between Negritude and Pan-Africanism. "What
is the common denominator", Cesaire 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, Cesaire hastens
to make the precision, with cultural commonality. African cultures in
Africa and in the African Diasporas 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. Cesaire'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 Negritude. 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 Negritude an "anti-racist
racism", which Senghor and Cesaire forcefully dismissed,
insisting that their antiracist combat should never be confused with
racism, even a counter or a reverse one). As an example, the
*creolite* movement in the Caribbean claimed
creoleness as a continuous process of hybridization ("Neither
Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves
Creoles", the Creolite writers famously stated at
the beginning of the manifesto (Bernabe, Chamoiseau, and
Confiant 1990, 75)) turning its back on Cesaire's
Negritude and his claim of an African heritage as constitutive
of his identity: Negritude 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 Negritude 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, Cesaire 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 "Negritude" as a
"civilization" under which those differences would be
subsumed. But above all he believed, against any "incarcerating
conception of identity" (2004, 92) that Negritude,
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 Negritude 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 Negritude 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.[17]
 The essentialist language is pervasive in Negritude
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
"metissage" (mixture) than he is a thinker of
Negritude. His watchword, "everyone must be mixed in
their own way" is as central to Negritude 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
"negre" by Senghor which is crucial to understand
why painter Pablo Picasso, poets Paul Claudel, Charles Peguy or
Arthur Rimbaud, philosopher Henri Bergson, etc. have been somehow
enrolled by Senghor under the banner of
"Negritude". The message being, ultimately and
maybe not so paradoxically, that one does not have to be black to be a
"negre".