Decolonizing the Mind

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Negritude's writers described their own project, in a phrase that has outlived the movement itself, as a decolonization of the mind: the argument that political independence from a colonial power meant little if the colonized still measured their own culture against the colonizer's standard. Senghor and Damas each carried that argument past the founding magazine and into the wider world of print, editing anthologies meant to put Black francophone poetry in front of readers who had never been offered it as literature worth reading on its own terms; Damas's Poetes d'expression francaise appeared in 1946, followed two years later by Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache de langue francaise, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre that helped introduce the movement to a wider French readership. Negritude's reach extended across the francophone world, from Cesaire's Martinique to Senghor's Senegal to Damas's French Guiana, three points on three different continents united by a shared colonial language and a shared refusal to let that language define their culture's worth.