Negritude

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 began, as so many literary movements have, with a small magazine run by students. In Paris in the 1930s, three young men from French colonies, Aime Cesaire of Martinique, Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal and Leon Damas of French Guiana, co-founded L'Etudiant noir, and it was in that magazine's May-June 1935 issue that the word Negritude is credited with its first appearance in print. The three had come to Paris under France's policy of cultural assimilation, which asked colonial subjects to become culturally French in exchange for a measure of civic standing, and their magazine argued the opposite case: that Black identity and African heritage carried their own value, not measured against a French or European standard. Senghor went on to a political career unmatched by almost any other literary founder in this atlas's roster of movements, serving as Senegal's first president after independence and remaining in office until 1980, nearly half a century after his student magazine first put the movement's name into print.

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.