Negritude Philosophy
from 1935
Black identity affirmed as a value rather than a deficiency, by students in Paris who had been taught it was the second thing.
- Active
- from 1935
- Where
- Paris, Senegal and Martinique
- Also
- Négritude
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- African
The claim
There is a shared black cultural inheritance with its own value, and assimilation to European norms is not progress but loss. Rhythm, participation and emotion are ways of knowing rather than failures to think.
What it held
Negritude began among African and Caribbean students in 1930s Paris, educated in a system that offered them French culture as the destination and their own as the point of departure. Césaire coined the word and used it first in a long poem; Senghor and Damas developed it.
The philosophical claim is about ways of knowing. Senghor argued that European reason analyses by standing apart from its object while African reason participates in it — and put this in a formula he spent decades regretting: emotion is African as reason is Hellenic. He meant it as a claim about two valid modes; it was read as conceding the stereotype.
That is the fault line. Fanon, who was Césaire's student, argued that negritude is a necessary stage in shedding an imposed inferiority and a trap if you stay in it. Soyinka's line — that a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude — is the sharpest version of the objection.
Césaire's own version is more political and less essentialist than Senghor's. His Discourse on Colonialism argues that colonialism decivilises the coloniser, and that Europe's fascism was its colonial methods coming home.
How it argued
Poetry as philosophical statement, plus essays, plus — in Senghor's case — the presidency of a country.
What it was arguing against
French assimilationist policy, which offered citizenship in exchange for cultural erasure, and the assumption that European norms are universal.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether it essentialises. Senghor's formulations are the most vulnerable and Césaire's the most defensible, and the two are routinely collapsed.
Common misconceptions
That it is a single position. Césaire's political and historical version and Senghor's cultural-ontological version differ substantially, and the criticisms that land on one often miss the other.
How it began
Three students in Paris — from Martinique, Senegal and French Guiana — who found they had more in common with each other than with what they were being taught.
What became of it
Living as a literary and political inheritance, superseded as a philosophical position by postcolonial thought that took the criticisms on board.
Lasting influence
African independence movements. Fanon, who both used and attacked it. Afrocentrism and later black cultural politics.
Why it still matters
The question of whether affirming a marginalised identity requires essentialising it is exactly the argument now being had in several other fields.
Put another way
A word coined as an insult, picked up and worn deliberately.
Where to start
The Discourse on Colonialism. Short, furious, and the argument is unmistakable.
The surprising bit
Senghor became the first president of Senegal, governed for twenty years, resigned voluntarily, and was elected to the Académie française — the first African to hold a seat.
In their own words
My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamour of the day.
A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude.
Connections
- Answers
- Ethnophilosophy
- Influenced
- Consciencism, Modernity-Coloniality School
The verdict
A movement that gave a generation its self-description and then had to be argued out of by the generation after.