What is "negritude"

1950, from French négritude; see negro + -tude. Supposedly coined by young authors in the French colonies of Africa before World War II.

n. The fact of being of black African descent, especially a conscious pride in the values, cultural identity etc. of African heritage; blackness. (from 20th c.)

Négritude is a literary and ideological philosophy, developed by francophone African intellectuals, writers, and politicians in France during the 1930s. Its initiators included Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor (a future President of Senegal), and Léon Damas of French Guiana. Négritude intellectuals disapproved of French colonialism and claimed that the best strategy to oppose it was to encourage a common racial identity for black Africans worldwide. They included the Marxist ideas they favored as part of this philosophy. The writers generally used a realist literary style, and some say were also influenced somewhat by the Surrealism style, and in 1932 the manifesto "Murderous Humanitarianism" was signed by prominent Surrealists including the Martiniquans Pierre Yoyotte and J. M. Monnerot.

The term was meant to be provocative. It takes its roots from the Latin , which was used exclusively in a racist context within France. It would be used to refer to black people as nègre. Negritude sought to appropriate the word. The term was first used in its present sense by Césaire, in the third issue of L'Étudiant noir, a magazine which he had started in Paris with fellow students Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas, as well as Gilbert Gratiant, Leonard Sainville, Louis T. Achille, Aristide Maugée, and Paulette Nardal. L'Étudiant noir also includes Césaire's first published work, Conscience Raciale et Révolution Sociale with the heading "Les Idées" and the rubric "Négreries", which is notable for its disavowal of assimilation as a valid strategy for resistance and for its use of the word as a positive term. The problem with assimilation was that one assimilated into a culture that considered African culture to be barbaric and unworthy of being seen as "civilized". The assimilation into this culture would have been seen as an implicit acceptance of this view. Nègre previously had been used mainly in a pejorative sense. Césaire deliberately incorporated this derogatory word into the name of his philosophy.