"my négritude
is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the day
my négritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth's
dead eye
my négritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it takes root in the red flesh of the soil
it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky
it breaks through the opaque prostration with its upright patience"
-- Aimé
Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal
KEY INDIVIDUALS
& WORKS
Leon Damas
(French Guyana), Pigments (1937)
Aimé Césaire
(Martinique), Cahier
d’un retour au pays natal / Notebook
of a Return to the Native Land (1939; translated into English
in 1968) [links are to excerpts only]
---. The
Collected Poetry
(1983)
Leopold
Senghor (Senegal; one of the few native Africans involved in the
movement & eventually the first president of the Republic of Senegal),
Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache de langue francaise
(1948)
---. Foundations of “Africanite” or “Negritude”
and “arabite” (1971)
---. Negritude et humanisme (1964)
JOURNALS
L'Étudiant Noir (The Black Student)
Tropiques (1941-)
Présence Africaine
INFLUENCES
- Ethnology, especially Leo
Frobenius' History of African Civilization (1936), which
showed the complexity and development of African civilizations and suggested
that these civilizations were unique in their own right as opposed to
being derivative of the European
- Harlem
Renaissance poets and writers
- Surrealism,
in its distinguishing of the categories of European/African & its
interest in the unconscious and its relation to dreams (Aragon, Breton,
Dali, Crevel and others)
SECONDARY REFERENCES
Robin D.G. Kelly, "Poetry
and the Political Imagination: Aimé Césaire, Negritude,
& the Applications of Surrealism"(July 2001)
A. James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude:The Poetry and Poetics
of Aimé Césaire (1981)
Keith Q Warner, ed. Critical Perspectives on Leon Gontran Damas
(1988)
Lilyan Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of
Negritude (1974)
Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (1975)