Nostalgia and Postcolonial Utopia in Senghor’s Négritude

Abstract

Négritude took shape as a plural movement, at the nexus of theory, literature and politics, in the 1930s and after the Second World War, in Paris, around the figures of Leopold Sédar Senghor, Birago Diop, Aimé Césaire and Léon Gontran Damas. The concept of Négritude, such as Leopold Sédar Senghor theorised it, was received with hostility but also with passion. For many it still appears as outdated and obsolete. Stanislas Adotevi, Marcien Towa, Mongo Beti, to name only a few, have rejected the concept of Senghor’s Négritude. Senghor’s theorisation of Négritude is twofold. The term Négritude, which was first coined by Césaire during the 1930s, consists of subjective and objective aspects in Senghor’s view. Subjectively, it refers to an experience lived by Blacks and grounded in the historical form of their human condition in the face of the violence of slavery and colonisation. It comprises ‘all the values of the black civilisation’ (Senghor, 1988, p. 158). In Senghor’s early writings, this so-called objective Négritude was based on the assertion of a dichotomy between European rationalism and emotion, usually ascribed to the black man. This aspect was prominent in an early essay published in 1939, ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’, exemplified in the now famous phrase: ‘Emotion is black as much as reason is Greek.’1 This dichotomy appeared as an avatar of the Lévy-Bruhlian thought of ‘primitive mentality’, as if Senghor’s Négritude ‘accepted colonial stereotypes’ (Jones, 2010, p. 131), thus encouraging a discourse that implies a racial and absolutised approach to difference.