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The Negritude Movement provides readers with not only an intellectual history of the Negritude Movement but also its prehistory (W.E.B. Du Bois, the New Negro Movement, and the Harlem Renaissance) and its posthistory (Frantz Fanon and the evolution of Fanonism).

An innovative look at the dynamic role of sound in the culture of the African Diaspora as found in poetry, film, travel narratives, and popular music. Black Soundscapes White Stages explores the role of sound in understanding the African Diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic, from the City of Light to the islands of the French Antilles. From the writings of European travelers in the seventeenth century to short-wave radio transmissions in the early twentieth century, Edwin C. Hill Jr. uses music, folk song, film, and poetry to listen for the tragic cri nègre. Building a conceptualization of black Atlantic sound inspired by Frantz Fanon's pioneering work on colonial speech and desire, Hill contends that sound constitutes a terrain of contestation, both violent and pleasurable, where colonial and anti-colonial ideas about race and gender are critically imagined, inscribed, explored, and resisted. In the process, this book explores the dreams and realizations of black diasporic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, and it poses questions about their legacies for us today. In the process, thee dreams and realities of Black Atlantic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, such as the poetry of Léon-Gontran Damas—a founder of the Négritude movement—and Josephine Baker's performance in the 1935 film Princesse Tam Tam. As the first in Johns Hopkins's new series on the African Diaspora, this book offers new insight into the legacies of these exceptional artists and their global influence.

In this volume, African and Caribbean writers who are concerned with contemporary issues, demonstrate the vitality of Negritude as a poetic, philosophical and literary movement and as an ideological response to oppression that is still relevant in its presentation of cultures.

Reilly talks abut Negritude's Contretemps. At some point, nearly every one of negritude's lexicological elements has been disputed: definition; etymology; date of coining; and person responsible for coining. These contretemps hinder the understanding not only of the word but also of the idea that it names. Filtering out the interfering reverberations of the present will allow to hear Cesaire's syncopated negritude anew as it was in the past at the moment of its coining.

This article analyzes the proceedings of the First Congress of Black Writers within the context of the global Cold War, teasing out the contradictory political agendas that subtended this foundational event for black writing and African literature. It treats the First Congress as a spectacle designed by Alioune Diop, founder and editor of Présence Africaine, in order to create before the Cold War world an image of a unified black collectivity: a (geo) political impact that Diop envisioned for his conference ostensibly limited to discussions of culture. The article explores the rhetorical strategies by which Diop maintained an image of consensus among a caucus of delegates who were in fact deeply divided politically. It discusses Diop's invocation of the 1955 Bandung Conference, his deliberately broad definition of culture, and his deployment of liberal human rights discourse as consensual strategies that cohere to project an image of a transatlantic black civic culture already independent and sovereign in all but name.

This article explores the literary criticism of the South African writer Es'kia Mphahlele by placing it within the context of the cultural Cold War. As the author of The African Image (1962; revised edition, 1974), one of the landmark works in midcentury Afrocentric criticism, Mphahlele helped to usher in a new era for African literary criticism, pushing it away from négritude's politicized judgments and toward a more self-consciously academic format. This article examines how Mphahlele constructed this newly academicized form of literary criticism by borrowing liberally from aesthetic discourses normally associated with US and Soviet cultural diplomacy programs. In particular, it describes how Mphahlele adapted a modernist language of “character,” taken from the writings of Lionel Trilling and E. M. Forster, only to apply this language to its ideological opposite: a social theory rooted in Marxian notions of class division. By doing so, Mpahahlele managed to find a way to generalize his own relationship to his South African audience—remote, uncertain, and riddled by class divisions—into a model for how literary criticism could represent an increasingly fragmented social sphere.

The objective of this essay is to inscribe Abiola Irele into the African philosophical discourse through a philosophical scrutiny of his own negritude analysis. And the justification for this exercise goes beyond the attempt to recognize the philosophical import of Irele's literary oeuvres. It is also a significant attempt at challenging the parochial arrogance of (African) philosophy, which hinges the term “philosopher” around the narrow qualification of being a professional philosopher. The significance of expanding the African philosophical discourse creates the possibility for a transdisciplinary space that allows for a multifaceted confrontation of the African predicament around the discipline of philosophy. Grounded on the idea of discourse as “the continued, enduring and interactive exchange, creation, and debate of shared interpretations (meanings),” the essay outlines a sense in which Irele's critical analysis of negritude can serve as a means by which we can update the lopsided critique of ethnophilosophy. This makes it possible to reintroduce the significance of Africa's self-imperative within the urgency of modern consciousness.

Since African Francophone bandes dessinées are a subset of print culture, their production, distribution, and consumption closely resemble that of African Francophone literature. European publishers and festivals remain crucial gatekeepers while African festivals are supported by European institutions and feature European cartoonists. Similarly, editors and well-established cartoonists often inhabit the paratextual space in many bandes dessinées, thus generating a patronage system in which African cartoonists heralded by European cultural brokers go on to validate the talent of other cartoonists. However, since the rise of such bandes dessinées occurred well after the height of Négritude and decades after the era of mega-festivals in Africa, including Léopold Senghor's FESMAN, cartoonists benefit from lessons learned by previous generations. Focusing on cartoonists' participation and performance, this article considers recent festivals to examine how such events and their byproducts reveal and challenge neocolonial trends and ideologies embedded in the global marketplace.

This paper argues that Negritude as both a literary and political movement was very instrumental in the liberation of Africa and the Black world from colonial subjugation and racial segregation in the early 1930s through to the 1960s. However, its contribution to both the literary and political world has often been engulfed in a mist, subjecting its relevance to posthumous ambivalence with different literary scholars offering their own insights into their understanding of the movement, and thus, its existence is fundamental in the continued postcolonial struggle against the league of mandarins that replaced the colonial oppressors. Therefore, this work provides an analysis of the rise and fall of Negritude as both a literary and political movement, with focus on a comprehensive understanding of how the movement crumbled.

[...]challenges to whiteness are discouraged or prevented. Tracing the progression of anti-Black White supremacy in literature reveals exactly when, where, why, and for what purpose racial denigration was created and perpetuated. [...]we have the current protestation that identity politics are divisive, but not so much the history from which those identities have been drawn. [...]Black writers are tasked with determining how they will deal with their Blackness on the page. First of all, I want to describe the cover of Gadsons work as an initial entry point.