Negritude: Legacy and Present Relevance (review)

This collection of essays on Negritude is based on the proceedings of a conference marking the centenary of Senghor's birth, held at the University of the West Indies, Barbados. Although the editors note that the setting for the conference will be little known to many of the book's intended readers, the volume comprises contributions from scholars from across the world and provides a broad and up-to-date response to the Negritude movement, conceived as still highly relevant today. Both the foreword, written by Jane Bryce, Head of the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature at the host institution, and the Introduction by the editors, printed in both French and English, argue that Negritude should not be dismissed as an outmoded, essentialist fetishisation of black culture, but on the contrary should be celebrated and probed further so as to reveal its complex and dynamic development. Indeed, for Bryce the very key to Senghor's conception of Negritude is precisely not its return to an originary African identity but 'its anti-essentialism, prefiguring Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Kristeva, Spivak … the prophets of post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, Postmodernism and Postcolonialism' (pp. xi–xii). This slightly hyperbolic statement aside, the virtue of the collection is its resolve to uncover the multiple dimensions of the Negritude movement, and to show not only that its original proponents used it to promote a highly nuanced understanding of the place of black identity within the universal, but also that a range of more recent postcolonial writers draw more or less consciously on Negritude philosophy. The articles in this bilingual study inevitably vary in quality, with some pieces merely repeating summaries of the movement's basic tenets and others exploring the work of subsequent writers without specifying very precisely the role of Negritude in such works. Nevertheless, the volume is remarkable for its dedication to uncovering the broad scope of the Negritude movement, including the varying understandings of the term offered by some of the original voices (Senghor and Césaire, but also Jean Price-Mars and Kamau Braithwaite), the links between Negritude poetry and contemporary politics, law and human rights discourses, and the evolution of Negritude thought by subsequent generations (Dangarembga, Chamoiseau, Kourouma, Sow Fall, as well as Reinaldo Arenas, Lasana Mwanza Sekou, Luis Pales Matos). Like many volumes based on conference proceedings, the collection could have benefited from a more concerted attempt on the part of the editors to bring the essays together: the introduction is brief and there is no unifying conclusion. However, the book constitutes an honourable attempt to rehabilitate Negritude in the wake of its vilification by the critics. It succeeds in showing both that the movement's history is intricate and multifaceted, and that its continued regeneration offers ways of imagining black identity suitable not only for the moment of decolonisation but also for the contemporary epoch of postcoloniality and globalisation.