The Negritude Moment: Explorations in Francophone African and Caribbean Literature and Thought (review)

The Negritude Moment is a collection of essays on negritude that Abiola Irele first published between 1965 and 2004 and that therefore span his scholarly career from his thesis for the doctorat de troisième cycle at the Sorbonne (Les origines de la Négritude à la Martinique: sociologie de l'oeuvre d'Aimé Césaire). As a Cameroonian reading these essays, I had a feeling close in many ways, I imagine, to that of a German reading the mostly sympathetic exegesis of Nietzsche or Heidegger written by a French philosopher after 1945: that is, reading most of French postwar philosophy. This statement is not an overstretch, for the sojourn of thinkers, critics, and writers in history is never innocent. Such a sojourn is called a movement when manufactured by the thinkers and writers themselves or by their contemporaries, and it bears influences when it is independent of their personal industry and future.

The Negritude Moment is about both the movement and influence of negritude. In Abiola Irele, that movement, which originated in francophone Africa and more specifically took root in Paris, has had one of its most important translators and apologists in anglophone Africa. As a movement, negritude was manufactured by and around the personality of Senghor, Césaire, and Damas (the most forgotten of the triumvirate, including in this book where Damas is not even named once) and has had an undisputed influence across the globe, for which the level of appraisal and criticism it has caused are a testament. To me, a francophone African, Irele's critical oeuvre has always been the most interesting to read (and teach) in that regard, and The Negritude Moment can easily be read as a continuation of The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, the book and classic for which he is best known. Like The African Experience, this new work gives an insight into the perspective, the angle through which the most revered critic of African letters addresses his topic—that of sympathy.

Abiola Irele is indeed the most sympathetic as well as the most powerful translator of francophone letters for anglophone readers. Here the task of the translator (to use Walter Benjamin's phrase) will have to be understood at a deeper level than that of a translator of words, for Irele has never published such a basic work. Instead, he has been a translator of thoughts. And this effort goes beyond the simple dissemination of thoughts formulated and published in French by Africans, or the criticism and teaching of francophone studies in English (both in Nigeria and the U.S.), to include the translation of concepts. Such a work, unique in its kind in the landscape of African studies, is thus only possible by postulating a singularity of the francophone mind, here understood in the historico-philosophical sense. And this is the single and most unifying trait that runs through The Negritude Moment, as its most evident but also questionable denominator, well beyond the self-imposed choice of essays on "negritude," all of which Irele has previously published in diverse journals.

Of Paulin Hountondji he writes that his intellectual trajectory "is inscribed within a framework of an intellectual adventure that perhaps only a francophone African could have gone through" (224). That this postulate could easily be valid for Senghor, Césaire, and even Camara Laye, the writers and thinkers to which the book is mostly dedicated, stands without doubt. Well aware of the questionable ground on which his postulate rests, Irele prevents the criticism of having transformed a contingent distinction into a philosophical one, by addressing it himself to Ezekiel Mphahlele, who also presupposes a singularity of the francophone mind. "It would not be difficult," he writes, "to show that Mphahlele's distinction between francophone Africans and Africans colonized by the British is not only inadequate as an explanation, but it also ignores the facts of the historical development of a theory of...