The Negritude Movement: W. E. B. Du Bois, Leon Damas, Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, Franz Fanon, and the Evolution of an Insurgent Idea by Reiland Rabaka (review)

In this thought-provoking study, Reiland Rabaka locates the roots of the Negritude movement in the diaspora by examining what he calls in chapter 1 the “Prelude to Negritude”—that is, the seeds of the Negritude idea found in the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and the early evolution of Negritude as an insurgent idea. He begins with a fine-grained analysis of Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folks, particularly his notion of double consciousness and how Souls is a critical text to understanding Du Boisian Negritude. In separate chapters on the three giants of Negritude thought, Leon Damas, Aimé Césiare, and Leopold Senghor, the author focuses the reader’s attention on the specificities of the Negritude idea as developed by these writers and how their work influenced and shaped the work of Franz Fanon, a topic explored in the final chapter. Though he acknowledges the importance of women thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic in the development of the Negritude idea (57–99), these women are treated in the first section as a prelude to Negritude rather central to the Negritude moment that developed in Paris. Nevertheless, this study presents a compelling argument that Negritude as an “insurgent idea” was and continues to be central to our understanding of African peoples’ struggle against racial capitalism and colonial domination.