Into the Heart of the Great Wilderness: Understanding Baldwin’s Quarrel with Négritude

This article analyzes James Baldwin’s 1957 essay, “Princes and Powers,” a critical assessment of the historic Paris Conference of Black Writers and Artists of September 1956. It registers and productively explores Baldwin’s intellectual tensions with an older generation of anticolonial activists, specific attending to his critical remarks on the conference presentations of the Négritude poets Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor. While the article takes issue with important elements of Baldwin’s analysis, it also points out Baldwin’s often unconscious affinities with the larger perspectives discussed in the conference, and considers these affinities as harbingers of his subsequent intellectual and activist trajectories.