Summary of Negritude
Negritude was a Black-led intellectual, literary, and cultural movement that emerged in Paris in the 1930s among African and Caribbean writers, artists, and thinkers living under or shaped by French colonial rule. Closely connected to the Harlem Renaissance and influenced by anti-colonial, Marxist, and modernist thought, the movement sought to reclaim Black identity from the distortions of racism, colonialism, and Eurocentrism. Negritude rejected the idea that African and diasporic cultures were inferior or "primitive," instead affirming Black history, aesthetics, spirituality, and ways of knowing as valuable and foundational to global culture. While it began as a literary movement, Negritude expanded into visual art, philosophy, and politics, playing a critical role in shaping cultural consciousness during the era of decolonization and beyond.
Key Ideas & Accomplishments
- Negritude reframed Black identity as intellectual and creative authority, asserting that Black people were not merely subjects of history or anthropology, but active producers of philosophy, literature, and art. It challenged Western dominance over cultural narratives by insisting on Black self-definition.
- As a movement, Negritude linked cultural liberation to political liberation through a lasting case that independence and civil rights could not be achieved without cultural renewal. This idea profoundly influenced postcolonial leaders, artists, and educators across Africa and the diaspora.
- Negritude artists and writers reshaped modernism beyond Europe by integrating African traditions, rhythm, myth, and symbolisminto contemporary forms, demonstrating that modern art was not solely a European invention.
- By connecting African, Caribbean, and African American thinkers across Paris, Harlem, and the colonial world, Negritude helped establish a global Black intellectual community that crossed national and linguistic boundaries.
- Negritude directly influenced later cultural and political movements including Pan-Africanism, the Black Arts Movement, Afro-Surrealism, Afrofuturism, and Black Consciousness, shaping how Black identity continues to be articulated today.
Progression of Art
Les Fétiches
Lois Mailou Jones was an African American artist born in Boston. She earned a degree in design from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1927. In the summer of 1928, she attended classes at Howard University in Washington D.C. (where she would later teach as well as earn a degree in art education) and decided to shift her focus from design to painting. She began spending her summers in New York City where she became involved in the Harlem Renaissance. In 1937, she received a fellowship to study in Paris at the Académie Julian. She fell in love with the city and enjoyed painting watercolors en plein air. She later recalled "The French were so inspiring. The people would stand and watch me and say 'mademoiselle, you are so very talented. You are so wonderful.' In other words, the color of my skin didn't matter in Paris and that was one of the main reasons why I think I was encouraged and began to really think I was talented." After this initial visit, she made annual return trips to France and became an important figure of the Negritude movement. During her first trip to France, Jones had met French artist Celine Marie Tabary in Cabris (in the French Riviera), and the two women shared a studio for a time. They developed a close friendship, and when Tabary emigrated to the United States in 1938, Jones helped her find a teaching job in the arts department at Howard University. In the following years, when war prevented Jones and Tabary from returning to France, they established a Parisian-style salon, "The Little Paris Group," at Jones' studio in D.C., where local artists (including Alma Thomas, Delilah Pierce, and Richard Dempsey) came to meet and exchange critiques.
Jones' oeuvre is in large part indebted to her collaborative relationship with notable writers of the Harlem Renaissance. She explained that after her first trip to France, "[Harlem Renaissance writer] Alain Locke said, 'Congratulations, I love what you did, I love your street scenes, and your studies of the Luxembourg Garden [...] but you've got to do something with your heritage, the black subject.' Locke, with DuBois and Marcus Garvey, really instilled in us the philosophy of the 'Black is Beautiful' period. It hit me really hard, that maybe this was something I should do." From this point onward, she shifted focus in her art to African American subjects, what she called her "Black Art period." Her renowned 1947 painting Parisian Beggar Woman featured an accompanying text by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. However, it is her 1938 painting Les Fétiches that is credited with bringing the Negritude movement, hitherto primarily an intellectual/political and literary movement, into the realm of the visual arts.
Les Fétiches, painted in Paris, depicts five overlapping African masks and a small red religious fetish set against a black background. Jones's interest in African masks began during her undergraduate studies in Boston, where she met costume designer Grace Ripley. While working with Ripley during evenings and weekends, Jones became deeply engaged with traditional African masks and costumes, later explaining that Les Fétiches grew out of sketches she made during this period. Her graduate research on the history of masks at Columbia University in 1934 further informed the work, as did objects she likely encountered at Paris's Musée de l'Homme.
Jones's teachers at the Académie Julian initially criticized her use of African masks in early sketches for the painting. She later recalled, "I had to remind them of Modigliani and Picasso and all the French artists using the inspiration of Africa, and that if anybody had the right to use it, I did. It was my heritage, so they had to give in." In Les Fétiches, the masks appear to pulsate with energy and movement, evoking African dance and ritual. Art historian Richard J. Powell observes that, like poetry associated with the Negritude movement, the painting emphasizes Africa's rhythmic and mythic dimensions while reclaiming African identity through heightened cultural consciousness. Art critic Holland Cotter has described the work as "an emblem of black American self-identity." Indeed, Les Fétiches stands as an early example of a broader movement among Black artists to reclaim African visual traditions long appropriated by European modernism.
Oil on linen - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Male Standing Figure - the Priest
Sculptor Ronald Moody, who is recognized as "the first recorded Black British artist," was born in Jamaica in the year 1900. Coming from an affluent family, he moved to London, England in 1923 to study dentistry, in which he earned his degree in 1930. However, while living in London, he frequented the British Museum where he became fascinated by sculpture, particularly in the museum's non-Western collections. He began making his own sculptures, first using plasticine and dental plaster, and later clay, wood, concrete, bronze, and brass. By the late 1930s he produced several works and had a solo show in Paris. Falling in love with the city, he relocated there in 1938, until he was forced to leave in 1940, fleeing two days before the Germans invasion. Though only in Paris for a short time, Moody connected with members of the Negritude movement, and formed a friendship with fellow artist Wifredo Lam. Later, in the 1960s and early 1970s, Moody became associated with the Caribbean Artists Movement.
Moody once stated "My past is a mixture of African, Asian, and European influences, and, as I have lived many years in Europe, my present is the result of the friction of Europe with my past. This has not resulted in my becoming an ersatz European, but has shown what is valuable in my inheritance, which I think shows in my work." Male Standing Figure - the Priest (1939) is one of the sculptures Moody produced while living in Paris. Carved from dense palisandre (a type of rosewood), the small sculpture depicts a topless, bald, male figure with a simple fabric garment covering its lower half. The figure stands erect, with its arms straight down by its sides, gazing directly yet calmly ahead. Though many of Moody's works were lost when he fled from Paris to England, this sculpture was saved, hidden in the studio of his friend Kobus Hooykaas. It was first exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Galerie Apollinaire in London in November 1950, where it was purchased by the British Ministry of Works, and has since been on display at various government buildings around London.
Art critic Guy Brett describes Moody's wood carvings as a form of modern figurative sculpture marked by simplification and symbolism rather than abstraction. While many twentieth-century modern artists drew on African art for its bold abstraction - such as Picasso or Brancusi - Moody was instead influenced by the more naturalistic, courtly traditions of African sculpture, particularly the classical art of Ife. His figures avoid both strict realism and pure abstraction, occupying a space that feels timeless and universal. Rather than depicting a specific individual or culture, Moody creates what Brett calls a "Being": a figure that feels alive and aspirational, grounded in humanity rather than portraiture or allegory. Brett also notes Moody's careful attention to the natural grain of the wood, which allows movement and stillness to coexist within a single form - the flowing grain suggesting energy and motion, while the figure itself remains calm, solid, and meditative.
Writer and playwright Marjorie H. Morgan explains that this "serene-looking piece, only 75 cm in height, [...] has often been seen as a symbol of resistance and resilience. Within this piece, I see the possibility of a seismic shift between introspection and outrage, from the position of quiet confidence and authority." The work demonstrates Moody's efforts to replicate the unique quality he had discovered earlier in Ancient Egyptian sculpture, a quality he described as "silence" and "a profound feeling of inner unity." Male Standing Figure - the Priest continues the artistic trajectory he had begun in earlier works, like Wohin (1934-35), Midonz (1937), and Tacet (1937-38), which Morgan refers to as "a trio of heroic sculptures," all of which were carved wooden busts of similarly zen-like figures, drawing from both pre-Columbian and Egyptian visual sources. Moody considered these works to be an "exploration of the inner life of man, and the possibility of evolution through self-awareness."
Palisandre wood - Government Art Collection, UK
La Jungla (The Jungle)
Cuban artist Wifredo Lam was born to a Chinese father and a mother of Congolese and Spanish descent. In 1938, at the age of thirty-six, he moved to Paris where he became part of the local art scene. He formed a particularly strong friendship with Picasso, whom he viewed as an "instigator of freedom," in whose work could be found the "presence of the aesthetic and spirit of African art." Through Picasso, Lam met Damas and Césaire, as well as the Surrealist poet and ethnologist Michel Leiris, who worked in the Black Africa department of the Paris anthropology museum, the Musée de l'Homme. In June of 1940, when the Germans invaded Paris, Lam was one of many artists and intellectuals to flee the city. Along with Césaire and others, he made his way to Marseille, Martinique, and the Dominican Republic, before reluctantly returning to Cuba. Back in his homeland, particularly in Havana, he found that the evidence of colonization was inescapable, writing of "its white capitol, the mark of America, its banks, its palaces, its luxurious European shops." At this point, said Lam, "I was taken aback by [Cuba's] nature, by the traditions of the Blacks, and by the transculturation of its African and Catholic religions. And so, I began to orientate my paintings toward the African." He visited Paris again briefly after the war had ended but didn't move back permanently until 1952. He died in Paris in 1982.
Despite only being in Paris for a short time during the heyday of the Negritude movement, Lam is now considered the most important visual artist associated with the Negritude movement, with Césaire calling him "the great artist of Neo-African painting." Lam's art, which included painting, sculpture, and printmaking, blended influences from the Afro-Caribbean Santería religion (which he learned about as a child from his godmother, a healer and sorceress) and Cuban folk legends, with imagery referencing "primitive" African art and masks, the history of Africa and the international slave trade, and the colonization of the Caribbean. He also drew heavily upon the practices of Surrealism, such as automatism, believing that these could allow "for deliverance from cultural alienation." Later in life, Lam explained that with his art, "I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters."
Lam was critical of the way in which the Cubists reappropriated African masks in their works (such as Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)) for a white, Euro-centric audience. He sought to address this through the painting that is now considered his masterpiece, The Jungle (1943). In The Jungle, he presents a densely packed forest comprised of bizarre forms, part-human, part-animal, part-vegetal. Their stalk-like legs resemble sugarcane, the crop grown and harvested by thousands of slaves brought to Cuba in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while their heads resemble traditional African masks. As he stated, "Africa has not only been dispossessed of many of its people, but also of its historical consciousness [...] I have tried to relocate Black cultural objects in terms of their own landscape and in relation to their own world." As well, many of the figures have enlarged, rounded buttocks and breasts, and oversized feet, likely intended as a nod toward the way in which Black bodies are frequently eroticized, exoticized, and viewed as "non-human" by white audiences. Lam also included scissor-like forms in the composition, explaining that "I used the scissors as a symbol of a necessary cut against foreign imposition in Cuba, against all colonization." Curator Karen Grimson asserts that, with this work, "Lam reintegrated African art forms into an autochthonous context, challenging the Western construction of 'the primitive' while still acknowledging the reality of Cuba's colonial legacy."
Gouache on paper on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York
Girl with Blue Headscarf
Artist Ben Enwonwu was born in 1917 into a noble family in Nigeria and following the passing of his father (a traditional Igbo sculptor) in 1921, inherited his sculptor's tools, later learning Igbo carving himself. In 1944, he moved to London to attend the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art. Following his graduation in 1947, he undertook postgraduate work in anthropology at the University of London, inspired to explore the field after experiencing racism and hostility upon moving to England. From 1948 onwards, he worked as an arts educator in Africa, Europe, and the United States, as a cultural and art advisor to the Nigerian government, an official illustrator for the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Right Society, and a freelance artist. Artist, art historian, and curator Sylvester Ogbechie describes Enwonwu's art as the opening up of "third space in art history whose nature and parameters are at variance with art history's exclusionary narratives of modernity and its inscription of the modern artist-subject as a white, Western European male." Enwonwu was a staunch supporter of the Negritude movement, representing Africa at the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Musée D'Art Moderne in Paris in 1947 (exhibiting alongside Picasso, which, as Neil Coventry, a representative for Bonhams Nigeria, notes, "was quite amazing for an artist who had never left Nigeria until two years prior") and leading the Nigerian contingent to the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal in 1966.
Enwonwu is widely considered to have been the most important African artist of the 1950s and '60s and used his art to challenge the legacy of colonization that continues in nearly every African nation. He once stated "I know that when a country is suppressed by another politically, the native traditions of the art of the suppressed begin to die out. Then the artists also begin to lose their individual and the values of their own artistic idiom. Art, under this situation, is doomed." His unique biography, in which his African heritage blended with a European arts education (primarily under Kenneth C. Murray in London), allowed him to develop a signature style that is evidenced by works like Girl with a Blue Headscarf (1953). This portrait of a young Black girl (likely based on a real person Enwonwu met during his extensive travels through Africa) is an obvious reference to Dutch Golden Age master Johannes Vermeer's Girl with The Pearl Earring (c. 1665), with the posture, positioning, gaze, and clothing nearly identical (though a mirror reflection) in the two paintings. Said the artist in 1943, "I am keeping my art African - even if I stay in England for 60 years, I will still figure in my works, a plain blunt African. I believe very strongly in being myself and to be original and African." Banker and art collector Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede asserts that "Enwonwu's work interprets African culture and tradition with sophistication and universal appeal. Beyond the intrinsic beauty of an Enwonwu, his unabashed Africanism fills me with pride."
Oil on board - Private collection
Anyanwu (The Awakening)
Ben Enwonwu challenged the long-standing tendency to view African art primarily as an ethnographic or anthropological object rather than as a dynamic and evolving artistic practice. He strongly resisted the idea that African artists should be confined to so-called "primitive" traditions, especially when European modernists freely drew inspiration from African art without criticism. Enwonwu argued that African artists had every right to engage with modern European training and techniques while remaining grounded in their own cultural heritage. Rather than copying either traditional African forms or European modernism, he sought an artistic language that acknowledged both, insisting that African creativity was foundational - not derivative - to modern art.
Enwonwu's best-known sculpture, Anyanwu (1954 - 55), embodies this philosophy. The work depicts the Igbo earth goddess Ani as a radiant female figure wearing royal Bini regalia, including a distinctive "chicken-beak" headdress, coral necklaces, and hoop bracelets. Enwonwu conceived the sculpture following a dream in which a graceful female form emerged from the sun, moving forward in a sweeping, curving motion. The figure's facial features were modeled after an Edo Queen Mother portrait sculpture, while her overall form recalls the powerful symbolism of Ethiopia Awakening (1921) by Harlem Renaissance sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller. Her elongated neck reflects ideals of beauty in Igbo and Bini cultures, while Enwonwu's deliberate extension of the limbs and torso serves as a metaphor for aspiration - expressing his vision of Nigeria's growth in politics, culture, and national identity.
Originally created at life-size for the Nigerian government to mark the founding of the National Museum in Lagos, Anyanwu gained international significance when Enwonwu was invited in 1966 to recreate the sculpture for the United Nations headquarters in New York. He later produced several smaller versions of the work. For Enwonwu, Anyanwu represented pride in African - and specifically Igbo - heritage, while also symbolizing the broader aspirations of African peoples in the post-independence era. The sculpture draws on a widespread African cultural understanding of womanhood as a life-giving, sustaining force, positioning the female figure as both the origin and nurturer of the nation. Spiritual in conception and rhythmic in form, Anyanwu reflects Enwonwu's belief that modern African art could honor ancestral traditions while expressing a confident, forward-looking vision of cultural and political renewal.
Bronze with marble base - United Nations Headquarters, New York City
Charlie Parker Yardbird
Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1901, to a father who was a Methodist minister and a respected member of the local African American community, and a mother who had been born a slave and who spoke often with her children about racism. Of ten brothers and sisters, only Beauford and three others survived into adulthood, because, as he later wrote, "so much sickness came from improper places to live - long distances to walk to schools improperly heated [...] too much work at home - natural conditions common to the poor that take the bright flowers like terrible cold in nature." Delaney studied art in Boston before moving to New York in 1929, where he was an important artist of the Harlem Renaissance for over two decades. During that time, his art mainly took the form of figurative paintings of the disenfranchised members of society, those he described as a "multitude of people of all races - spending every night of their lives in parks and cafes," and with whom he felt an affinity based on his own difficult, impoverished younger years. One such painting is Can Fire in the Park (1946), which depicts a group of men huddled together around a garbage can fire for warmth. In 1953, Delaney, like many other members of the Harlem Renaissance, decided to move to Paris where, as a gay Black man, he felt more able to be himself. Once there, his style of painting shifted toward Abstract Expressionism. Curator Adrienne Childs notes that, in fact, "Delaney's relationship with abstraction predated the notorious Abstract Expressionist movement, positioning him as a forerunner of one of the most important ideological and stylistic developments in twentieth-century American art. Although he chose not to identify himself with the movement, as the Abstract Expressionists began to gain notoriety in the late 1940s, Delaney's abstract work increasingly gained attention."
One of Delaney's abstract explorations of light and color, painted while he was in Paris, is Charlie Parker Yardbird (1958). Although visually the painting does not seem to have any connection to the concerns of the Negritude movement, its title indicates otherwise, telling us that Delaney, like many visual artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude movements, drew inspiration from jazz music. Charlie "Yardbird" Parker was an influential African American jazz saxophonist and composer who tragically died in 1955, at the age of just thirty-four, from drug and alcohol abuse. Monique Y. Wells, who writes on the history and culture of the African Diaspora, explains that Delaney "was passionate about jazz and considered the music to be an important art form. He taught his famous mentee, James Baldwin, that jazz was as 'sacred' as gospel music. [...He] was always concerned with how he could best portray jazz through light and color." Wells asserts that "the rose and blue tones of Charlie Parker Yardbird seem to radiate from the center of the canvas, just as Parker's music emerged from the bell of his saxophone during his 1946 recording of Yardbird Suite." Later, in 1968, Delaney would once again pay tribute to Parker in the portrait painting Charlie Parker.
Oil on canvas - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Africa Dances
This painting comes from Enwonwu's Africa Dances series, which was inspired by a 1935 book of the same name by English anthropologist and author Geoffrey Gorer. Gorer's book was an account of the 1933 trip he took through West Africa with his partner, the Senegalese dancer Féral Benga, to study native dances and recruit dancers for a Paris dance company. (Benga had moved to Paris in 1925, where he opened an African cabaret club, La Rose Rouge, and he also spent time in New York where he was a gay icon and a popular model with Harlem Renaissance artists and photographers, such as photographer Carl Van Vechten and sculptor Richmond Barthé.) Gorer's book also included his reflections on colonial rule and its impact on traditional life in Africa, thus making it popular amongst the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude communities.
Dance scholar and ethnographer Francesca Castaldi writes that, in the context of anti-colonialism and decolonization, "African dance allowed for the articulation of indigenous cultural beliefs and the expression of historical continuities, making dance also a powerful medium of indigenous resistance against the European colonizers," thus it comes as no surprise that dance was a prominent theme in much Negritude art. Enwonwu, who was inspired by dance in several of his sculptures and paintings, explains that he "began to use some of the traditional dances - particularly the dance movements and the colors - as a basis for representation," adding "The essence of my own Negritude was particularly characterized in the movement of dancing figures [...] in the beauty of black women. My Negritude is shown in Black forms because at that time in London, Black beauty was an essential and recognized image of the movement." Nigerian Heritage Management professional Solomon Nkwagu writes that "Enwonwu used the [Africa Dances] series as visual illustrations of his views on the state of the modern Nigerian culture at the time, with attention to the symbolic imageries he saw in different scenes of traditional ceremonies, cultural dances and ritual performances of different ethnic groups in the country."
In this particular painting, Enwonwu presents a slender, elongated Black dancing female figure, over a background of black silhouetted dancing forms. Nkwagu explains that these silhouetted figures, which appear in many of Enwonwu's paintings, "are his representations of race consciousness through black identity." Writer Chimezie Chika elaborates on this, explaining that "Enwonwu's Africa Dances series and his single portraits are the physical projections of his interest in celebrating African culture and womanhood. [...] In the dance paintings, he sought to capture the spirit rather than substance of dance - a recourse to the heady essence of African dance as a communion between the living and the dead, which explains why some of the figures appear in abstracted forms." Though Enwonwu often painted dancing women in the nude, the figure in the foreground here is clothed in a yellow dress and head wrap, showcasing traditional African textiles. The artist has received criticism, however, for his works of dancing female figures, most notably from Nigerian-American artist and academic Olu Oguibe, who has asserted that "Enwonwu's 'celebration' of the female figure (or indeed the female) was very much in the romantic tradition of celebrating or deifying women and womanhood while at the same time ignoring the reality of women's lives in an increasingly repressive and violent patriarchal society."
Oil on canvas - Private collection
Beginnings of Negritude
From Harlem to Paris
The French Negritude movement was significantly influenced by the Harlem Renaissance (also known as the "New Negro" movement) in the United States. In the 1920s, '30s, and '40s in Harlem, New York, a community of like-minded African American artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers emerged. Though the media and styles in which they worked, and the influences upon which they drew, varied greatly, they shared a desire to promote African American culture and pride at a time when Black Americans were still fighting for Civil Rights. Around the same time as the Harlem Renaissance was taking off, the U.S. government was operating its Works Progress Administration (WPA) program for artists, and though Black artists were initially barred from participating, the Harlem Artists Guild successfully protested the WPA's discriminatory practices. This meant that many visual artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance (like Charles Alston, Ernest Crichlow, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Augusta Savage, and Hale Woodruff) were given opportunities to work on WPA projects, like public murals, which legitimized and bolstered their careers.
The widespread desire amongst Black creatives and intellectuals in the United States to develop a concept of "The New Negro" was catalyzed in large part by WWI, both the experiences of African American soldiers who fought in Europe (including in France) and the experiences of those back in the United States during and after the "Great War." Elizabeth West, Professor of English and Women's Studies, explains that "Unlike the emerging literati of the Lost Generation [such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald], blacks, for the most part, weren't angst-ridden over a post-war world devoid of meaning: they had never internalized the myth of America as a shining 'city upon a hill.' For them, the war brought no end or loss, no disillusionment or void," adding that "for black artists, writers and thinkers, the war meant something entirely different: It spawned a transformation of the way African Americans imagined themselves, their past and their future." It is important to note that, to this day, the most celebrated African American regiment in the "Great War" was The Harlem Hellfighters, an all-black unit comprised almost entirely of men from Harlem and the surrounding areas, who went down in history for their immense bravery and ferocity in battle.
Many important writers of the Harlem Renaissance visited and had ongoing ties to Paris, like Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Ralph Ellison, and Claude McKay, and many even settled there permanently, such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and William Gardner Smith. American jazz music, such as that of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, made its way to France (having been introduced, in large part, by African-American soldiers in WWI, like the Harlem Hellfighters) and influenced the Negritude movement, and some African-American entertainers reached the height of their success in France, such as actress, dancer, and singer Josephine Baker (the first black woman to star in a major motion picture). Many visual artists that were associated with the Harlem Renaissance also moved to Paris, such as Henry Ossawa Tanner (who moved in 1891 and is considered a forerunner to the Harlem Renaissance) and Beauford Delaney (whose move happened later, in 1953). Though not relocating permanently, Lois Mailou Jones studied in Paris in 1937 and made frequent return trips throughout the rest of her life, and Palmer C. Hayden spent five years in France, from the late 1920s to the early 1930s.
As to why so many notable Black Americans emigrated to France, and particularly to the creative/cultural hub of Paris, in the early twentieth century, African American arts specialist and gallerist Eric Hanks explains that "The institution of slavery in the United States, and its eventual aftermath, created an oppressive atmosphere of degradation and discrimination for persons of African descent. This was felt across all walks of life, including in the visual arts. [...] Admission to art schools and academies was difficult, and in many cases, impossible. Museum exhibitions and commercial gallery representation was almost non-existent. The contributions and accomplishments of African American artists went largely unnoticed in every major art history book and college-level course on art in America. [...] By the 1920s in America, with lynchings and race riots on the rise, both legal and de facto segregation the prevailing reality, and limited opportunities to grow and develop, there was a mass exodus of Black artists to Paris."
Again, WWI had much to do with the situation, and it is important, as West notes, that "Black soldiers abroad during World War I experienced a type of freedom and mobility unattainable back home. In cities from London to Paris, many, for the first time, could travel without the worry of being denied equal lodging accommodations or admission to entertainment venues. Once they returned stateside, they became increasingly impatient with Jim Crow laws and codes of racial discrimination. Life, they realized, didn't have to be this way. In a nation that was now half a century beyond slavery, the fever spread among a new generation of blacks. In the war's aftermath, racial tensions heightened - a reflection of this mood." Having had a taste of such freedom and respect abroad, it is no wonder that many Black Americans, including many members of the Harlem Renaissance, opted to return to Paris. The Montmartre neighborhood, with its jazz clubs and cabarets, soon became home to a thriving Black expat community.
Birth of the Negritude Movement
The Negritude movement developed in 1920s and '30s Paris, where about a dozen scholarship students from Africa and the Caribbean met with Black artists, writers, and intellectuals, and began to gather together and discuss issues related to race, particularly as pertaining to (de)colonization and (post)colonialism, racism, and Eurocentrism (with Marxist theory showing up as a major influence). This community aimed to reclaim, celebrate, and assert a uniquely Black identity. Gregson Davis, professor of Comparative Literature, explains that these "Students of color [...] soon or later found themselves drawn, if only in self-defense, into a radically critical stance towards European civilization and its arrogant claims to superiority. Thus, cultural assimilation ironically engendered, in proportion to its very thoroughness, a form of resistance on the part of its youthful recipients that can usefully be labeled 'counter-assimilationist.' Since the stigmatization, or even erasure, of non-Western cultural traditions was a common subtext of the promotion of the canon both inside and outside the lycée, many students of African origin sought vigorously to repossess a degraded identity - the more so because their skin color marked them off as 'other' in a manner both irreducible and pronounced." The movement soon spread to the rest of the French-speaking world, and beyond.
The term "negritude" (meaning "blackness" or "negro-ness") was first coined by Francophone Martinican poet, author, and politician (who later served as president of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983-88) Aimé Césaire in his 1939 epic poem "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal" which includes the passage "My negritude is not a stone, its deafness heaved against the clamor of day. My negritude is not a film of dead water on the dead eye of earth. My negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral. It delves into the red flesh of the soil. It delves into the burning flesh of the sky. It digs through the dark accretions that weigh down its righteous patience."
However, two years before Césaire's poem was published, French-Guyanese poet and politician Léon-Gontran Damas published his first volume of poetry, Pigments (1937), which is often considered a sort of "manifesto" for the Negritude movement, and was actually banned by the French government in 1939 as a posed "threat to the security of the state." The poems in Pigments challenge slavery, segregation, colonial assimilation, and the repression of racial and cultural identity in African diasporic communities, all of which became central themes/concerns for the other artists, writers, and intellectuals of the Negritude movement.
The third central figure in the birth of the Negritude movement was Senegalese poet and politician (and later, the first president of Senegal, from 1960-80) Léopold Sédar Senghor, who once defined the movement as "the sum total of the values of the civilization of the African world," and as "the simple recognition of the fact of being black and the acceptance of this fact, of our destiny as black people, of our history and our culture." David Tresilian, a Literature professor and cultural development consultant for UNESCO, explains that "Senghor was a member of the founding generation of post-independence African leaders, men like Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Cote d'Ivoire, and Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya. All of them took leading roles in the struggle against European colonial rule in the early and middle decades of the last century before becoming the first presidents of their countries on independence." Senghor would also become the first Black person to be accepted into the French Academy, in 1984. Like the other two "founding fathers" of the Negritude movement, Césaire and Damas, Senghor called for a rediscovery of African beliefs and values, and the celebration of Black identity. Unlike Césaire and Damas, however, Senghor supported assimilation, believing that "a cultural métissage," that is, miscegenation (intermarriage), between Blacks and whites, would create new generations with an improved racial consciousness, what he called a "give-and-take." Said Senghor, "Race is a reality [but] I do not mean racial purity. There is difference, but not inferiority or antagonism."
Women of Negritude
Though the history of Negritude tends to focus on its male instigators, several women were also instrumental in the movement. Aimé Césaire's wife Suzanne Césaire (née Roussi), was, like her husband, also a Francophone Martinican writer, as well as a teacher, and an anticolonial and feminist activist. Her surrealist work focused on themes pertaining to Caribbean identity and "the colonial dilemma."
Even more central to the movement from its inception, however, were Francophone Martinican sisters Paulette and Jeanne ("Jane") Nardal, both of whom were deeply concerned with black experience. Paulette was a journalist and writer, and the first black student at the Sorbonne, and Jane was a writer and teacher. Not only did they develop central ideas for Negritude in their writings (many of which pre-date some the most commonly cited foundational texts by the movement's key male figures), but they were also active in connecting others, introducing Harlem Renaissance figures like Hughes and McKay, to Black intellectuals from France and the French colonies, like Césaire, Senghor, and Damas. Many important meetings and conversations that contributed to the development of the Negritude movement took place at the cafe that the Nardal sisters owned, the Clamart Salon, where they developed what anthropologist Gary Wilder calls a "transnational black public sphere in imperial Paris." It was also at the Clamart Salon that Paulette and Haitian doctor Leo Sajou developed La Revue du Monde Noir (1931 - 32), a literary journal for Black intellectuals in Paris that was published in both English and French.
Anthony J. Ratcliff, professor of Pan African Studies, explains that "in addition to translating Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925) into French, the Nardal sisters also wrote numerous essays exploring the complex interaction between race, place, and gender experienced by Afro-descendant women in France. [...] Jane Nardal initially asserted the centrality of Black women in constructing and codifying racial consciousness, which ultimately resulted in Négritude: 'Until the Colonial Exposition, the coloured women living alone in the metropolis have certainly been less favoured than coloured men who are content with a certain easy success. Long before the latter, they have felt the need of a racial solidarity that would not be merely material. They were thus aroused to race consciousness. The feeling of uprooting which they experienced...was the starting point of their evolution.' Later Paulette Nardal would suggest that Jane 'was the first 'promoter of this movement of ideas, so broadly exploited later' and that Senghor and Césaire 'took up the ideas tossed out by us and expressed them with more flash and brio...[W]e were but women, real pioneers - let's say that we blazed the trail for them.'"
Negritude in the Visual Arts
Visual artists of the Negritude movement sought to critique political and cultural imperialism, and to develop a new, distinctly Black, avant-garde aesthetic, drawing inspiration from the writings of important Harlem Renaissance writers like Hughes and Locke, and other postcolonial thinkers and writers such as Césaire, Damas, and Francophone Martinican philosopher Frantz Fanon. Many of these artists agreed with Senghor (who was a passionate promoter of African art both within Africa and beyond its borders) that modern Black art should look back to, and draw from, traditional African arts and culture. However, as Tresilian explains, "another important part, perhaps for Senghor even the most important, was [...] his desire to 'reinvent' or 'reimagine' 'universalism.' Senghor was not convinced that the path forward for Africa's arts lay in the exploration of local African or black identity, as the earlier emphasis on négritude might have been taken as suggesting. Instead, he wanted the African arts to make claims towards 'universalism' - to be at the cutting edge of international experimentation in the arts and to avoid the trap of nostalgia in the guise of authenticity or traditionalism.'" Tresilian goes on to note that "When Senghor was looking for artists to illustrate his poems, he chose Marc Chagall, Hans Hartung, and Zao Wou-ki, replacing négritude, or a focus on African artists, by what he hoped would be a new 'humanism' or 'universalism' that could be achieved by bringing together leading international artists [of various races]."
Anthropologist and curator Glenn Jordan explains that "At the core of négritude thought is the tenet that [...] colonialism is not only a system of geo-political power and economic exploitation but also, a system of knowledge and representation. It is the latter that négritude thought, writing and visual art addresses. Moreover, the Négritudists assume that the legacy of colonialism lives on in culture and subjectivity long after colonialism is formally over [...]. Their concern is with transforming national and diasporic cultures and with that difficult task that bell hooks, the African American feminist cultural critic, refers to as 'decolonizing our minds.' The thinkers and artists of Négritude, like those of other avant-garde Modernist movements, believed in the power of art - in its immanent capacity to transform reality, to remake human beings and their worlds. Like the Surrealists, the négritude thinkers and artists had faith that art is particularly suited to achieve revolutionary ends." In 1956, Senghor himself asserted that "Our renaissance will be more the work of [...] writers and artists than of politicians. We have seen from experience that there can be no political liberation without cultural liberation. If white America is now acceding to Negro demands, it is because Negro writers and artists have restored to their people the dignity of its true face. If Europe has now begun to reckon with Africa, it is because African traditional sculpture, music, dancing, literature and philosophy have compelled recognition from an astonished world."
Although the visual artists of the Negritude movement each developed their own unique visual language tied to the core concepts of the movement, there were common threads that ran throughout their oeuvres, including criticism of colonization and racism, a desire to return to a (mythologized and romanticized) African homeland, the use of traditional African visual motifs and imagery, and a celebration of the beauty of Black bodies. As well, Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne explains how, for Senghor and many other Negritude artists, a central guiding principle was the idea of "rhythm," which Senghor defined as the "ordering force that constitutes Negro style [...] It is the vital element par excellence. It is the primary condition for, and sign of, art, as respiration is of life - respiration that rushes or slows down, becomes regular or spasmodic, depending on the being's tension, the degree and quality of the emotion. [...] It is not a symmetry that engenders monotony; rhythm is alive, it is free." Years later, he elaborated, asserting that rhythm "is the architecture of being, the internal dynamism that gives it form, the system of waves it emanates toward the Others, the pure expression of vital force. Rhythm is the vibrating shock, the force that, through the senses, seizes us at the root of being. It expresses itself through the most material and sensual means: lines, surfaces, colors, and volumes in architecture, sculpture and painting; accents in poetry and music; movements in dance. But, in doing so, it organizes all this concreteness toward the light of the Spirit."
World Festival of Negro Arts
The first World Festival of Negro Arts and Culture was organized by Senghor (with the support of UNESCO) from April 1-24, 1966, in Dakar, Senegal. This was a key event that developed out of the Negritude movement (particularly Senghor's own specific version of Negritude) and was essentially the first opportunity for many Black artists, writers, musicians, and performers to participate in an international forum focused on the exploration and celebration of African culture. The festival is generally seen as the beginning of the international Black Arts movement. A central theme at the 1966 festival was African tribal art, and its place within global art history.
Ratcliff explains that, with the festival, "for a brief historical juncture, Senghor and his affiliates were able to posit Négritude as a viable philosophical model in which to realize this unity. However, upon critical reflection, a number of the Black cultural workers who initially championed the Dakar Festival came to express consternation at the behind-the-scenes machinations which severely weakened the 'lovely dream' of ''Pan-Africa' [...] Ironically, while the aims of the Festival were to build unity among African and Afro-descendant performers by illustrating the cultural developments of newly independent nations, much of the impetus behind the event became legitimizing Africa in the eyes of their former European colonial regimes."
In fact, very few dissenting voices were permitted to attend the festival. For instance, the American committee (which was very much under the control of the U.S. government), opted to send only members of the older, "safer" generation of African-American arts and culture (like actor Sidney Poitier, visual artist Hale Woodruff, musician Duke Ellington, and poet Langston Hughes), excluding younger voices associated with the newer Black Arts and Black Power movements, nor musicians associated with New Jazz or Rhythm & Blues. Writes Ratcliff, "upon return to the United States, many of these individuals would detail the undesirable machinations of the event and how little in the way of actual Pan African solidarity took place." South African poet-in-exile, Keorapetse Kgositsile published an article titled "I Have Had Enough!" in July 1966, in which he criticized the hypocrisy of the festival, such as the absence of any "contemporary" Afro-North American artists, and the fact that the Senegalese government built a fence around the nearby Dakar slums, which meant that the majority of attendees were white Europeans, and thus, wrote Kgositsile, "Black culture was being 'made illustrious' to and for a white patronage."
Criticisms of Negritude
Criticisms of the World Festival of Negro Arts and Culture mirrored criticisms that had already been circulating regarding the Negritude movement as a whole, such as Kgositsile's assertion that Negritude was too focused on defining Blackness for a white audience and within a white world. Negritude also faced ongoing criticism for being overly reductionist and essentialist, with some even seeing it as promoting a form of black exoticism or fetishization. Nigerian poet, playwright, and novelist Wole Soyinka, the first African Nobel Laureate in Literature, called Negritude "a narcissistic cult of the African world," and a movement of "superficiality and racial self-romanticization." He also criticized the key figures of the Negritude movement for seeking a "premature closure to the historic travails of the Africans by freely forgiving their victimizers." French novelist, playwright, and critic Maryse Conde was also cautious of Negritude, calling Césaire's "fetishization of blackness" a "sentimental and empty trap."
Negritude: Concepts, Styles, and Trends
Reaction against Colonialism
Most of the individuals involved in the Negritude movement came from countries that had experienced colonial rule, and many of these nations were still in the process of decolonization during the movement's heyday, therefore, as African cultural theorist Pal Ahluwalia asserts, the movement "should be placed within the context of an evolving African identity." Then, by coming to Europe, these individuals suddenly found themselves living in the societies of the colonizing nations (particularly France and England), where they more often than not faced racism, cultural alienation, lowered self-esteem (including self-hatred, feelings of inferiority, and shame) in their day-to-day lives, often struggling to feel like they "belonged." (Indeed, "belonging" is now a central concept in critical cultural studies, and is defined by psychologist Kelly-Ann Allen (et al.) as "the subjective feeling of deep connection with social groups, physical places, and individual and collective experiences [and which] is a fundamental human need that predicts numerous mental, physical, social, economic, and behavioural outcomes.") Meanwhile, the Negritude artists who came from the United States (and Harlem in particular) found that they experienced less racism in Paris than they had back home, yet they never forgot their racialized experiences in the U.S., nor the history of colonization and of the transatlantic slave trade that preceded the Jim Crow Era in which they had lived.
Something else at this particular historical moment catalyzed a turn to nationalism and reclamation amongst Africans and the African diaspora: World War I. Educator Mario Marlon Ibao explains that "If nationalism was the current that swept the hearts and minds of many African intellectuals to fight for their independence, then World War I was the watershed event that caused these currents to overflow. Approximately one million Africans were drafted by their colonial rulers to participate in military actions in Europe, the Middle East, and in Africa itself during World War I. What happens when an exploitative government enlists in its army the very same people, they oppress to fight their enemies? What happens when a subjugated people are forced to undergo considerable hardship and deprivation, and in many cases, injury and death in a war that is not their own? Does this government expect these long-suffering people to not learn anything from their experience in the war and to just go back to their subjugated existence once the war is over? Or, on the other hand, do the survivors return to demand a 'just reward' for their efforts and sacrifices? Because they were denied this, many of the returning soldiers turned to nationalism and anti-colonial activities with an eye towards driving out their oppressors. It was military service that provides African veterans with the necessary skills to carry out a revolutionary struggle." Kenyan historian Bethwell Ogot writes that as a result of the war, "The Africans became more aware of themselves as a distinct racial group; they discovered the weakness and the heterogeneity of the white men; and even more crucial, they learned the importance of organized resistance."
Therefore, for many Negritude artists, writers, and thinkers, issues pertaining to colonialism, decolonization, and postcolonialism were at the heart of their creative output, and indeed it seems that their activities were further fueled by a collective desire to see solidarity, freedom, and pride being experienced not only on an individual level, but for all of their African compatriots and members of the worldwide African diaspora. These themes are reflected in Negritude visual art in a variety of ways, such as paintings and sculptures that depict and celebrate influential activists and others who fought for social and political change in African nations and communities (such as Ben Enwonwu's 1953 portrait paintings of Stephen Oluwole Awokoya (former minister of education in the old Western Region of Nigeria) and his 1949 portrait bust of Nigerian politician Samuel Ogbemudia, as well as Ronald Moody's portrait busts of Richard St. Barbe Baker (the English botanist whose reforestation activism in Africa led to improved quality of life for many Africans) and of his own brother, Dr. Harold Moody, who campaigned against racial prejudice in England and established the League of Coloured Peoples in 1931). Colonization and its after-effects are also made visible in Negritude art through depictions of Black people facing oppression (such as Jones' 1944 painting Mob Victim (Meditation)).
Home-going
As Nigerian literary scholar Abiola Irele explains, "A myth of Africa developed in consequence out of the literature of negritude, which involved a glorification of the African past and a nostalgia for the imaginary beauty and harmony of traditional African society." Irele adds that "this strain in negritude is probably charged with the greatest emotional force. Senghor for instance infuses into his well-known love poem, 'Black Woman,' a feeling that is more filial than erotic, due to his identification of the continent with the idea of woman, in a way that lends to the image of Africa the force of a mother figure." The mythologization of Africa and the idea of longing to "go home" to the continent can be found in the works of many other Negritude writers, such as Haitian writer and politician Jacques Roumain, who wrote "Africa, I have preserved your memory, Africa you are in me like the splinter in a wound, like a totem in the heart of a village." Naturally, these concepts are also present in much of the visual art of the Negritude movement, including many paintings by Jones, who traveled extensively throughout Africa and produced several romanticized scenes of the places and people she encountered there. The concept of home-going continues to be central to cultural studies and diaspora studies in particular, and was recently foregrounded in the 2016 novel, Homegoing by Ghanaian American author Yaa Gyasi.
African Culture and Traditions
Artists and writers of the Negritude movement sought to express a distinctly African "spirit" through their works. They believed, as Senghor did, that "there is a certain flavor, a certain odor, a certain accent, a certain black tone inexpressible in European [languages]." Hughes, meanwhile, used the word "Soul" which he defined as "the essence of Negro folk art redistilled - particularly the old music and its flavor, the ancient basic beat out of Africa, the folk rhymes and Ashanti stories - all expressed in contemporary ways so emotionally colored with the old that it gives a distinctly Negro flavor to today's music, painting, and writing." In order to capture this spirit or Soul, Negritude's visual artists (like Jones, Ben Enwonwu, Wifredo Lam, and Ronald Moody) often turned to traditional African imagery (such as masks, costumes, textiles, etc.) as inspiration for, and the subject matter of, their art.
Black Beauty
Many Negritude writers, artists, and thinkers celebrated the beauty of Black bodies in their work, challenging the pervasive views that white people held of Black bodies, Black facial features, and Black hair, seeing them as ugly, inferior, exotic, or oversexualized. In one of his poems, Hughes wrote "Color: Wear it like a banner, for the proud - Not like a shroud. Wear it like a song, soaring high - not moan or cry." Similarly, in his 1967 poem "Black Woman," Senghor wrote "Naked woman, black woman, clothed with your colour which is life, with your form which is beauty! [...] Gazelle limbed in Paradise, pearls are stars on the night of your skin." Of course, the beauty, strength, and dignity of Black bodies is celebrated in the works of Negritude's visual artists as well, such as Jones' painting Standing Male Model (1947 - 1951), and Ben Enwonwu's Africa Dances series. Such celebrations of Black beauty in Negritude art and writing directly influenced the later "Black is beautiful" slogan that was popular with the Black Panthers in the United States in the 1960s and '70s.
Literature and Music as Inspiration
Negritude developed initially as a literary and intellectual movement, and thus it is no surprise that much of the movement's visual art was created in relation to poetry and prose by Negritude writers, with many paintings and sculptures drawing inspiration from texts by authors like Césaire and Senghor. At the same time, Black musicians were playing a major role in the development of the modern Black collective identity, with Jazz and the Blues emerging as distinctly Black genres, through which Black musical artists could express their identity, creativity, and struggles. Music was a particularly powerful influence on Beauford Delaney (an American artist who had been part of the Harlem Renaissance, before relocating permanently to Paris and becoming part of the Negritude movement), as evidenced by paintings like Jazz Club (1950), Rehearsal (1952), and Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald (1968).
Later Developments - After Negritude
It is impossible to pinpoint a specific end date of the Negritude movement, and many scholars and critics argue that it still continues today, in any artistic expression that asserts, emphasizes, and/or celebrates Black identity. However, such expressions are more recently associated with the names of several newer groups and movements, all of which are indebted to the foundations laid by Negritude. Indeed, from Negritude, a great many subsequent movements have been born. For instance, Créolité was a literary and cultural movement that developed in the 1970s and which, in response to Negritude, sought to foreground the fact that Caribbean identity is not solely African, but in reality, much more diverse, being also influenced by indigenous Caribbeans, European colonialists, and East Indian and Chinese immigrants.
The Black Art Movement (BAM) in literature and the visual arts, and the related AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) group, which were connected to the broader Identity Arts Movement in Contemporary Art, began in the United States in the mid-1960s, and were also influenced by the modernist aesthetic of the Negritude and Harlem Renaissance artists. BAM is even referred to by some scholars as "the second Renaissance." BAM, like Negritude and the Harlem Renaissance, sought to develop a unique "Black aesthetic" in order to express the experiences of Black individuals and communities, and to foreground Black identity and pride. However, in contrast with Negritude, these movements were more overtly and radically political, and were closely linked to, and instrumentalized by, political movements like the Nation of Islam, the Black Power movement, the Black Panthers, and the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, in comparison with Negritude, BAM artists and writers were also more staunchly opposed to Black creation for a White audience, for instance with BAM poet Larry Neal asserting that "The motive behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world." Historians and activists John H. Bracey, Jr., Sonia Sanchez, and James Smethurst note that BAM, in turn, was "the source of the hip-hop cultural movement, as well as a catalyst for cultural movements among Asian American, Chicana/a, Puerto Rican, and Native American communities."
Other twentieth-century movements that developed out of Negritude include Pan-Africanism, (a global movement that developed at both the government and grassroots levels, rooted in the core idea that people of African descent, across continents and histories, share a linked destiny and collective power) and the Black consciousness movement (a grassroots anti-apartheid activist movement that emerged in South Africa in the mid-1960s). These two movements drew heavily upon the writings of Negritudists like Senghor, Césaire, and the Nardal sisters.
More recently, the artistic movements of Afro-Surrealism and Afrofuturism can also be seen as scions of Negritude. Afro-Surrealism is a form of expression whose proponents believe that Black experience is inherently Surrealist in nature. It was summed up by Senghor in the following quote: "European Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical." Related to Afro-Surrealism is Afrofuturism, which writer and poet D. Scot Miller defines as "a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future." Miller adds that, while Afrofuturism looks to the future, "Afro-Surrealism is about the present.