Negritude Women

by Tracy Whiting

The Negritude movement, which signaled the awakening of a pan-African consciousness among black French intellectuals, has been understood almost exclusively in terms of the contributions of its male Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Leon G. Damas. This masculine genealogy has completely overshadowed the central role played by French-speaking black women in its creation and evolution. In Negritude Women, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting offers a long-overdue corrective, revealing the contributions made by four women -- Suzanne Lacascade, Jane and Paulette Nardal, and Suzanne Roussy-Cesaire -- who were not merely integral to the success of the movement, but often in its vanguard. Through such disparate tactics as Lacascade's use of Creole expressions in her French prose writings, the literary salon and journal founded by the Martinique-born Nardal sisters, and Roussy-Cesaire's revolutionary blend of surrealism and Negritude in the pages of Tropiques, the journal she founded with her husband, these four remarkable women made vital contributions. In exploring their influence on the development of themes central to Negritude -- black humanism, the affirmation of black peoples and their cultures, and the rehabilitation of Africa -- Sharpley-Whiting provides the movement's first genuinely inclusive history.

Genres: France, History, Grad School, Research

184 pages, Paperback

First published October 8, 2002

Reviews

[Parlei · Rating 4 out of 5]

A necessary but difficult read; the book assumes that the reader has a lot of schema, so it's not easy to keep track of all the connections between names, dates, historic events, etc. That said, the introduction and the section on Suzanne Césaire were the most poignant, and the sharpest undercurrent to the lie that Négritude was a solely male/masculinist movement. It was particularly intriguing to see how much of Aimé Césaire's hybridizing of plant/ecological imagery was also a strong part of Suzanne Césaire's writing and makes me wonder what kind of co-thinking the two did.

My biggest problem, and this was probably a publishing issue, is that it doesn't include the original French of Nardal and S. Césaire's works. It was nice seeing translations, but as a reader of French I really would like to read the rhythm of their original pennings.

This book needs to be referenced and brought into any class that teaches Négritude/francophonie.

[Annaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative!

[beatricks]

This is more of an academic text than a "reading for fun and profit" capital-b book, and of course I haven't the academic context it would naturally go in. But it's really interesting, so who cares.