Notes on: Diagne, SB Négritude. Stanford
Encyclopaedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu
Three black students from French colonies met in
the 1920s in Paris (Senghor, Césaire, Dumas). They
realised that they all belong to people considered
uncivilised and they have recent memories of
slavery. They had all been educated in elite
French or French colonial institutions and had
experience of revolt against racism and
colonialism, including hatred of local black
elites. They also noticed embarrassment at being
associated with other Africans among French
Caribbeans. They are influenced by American
thinkers in the Harlem Renaissance. At first the
movement was liable to exclude black women, and
their contribution tended to be incorporated
without acknowledgement, especially the
contribution of African civilisation.
A journal was founded in the 1930s and the term négritude
coined, deliberately as a provocation, to stress
the value of blackness against white supremacists.
It is still an irritant. It is admitted to be
still only a possible posture of revolt rather
than a particular philosophy, a poetic revolt, and
aesthetics, although there are claims for it as
something more philosophical '"the sum total of
the values of civilisation of the Black World"'.
Initially, anthologies of poetry were published to
develop négritude as a literary movement, with the
themes of publicising poverty illiteracy and
exploitation and political racism, as a kind of
manifesto, for all the colonised, including yellow
people, people of colour in general. It claims a
new vitalism opposed to the decadence of white
literature, but was also contrasted to 'Caribbean
"mulatto society "' which was seen as corrupted by
white decadence: white incomprehension was seen as
a matter of pride. The poetry expressed the love
for life joy in life.
The anthology had a preface written by Sartre
entitled 'Black Orpheus', but this had
contradictory consequences, because it also
implied an eventual impotence 'in front of fate
and death', and captured négritude as
'an illustration of his own philosophical theses'
. For Sartre, it was a poetic appropriation of
French, a necessary use of the language of
domination, even though it was a weapon against
that domination, a radical transformation,
appearing as a fundamental violence against French
self-assurance, making French itself unfamiliar,
especially if it invokes other techniques such as
surrealist writing and [what looks like
semioclasm]. But then French poets had already
done that, '"from Mallarmé to the Surrealists"',
so négritude became a kind of
surrealism.
Sartre maintained the traditional Marxist view
that the proletariat could be the only
revolutionary class and actor of history. Négritude
was a creation of poetry just as Eurydice was a
creation of Orpheus. It could only ever be a
poetry, while liberation was in the hands of the
proletariat. It can only be subjective, something
concrete and particular rather than universal and
abstract.
So overall Sartre's preface popularised négritude
but simultaneously 'dismissed its historical
significance' and many of his criticisms were to
be repeated later, especially from certain
Marxists who announced that race was a
distraction, something that detracted from the
universal struggle against capitalism. Senghor
became his country's president and indeed seem to
imply that cultural recognition and reconciliation
was what was needed, seeming to compromise with
neocolonialism. There is also an accusation of
essentialism, some common identity, the African
was somehow beyond historical trajectories and
circumstances.
So négritude had to define
itself afterwards against Sartre. It had to insist
it was not just a particularism, specifically
against white supremacy is, and it had to show
there was something substantial not just poetic in
African values of civilisation, that it had an
ontology and epistemology.
Differences appeared among the three founding
fathers. Two of them (C and D) were poets rather
than theorists and stressed cultural heritage and
common cultural traditions, while Senghor ,
insisted on some shared 'ontology of life forces',
some vital force that constituted being, all being
including animals and vegetables, even minerals,
that tended towards personhood, freedom, and that
this was the driving force of religion. An
ontology of life forces, subsequently summarised
by a Belgian philosopher: there are specific
forces characterised by different intensities and
types, and each one can be strengthened or
weakened; they can influence and act upon each
other; they are organised in a hierarchy starting
from God and going down to the mineral through the
ancestors living humans and animals; causal action
involves the influence of stronger force on weaker
force.
The idea of a hierarchy of forces 'constitutes a
good summary of the view shared by many African
religions characterised as "animism", while the
other points help understand the particular type
of causality that has been labelled magical
thinking'. Senghor also tries to argue that
African art is to be understood as 'the language
of an ontology of vital forces'. His argument was
supported by a later book on Bantu philosophy
claiming to rest on exactly this sort of ontology,
written by a Belgian Franciscan priest: he claimed
to uncover ontological principles from
ethnographical description of Bantu culture.
While Senghor embraced the book, his fellow
founder C rejected it, because he saw it as
fundamentally compatible with colonialism, and
with satisfactions like decent wages comfortable
housing and food, too pure and spiritual, only
concerned with ontology: even the Bantu had
accepted white people as part of their ontology at
first, a higher power, only ever reformist and
quietist.
The aesthetics of négritude is perhaps the
most important, even for Senghor, and he supported
the vogue of black art and ethnography in France,
taken up by people like Picasso. He wanted négritude
to be a philosophy of African forms and argued
that it intended to depict the sub- reality that
is inhabited by vital forces rather than just
reproducing appearances. Life forces followed
rhythms and masks and sculptures should be seen as
combinations of those rhythms, themes of sweetness
as in one of his analyses of the feminine
statuette, combinations of concave forms and
cylindrical forms, in an underlying rhythm,
expressed in material forms.
Senghor became president in 1960 and organised his
own international festival of black arts. C's main
theme was whether African arts could regain some
sort of initiative. He remained informed by
surrealist politics and the Dionysian, with a
deliberate link to Nietzsche. Art remained as a
response to mechanism and dehumanising philosophy,
reification associated with modern Europe, and
offered a hopeful retotalising
Senghor also developed some epistemological
implications, expressed in the slogan that
'"emotion is Negro as reason is Hellenic"',
associated with his views on rhythm. This clearly
runs the danger of accepting Western ethnology and
the distinction between Western rationality and
the inferiority of colonised societies and their
more primitive mentality, suffused with
participation and magical thinking, ignoring
contradiction and proper understandings of
causality, associated with Levy-Bruhl. C also seem
to support this view in a poem suggesting that
black people were somehow simply abandoned in the
world.
Sartre saw this as similar to the distinction in
Bergson between intelligence and intuition, and
this leads to a more redemptive reading, negritude
as '"Afro Bergsonian epistemology"', although
Senghor explicitly used the language of Levy
Bruhl. Later he was to argue that there was an
identical form of reason, however just different
combinations of these elements, pointing back to
Bergson, and more explicit allegiances later
claiming that we now know that knowledge does not
divide subjects from objects nor objects into
separated parts. Senghor 'following Bergson'
argues for a 'reason – that – embraces' [still
looks a bit animist to me] [and there are
similarities between animism and the Elan Vital?].
So there is no simple division of humanity into
two categories, and this should be seen instead as
an acknowledgement of Bergsonian intuition.
Further, it is a description of art as knowledge
that attracts the most controversial bits about
emotion. In the context of the remark about
emotion being Negro, what Senghor is really saying
is that 'Hellenic art is to analytic reason what
African art is to emotion'
Cesaire was originally a member of the French
Communist Party but then resigned. The other two
were socialists. It was total allegiance to Russia
that seemed to be the problem rather than an
adequate recognition of blackness, and an
insistence that Stalinist paternalism was really
the same as colonialism. Culture was more
important than politics. This is also a response
to Sartre and his 'emaciated universalism'. He
called for an African communism or an African
socialism, based on the early Marx. He advocated
the epistemological break and focused on the
ethical and humanist work, while the later work
was a betrayal. This early work had to be built
upon to think out an African path to socialism
'inspired by black spiritualities and which
continues the tradition of communalism'.
Alienation is particularly important, and it is to
be combated on all levels, to reach a stage when
we can give birth to 'homo artifex' instead of
Homo Faber.
Négritude
has affected the concept of Africa invented by
Europeans. It has forced critical self appraisal
and challenged the concept of European rational
man. Does it have anything to say about black art,
especially as philosophy? There can be no recipe,
because African art should be a matter of self
invention. What about the role of négritude
in general black politics? It's heyday was really
before the great independence movements in Africa.
The vertical dimension, pan- Africanism, became
increasingly important in identifying négritude,
as independent liberation struggles seem to have
replaced any attempt at essentialism — for example
in the Caribbean Creoleness as a hybrid
construction fought racism rather than négritude
[a bit like Fanon on sociogenesis?].
African-American identity depends more on internal
identity politics of being American rather than
solidarity with Africans, except for a tiny elite.
Pan- Africanism has been revived via things like
the African Union, with the African diasporas as a
symbolic region only, unlike as in négritude
[it also implies that people actually living in
Africa may be African even if they are of European
or Asian descent]. Négritude becomes
problematic in terms of whether it is a horizontal
or vertical solidarity, a political alliance to
fight racism, or a matter of reviving heritage
while fighting off essentialism. Both essentialism
and hybridity are pervasive, with mixture probably
dominating these days. Négritude
might even be extended to include people who
aren't black, to include surrealists or poets, and
philosophers like Bergson [apparently an argument
by Senghor].
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