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Négritude
''Négritude'' (from French "Nègre" and "-itude" to denote a condition that can be translated as "Blackness") is a framework of critique and literary theory, developed mainly by francophone intellectuals, writers, and politicians of the African diaspora during the 1930s, aimed at raising and cultivating "Black consciousness" across Africa and its diaspora. Négritude gathers writers such as sisters Paulette and Jeanne Nardal (known for having laid the theoretical basis of the movement), Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Abdoulaye Sadji, Léopold Sédar Senghor (the first President of Senegal), and Léon Damas of French Guiana. ''Négritude'' intellectuals disavowed colonialism, racism and Eurocentrism. They promoted African culture within a framework of persistent Franco-African ties. The intellectuals employed Marxist political philosophy, in the Black radical tradition. The writers drew heavily on a surrealist literary style, and some say they were also influenced somewhat by th ...
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Paulette Nardal
Paulette Nardal (12 October 1896 – 16 February 1985) was a French writer from Martinique, a journalist, and one of the drivers of the development of black literary consciousness. She was one of the authors involved in the creation of the Négritude genre and introduced French intellectuals to the works of members of the Harlem Renaissance through her translations. Born into the upper-middle class on Martinique, Nardal became a teacher and went to complete her education in Paris. She was the first black person to study at the Sorbonne in 1920 and with her sisters established an influential literary salon, Le Salon de Clamart, which explored the experiences of the African diaspora. As a journalist and author, she published works that advocated a Pan-African awareness and acknowledged the similarities of challenges faced by people due to racism and sexism. Though an ardent feminist, she was not radical, encouraging women to work within the existing social structures to achieve poli ...
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Aimé Césaire
Aimé Fernand David Césaire (; ; 26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) was a French poet, author, and politician. He was "one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature" and coined the word in French. He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958, and served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988. His works include the book-length poem ''Cahier d'un retour au pays natal'' (1939), '' Une Tempête'', a response to Shakespeare's play '' The Tempest'', and '' Discours sur le colonialisme'' (''Discourse on Colonialism''), an essay describing the strife between the colonizers and the colonized. His works have been translated into many languages. Student, educator and poet Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Colonia de France, in 1913. His father was a tax inspector and his mother was a dressmaker. He was a lower class citizen but still learned ...
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Léopold Sédar Senghor
Léopold Sédar Senghor (; ; 9 October 1906 – 20 December 2001) was a Senegalese poet, politician and cultural theorist who was the first president of Senegal (1960–80). Ideologically an African socialist, he was the major theoretician of Négritude. Senghor was a proponent of African culture, black identity and African empowerment within the framework of French-African ties. He advocated for the extension of full civil and political rights for France's African territories while arguing that French Africans would be better off within a federal French structure than as independent nation-states. Senghor became the first President of independent Senegal. He fell out with his long-standing associate Mamadou Dia who was Prime Minister of Senegal, arresting him on suspicion of fomenting a coup and imprisoning him for 12 years. Senghor established an authoritarian single-party state in Senegal where all rival political parties were prohibited. Senghor was also the founder ...
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Frantz Fanon
Frantz Omar Fanon (, ; ; 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961), also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist, and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department). His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization. In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported Algeria's War of independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Fanon has been described as "the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time". For more than five decades, the life and works of Fanon have inspired national-liberation movements and other radical political organizations in Palestine, Sri Lanka, S ...
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Martinique
Martinique ( , ; gcf, label= Martinican Creole, Matinik or ; Kalinago: or ) is an island and an overseas department/region and single territorial collectivity of France. An integral part of the French Republic, Martinique is located in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies in the eastern Caribbean Sea. It has a land area of and a population of 364,508 inhabitants as of January 2019.Populations légales 2019: 972 Martinique
INSEE
One of the Windward Islands, it is directly north of Saint Lucia, northwest of

Léon Damas
Léon-Gontran Damas (March 28, 1912 – January 22, 1978) was a French poet and politician. He was one of the founders of the Négritude movement. He also used the pseudonym Lionel Georges André Cabassou. Biography Léon Damas was born in Cayenne, French Guiana, to Ernest Damas, a mulatto of European and African descent, and Bathilde Damas, a Metisse of Native American and African ancestry. In 1924, Damas was sent to Martinique to attend the Lycée Victor Schoelcher (a secondary school), where he would meet his lifelong friend and collaborator Aimé Césaire. In 1929, Damas moved to Paris to continue his studies. While he studied law under guidance from his parents, his diverse array of courses in other topics like anthropology, history, and literature sparked his interest in radical politics. There, he reunited with Césaire and was introduced to Leopold Senghor. In 1935, the three young men published the first issue of the literary review '' L'Étudiant Noir'' (The Black St ...
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Jeanne Nardal
Jeanne "Jane" Nardal (1900 – 1993) was a French writer, philosopher, teacher, and political commentator from Martinique. She and her sister, Paulette Nardal, are considered to have laid the theoretical and philosophical groundwork of the Négritude movement, a cultural, political, and literary movement, which first emerged in 1930s, Paris and sought to unite Black intellectuals in the current and former French colonies. The term "Négritude" itself was coined by Martiniquan writer-activist Aimé Césaire, one of the three individuals formally recognized as the "fathers" of the cultural movement, along with Senegalese poet Léopold Senghor and French Guianese writer Léon Damas. It was not until relatively recently, however, that the women involved in the Négritude movement, including Jane and Paulette Nardal, began to receive the recognition they were due. Ancestry The Nardal's great-grandmother, Sidonie Nardal, was born into slavery in the region of Trinité, Martinique, be ...
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Abdoulaye Sadji
Abdoulaye Sadji (1910 in Rufisque, Senegal – 25 December 1961 in Dakar) was a Senegalese writer and teacher. The son of a Muslim priest, a '' marabout,'' Sadji was educated in a Quranic schoolWästberg, s. 292 before attending French schools. After training as a teacher at the École Normale William Ponty in Gorée he became one of the first African high school teachers, working in various parts of Senegal.Akyeampong, Gates, p. 242 In 1932 he became only the second Senegalese person to earn a bachelor's degree. In the 1950s, Sadji worked for a radio station in Dakar and in 1953, together with Léopold Sédar Senghor, he wrote a reading-book for the elementary school. This book, ''La Belle Histoire de Leuk-le-Lièvre'', preserves traditional Senegalese oral tales and is regarded as a classic collection of traditional stories from Africa. As one of the founders of ''Négritude ''Négritude'' (from French "Nègre" and "-itude" to denote a condition that can be translated as ...
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French Guiana
French Guiana ( or ; french: link=no, Guyane ; gcr, label= French Guianese Creole, Lagwiyann ) is an overseas department/region and single territorial collectivity of France on the northern Atlantic coast of South America in the Guianas. It borders Brazil to the east and south and Suriname to the west. With a land area of , French Guiana is the second-largest region of France (more than one-seventh the size of Metropolitan France) and the largest outermost region within the European Union. It has a very low population density, with only . (Its population is less than that of Metropolitan France.) Half of its 294,436 inhabitants in 2022 lived in the metropolitan area of Cayenne, its capital. 98.9% of the land territory of French Guiana is covered by forests, a large part of which is primeval rainforest. The Guiana Amazonian Park, which is the largest national park in the European Union, covers 41% of French Guiana's territory. Since December 2015, both the regi ...
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Surrealist
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or ''surreality.'' It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media. Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and '' non sequitur''. However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost (for instance, of the "pure psychic automatism" Breton speaks of in the first Surrealist Manifesto), with the works themselves being secondary, i.e. artifacts of surrealist experimentation. Leader Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a ...
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Black Is Beautiful
Black is beautiful is a cultural movement that was started in the United States in the 1960s by African Americans. It later spread beyond the United States, most prominently in the writings of the Black Consciousness Movement of Steve Biko in South Africa. Black is beautiful got its roots from the '' Négritude'' movement of the 1930s. Negritude argued for the importance of a Pan-African racial identity among people of African descent worldwide. It aims to dispel the racist notion that black people's natural features such as skin color, facial features and hair are inherently ugly. John Rock was long thought to be the first person to coin the phrase "black is beautiful"—during a speech in 1858—but historical records indicate that he never actually used the specific phrase on that day. The movement also encouraged men and women to stop trying to eliminate African-identified traits by and attempting to lighten or bleach their skin. Bill Allen, a freelance writer for adver ...
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Afro-Surrealism
Afro-Surrealism or Afro-surrealism is a school of art and literature. In 1974, Amiri Baraka used the term to describe the work of Henry Dumas. D. Scot Miller in 2009 wrote his famous Afro-surreal Manifesto in which he says, "Afro-Surrealism sees that all 'others' who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist..." The manifesto delineates Afro-Surrealism from Surrealism and Afro-Futurism. The manifesto lists ten tenets that Afro-Surrealism follows including how "Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past," and how "Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it." Afro-Surrealism, is practiced and embodied in music, photography, film, the visual arts and poetry. Notable practitioners and inspirations of Afro-Surrealism include Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, Krista Franklin, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, René Ménil, Kool Keith, Terence Nance, Will ...
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