Longue Durée Négritude: Thinking the Movement Beyond the Twentieth Century

This talk examines the form of Negritude that has come to shape our scholarly and popular understanding – one shaped by the intellectual and creative contributions of Paulette Nardal and Aimé Césaire of Martinique, Léon‑Gontran Damas of Guyane, and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal. I first situate Negritude within its layered contexts: the local landscapes of Martinique, Guyane, and Senegal; the national framework of France and its colonial institutions; and the wider global currents of Black internationalism circulating in the interwar and postwar periods. Through these intertwined settings, I explore the movement’s defining traits and its philosophical, political, artistic, and literary expressions as articulated by the thinkers and poets who shaped it.

With a focus on American Negritude as articulated by Nardal, Césaire and Damas, I argue that the movement’s roots reach even deeper than what Aimé Césaire proposed when he identified the Haitian Revolution (1791–1803) as the first historical expression of Negritude.

By returning to the intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic strategies forged by Africans on plantations – strategies through which they affirmed Africa as a site of beauty, dignity, and ancestral grounding – I show that Nardal’s, Césaire’s, Damas’s, (and Senghor’s) Negritude participates in a much older tradition of African and Afro-descendant thought. Framing Negritude within this longue durée allows us to see it as not only a twentieth‑century literary and political movement, but also as a continuation of an enduring African and diasporic epistemology born in resistance, memory, and the reimagining of Africa across centuries.