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The (Revised) Birth of Negritude: Communist Revolution and “the Immanent Negro” in 1935

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Christopher L. Miller
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Extract

For Several Decades, Scholars have Believed, for Lack of Evidence to the Contrary, That Négritude—One of the Key Terms of identity formation in the twentieth century—appeared in print for the first time in Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), in 1939. This consensus reflects a revision of what the cofounders (with Césaire) of the negritude movement, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas, had remembered and stated. Senghor said in 1959 that “the word [négritude] was invented by Césaire in an article in the newspaper that bore the title L'Etudiant noir” (qtd. in Ako 347). In an interview published in 1980, Damas said, “Césaire coined this word in L'Etudiant noir” (qtd. in Ako 348). But L‘étudiant noir was a phantom. Lilyan Kesteloot, in her groundbreaking study Black Writers in French, attempted to summarize the content of L‘étudiant noir without seeing a single issue of it; none was available to her (84n2).

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 3 , May 2010 , pp. 743 - 749
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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References

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