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

2010; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 125; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1632/pmla.2010.125.3.743

1938-1530

Christopher L. Miller,

North African History and Literature

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).