PAPERBACK ISBN: 0-88258-066-3       $32.95

450 pages; 6 x 9 inches

A Literary History of Negritude

by Lilyan Kesteloot, Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy

Negritude, according to Aimé Césaire, “is the awareness of being black, the simple acknowledgment of a fact which implies the accep­tance of it, a taking charge of one’s destiny as a black man, of one’s his­tory and culture.” The assertion and affirmation of black identity by Césaire and other writers of the negritude movement during the 1930s and early 1940s signaled an intellectual revolt against French colonialism and its assimi­lationist policy. In the preface to Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude, author Lilyan Kesteloot discusses the radical departures from this concept that have occurred in recent francophone literature in response to painful post-independence realities.  She examines the roots and development of this cultural and literary movement among French-speaking West Indian and African students in Paris and confirms the ongoing employment of the negritude idiom in poetry and the historical drama. Kesteloot also ana­lyzes the early poetry of Léopold Senghor, Léon Damas, and Aimé Césaire, the founding fathers of the movement, tracing the elabora­tion of their ideas and the activities through which these poets dissemi­nated their views. The study concludes by gauging the impact and influence of negritude on subsequent generations of French-speaking Caribbean and African writers.

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