Michal Golis (330988)Mgr. Martina Horkov, Ph.D.AJ 56011: Postcolonial and Feminist Rewritings of Master Narratives3rd November 2012 Ngritude Having first emerged in the 1930's among Paris black intelligentsia, Ngritude is a primarily literary and philosophical movement formed in reaction to French colonialism and prevalent institutionalized racism, which, apart from being a tool of social and political oppression, constituted a major hindrance to the flourishing of black intellectual thought and artistic expression. It provided black intellectuals with a platform for asserting their identity, informed by a unique colonial experience, and cultural heritage and served as a relatively potent force in the anti-colonialist struggle. The term Negritude was first coined and used by a Martinican poet and playwright Aime Csaire in 1935 in the third issue of a literary review L'Etudiant Noir (The Black Student). It, however, gained greater significance especially after being used in his epic poem Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal where he writes:My negritude is not a stoneNor a deafness flung against the clamor of the dayMy negritude is not a white speck of dead waterOn the dead eye of the earthMy negritude is neither tower nor cathedral (67-68) What is it then? Though the term has always been somewhat ambiguous, in the words of Aim Csaire it originally referred to "the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as black people, of our history and our culture (Senghor 69)." In a later interview Csaire explained it was also meant to describe and serve as an affirmation that one is black and proud of it (BBC). The Ngritude movement used the term ngre, which previously bore almost solely negative connotations of inferiority, oppression and discrimination and appropriated it to show that blackness was something to embrace and unite around rather than be ashamed of and thus reverse the representations ascribed to them, turn those negative identities into positive images (Ahluwalia 22). In Csaire's eyes its main task was to divest the black man of the system, which had separated him from himself, his past and culture, free him from the yoke of colonialism. His conception of Negritude was therefore essentially anti-colonialist, which attracted numerous reactions, reformulations and criticisms. One of the thinkers, whose understanding of what Ngritude should represent differed from Csaire's was Lopold Sdar Senghor, an important Senegalese poet and cultural theorist as well as one of the founders and key figures of the Ngritude movement. In Senghor's eyes the term gained a much wider scope of reference, applying to the whole of humanity rather than constituting a reaction to the West or colonialism as such. In his later writings he, furthermore, gave the word a strong pan-African, or pan-Negrist, political undertone as he strived for the formation of strong Senegal and the awakening of the African continent while encouraging the politics of cultural crossbreeding, leading to an ultimate universal civilization which would be the product of values from many cultures (as cited in Thiam 29). It is somewhat paradoxical that one of the intellectuals who most contributed to the spread of the idea of Negritude was a white man Jean Paul Sartre in his essay Black Orpheus, published as an introduction to a volume of poetry Anthologie de la nouvelle posie ngre et malgache. Sartre characterizes the term's meaning as an anti-racist racism (Ahluwalia 24) and though he views it as an inevitable reaction, it is nevertheless a reaction only poetic, without the potential to activate any fundamental social change. (Souleymane)FanonPal Ahluwalia the movement was full of contradictions and ambivalencedevelopmentmain proponentsphilosophy and characteristicsreactionfoundational worksplace in post-colonial theoryquotes