ABSTRACT
As we have seen in Chapter 4, in the 1920s and 1930s, with the so-called Harlem Renaissance and with the introduction of the concept of négritude – the idea that all black Africans and people of African origin somehow participated in a unified consciousness – ‘race’ began to be a factor of importance in literary studies. Refusing to be defined, on the basis of race, by the dominant white culture, African-American and French-speaking writers from Africa and the Caribbean began to define themselves and their culture in their own terms. After World War II, this project of cultural self-definition developed alongside the project of political self-determination that we find in the American Civil Rights movement and in the African and Caribbean demand for political independence and nationhood. This should not create the impression that cultural self-definition and political self-determination moved along two parallel lines that never met. On the contrary, the one cannot really be separated from the other. The AfricanAmerican Black Arts movement saw itself for instance as the cultural wing of the political Black Power movement of the 1960s and we have seen how Frantz Fanon, a radical critic of colonialism, saw national cultures – including national literatures – as
important instruments in the struggle for political independence. Cultural self-definition and political self-determination were two sides of the same coin.
