ABSTRACT
Conceptually, Négritude was a multifaceted high-wire intellectual and political act negotiating, on the one hand, doctrines of racial relativism and, on the other, an ambiguous longing for a multiracial universalism. Négritude wanted to affirm an African and black racial particularity even as it showed, in its theories and practices, a remarkable willingness to engage in critical dialogue with modern Western thought from—in the case of Senghor, for example—Marx and Hegel through Pierre de Chardin to Sartre. Césaire and Senghor selectively appropriated resources from modern Western traditions, but for the purposes of asserting the difference and the uniqueness of an African and black world; they staged their arguments as determinate demands requiring that Europeans understand and respect the “dignity” of Africans (Césaire) 1 in the name of a “universal brotherhood” (Senghor). 2 Key questions, however, remained: If Négritude offered itself as an “Africanist” or black critique of racial whiteness and capitalist exploitation in European modernity, if Négritude presented itself as an alternative mode of conversation about the anthropology of blackness and whiteness, should we not ask if this Négritude, through these questions and its cultural politics, also succeeded in transforming not only its condition of subjection but also the Euro-American objects of its critiques? If Négritude failed in this transformative mission, why? If it succeeded, what is left, today, for a successor philosophy of Africa or of black race and cultures? What determinate 148“black” or “Afro” projects could an African or black philosophy inherit from Négritude? What connects today’s African or black philosophy to its Négritude prehistory?
