From Negritude to Black Cultural Nationalism: Debating the Possibility of Negro-African Unity in Nigeria and the US at Midcentury

While scholars continue to parse and enrich the diverse meanings and inflections of negritude, most have done little to recover its meanings beyond a francophone orbit. Though recent work has drawn attention to negritude’s political appeal within the French state and among African nationalists, this scholarship has not considered its adaptations beyond its most prominent thinkers, nor more crucially, its reception outside the state in the transnational black public sphere. In fact, it was during the later twentieth century that negritude went “global” via a transatlantic print culture and institutional network of cultural organizations affiliated with Présence Africaine and its Society of African Culture, especially in Nigeria and the United States. The efforts to transmit negritude across Africa and its diaspora generated fierce contests over its meaning, as the Senegalese, Nigerian, and African American members of this intellectual circle debated the significance of colonialism as a central unifying historical experience, the meaning of cultural continuity in African and diasporic cultures, the potential of negritude to serve as a useful organizing force in the context of postcolonial nation-building, and even the very idea of “Negro-African” unity. It was through these debates that negritude began to shed its postwar humanist inflections and was transformed into what the scholar Abiola Irele first named “black cultural nationalism,” as a way to fix negritude’s ongoing relevance in the context of postcolonial liberation. Even among sympathetic intellectuals who sought to yoke negritude to contemporary African and black politics, disagreement prevailed over what kind of political strategy and community the concept invoked. However, in examining the contested history of negritude’s anglophone reception, this paper will argue that such constitutive disjunctures should rather be read as sites of productive possibility within African and black internationalist movements.