1. Frantz Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop,
and the Meaning of Négritude
Casey Phanor
Senior History Major
UNCF/Mellon Undergraduate Fellow
Mentor: Dr. Samuel T. Livingston
2. Fanon, Diop, and the Meaning of Négritude
• Overview
• Thesis – The intersections between the French Caribbean and Africa points to a reconstruction of Négritude as a discursive
practice.
• My introduction to Négritude
• Context – Historical and Geographic (France, Senegal, and Martinique)
• What is Negritude?
• The Founders
• The Critics
• Fanon, Diop and Rodney
• Significance – We need a different approaches to understanding the postcolonial/post-black world relative to our lived
experience. We must understand that poetry, legislation, and film fits into artistic production in a social process.
3. What is Négritude?
• Literary and ideological movement in the 1930’s
• Francophone students (Aime Césaire, Leopold Senghor, and Leon Damas)
created a journal, Eduiant Noir to speak about the treatment of blacks in the
French metropole.
• Négritude later came to constitute what was to remain specifically African in
the politics of African Socialism
• There are a multiplicity of definitions, as founders used their subjective
experience to confront colonial racism.
4. The art of Négritude
• “Prospero, you are the master of illusion. Lying is your trademark. And you have
lied so much to me (Lied about the world, lied about me) That you have ended by
imposing on me An image of myself. Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That’s the way you have forced me to see myself I detest that image! What's more,
it's a lie! But now I know you, you old cancer, And I know myself as well. - Caliban,
in Aime Cesaire's A Tempest
• Surrealism
• Noted in “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House” by Audre
Lorde
6. Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor
• Césaire: “Négritude is the simple recognition of the
fact of being black, and the acceptance of this
fact.”
• Senghor: “[Négritude is ]the totality of civilizations
and its values within the black world…”
7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Orphée Noir (1953)
• French philosopher, existentialist
• “Objective Negritude” Customs, arts, culture
• “Subjective Negritude” The poet; an original identity
• Negritude is a contingent phenomenon, a tension
between the black man’s “situation” and “freedom”
• Negritude is an active confrontation with history, it is a
pure contingence and becoming
8. The Négritude Debate
Wole Soyinka
Albert Franklin (1953): economic and materialist
explanation. The first questioning of Sartre’s ideas
Wole Soyinka (1976): “The tiger has no need to proclaim
tigritude.” Soyinka emphasizes the difference between the
Francophone and Anglophone black experience
Marcien Towa (1971): Interpretation of Senhor’s poetry
versus his political activity. She is from Cameroon, rejects the
notion of an irreducible black soul
Frantz Fanon (1961): Primacy of political action over culture.
The historicity of the black body of the past was not a
discovery, but a rediscovery
Cheikh Anta Diop (1974): Western domination in the field
of knowledge represented a fight to regain Africa’s knowledge
of itself. There existed more factors to determine one’s being-
in-the-world.
9. Frantz Fanon
• Martinican psychiatrist
• Used psychoanalysis to unpack Négritude in the French Antilles
• “Man freed from the springboard embodying the resistance of others
and digging into his flesh in order to find self-meaning.”
• “Ontology does not allow us to understand the being of the black
man, since it ignores the lived experience.”
10. Cheikh Anta Diop
• Senegalese physicist
• Saw Négritude as contingent to restoring black historical
consciousness
• “I approached the problem of black subjugation from a
different perspective than the literary anti-colonialist of the
1940’s. […] I realized that the cultural personality of a
people, of any people, was made up of three interrelated
factors. The psychic factor. The linguistic factor. The historical
factor.”
• “flight from one’s own language [as] the quickest shortcut
to cultural alienation.”
11. How scholars understand Négritude today?
• Today Négritude is considered dead and
outdated.
• Gates: “The Other must be seen as the
necessary negation of a primordial identity—
cultural or psychic—that introduces the
system of differentiation which enables the
‘cultural’ to be signified as a linguistic,
symbolic, historical reality.”
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
12. Research Question
• How do Frantz Fanon and Cheikh Anta Diop situate Negritude with an
activism model and a political voice?
13. Research Statement
• For Fanon, Négritude represented self-determination in response to the
alienating factors of colonialism, where one transcends the Manichean
binaries of French culture. On the other hand, Diop saw Négritude as
contingent to pre-colonial African identity, and in order to restore one’s
black historical consciousness, he located the Ancient Egyptian civilization as
the most plausible source for the origins of African history and language.
The differences between Fanon and Diop’s approach to Négritude, however,
resulted from their social environments.
14. Afterword: Walter Rodney
• Guyanese Historian, activist
• Rodney’s production in the 1979 documentary “The Terror and the
Time” displays a new form in which to interpret the ideas of
Négritude, as the film mediates past and present political struggles on
screen.
15. “The Terror and The Time” (1979)
The film intended to capture the history of the Guyanese people’s
fight for independence in 1953, where the everyday economic and
cultural repression of British colonialism could be seen up close
and personal.
16. Connections Between Rodney and Négritude
• The process of Rodney’s creative production in “The Terror and the Time” used
political struggle to formulate theories of liberation against the neocolonial state of
Guyana as well as the ruling elites’ attempt to control knowledge production.
• The documentary was an attempt to intervene into the Guyanese elite’s control of
knowledge production, while inserting revolutionary ideas which working people
could embrace.
• His film sought to ensure “creative production […] exists with the social division of
labor.” It was a social production because, like poetry, a film’s value can only be
realized through analysis.
17. Toward a Conclusion
• Locating the point where Fanon and Diop’s ideas on Négritude intersect as
well as examining the process in which Rodney synthesizes them highlights
the complexities within Négritude, allowing a refashioned approach to the
colonial situation.
