Négritude

Négritude is a framework of critique and literary theory developed in the 1930s, mainly by French-speaking Black intellectuals and writers, to raise Black consciousness across Africa and its diaspora. Its founders included the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, later the first president of Senegal, and Léon Damas of French Guiana. Césaire first used the word in its present sense in 1935 in L'Étudiant noir, a magazine he had started in Paris with fellow students. Rejecting colonialism, racism and Eurocentrism, its writers drew on Marxism and Surrealism and celebrated African history and culture.