SOURCE: Guillaume, Jr., Alfred J. “Negritude and Humanism: Senghor's Vision of a Universal Civilization.” In The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, edited by Amritjit Singh, William S. Shiver, and Stanley Brodwin, pp. 271-80. New York: Garland Publishing, 1989.

In the following essay, Guillaume ruminates on the ideology of Negritude as espoused by Senghor and others during the 1930s.

If the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s served as the catalyst for the “New Negro” in the United States, the Negritude movement of the 1930s in Paris sparked a similar renewal for black students from Africa and the Caribbean, who rejected the assimilation of European values and redefined themselves as children of Africa. This journey to the ancestral sources (“pèlerinage aux sources ancestrales”)¹ began in 1932 with the publication of Légitime Défense, a Communist and surrealist journal that opposed the bourgeoisie. Founded by Etienne Léro, Jules Minnerot, and René M...