SOURCE: Moore, Gerald. “The Politics of Negritude: Frantz Fanon, Léopold Senghor, Léon Damas, Aimé Césaire, David Diop, and Tchicaya U'Tamsi.” In Protest & Conflict in African Literature, edited by Cosmo Pieterse and Donald Munro, pp. 26-42. London, England: Heinemann, 1969.

In the following essay, Moore surveys the relationship between politics and Negritude as it is expressed in the works of various authors identified with the movement.

It is my hope to say something new about politics and Negritude, although that isn't easy because it is a much-trodden field. I certainly don't want to thrust at you reflections with which you are probably already quite familiar.

So I thought we might take as a starting-point the observations of Frantz Fanon, a Martiniquan writer of Negro origin, who spent a good deal of his life in France and, latterly, became the head of a mental hospital in Algeria. He...