The Study of Racialism

jjnetoneak · Probationary Joined: 06 Jan 2009 {Posts: 0 } Location: USA

- Aime Cesaire was born in Martinique [1913]. He was a poet, playwright, politician, and a member of the French Communist Party until Russia invaded Hungary in the mid 1950's -- which made him distanced himself to form the PPM. Cesaire influenced Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, a revolutionary treatise on the adverse effects of colonialism.

- Negritude restored what slavery & colonialism took away culturally from African Folks. Aime Cesaire along with Leopold Senghor, Leon Damas, and others coined this term of a restored identity. These are excerpts from an essay by Cesaire during a conference on "Negritude, Ethnicity and Afro Cultures in the Americas" -- held in Miami in 1987.

*THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN THE AMERICAS*, ed. by Moore / Sanders / Moore [pp. 13-16]. Aime Cesaire's in his own words:

I confess to not always liking the word Negritude even if I myself, with the complicity of others, contributed to inventing and promoting it.
But even if I do not revere the term, I affirm that the word negritude fits a visible reality and fulfills an undoubtedly profound need.
What is this reality?
An ethnic reality, some would say.
But the word ethnic should not confound us.
In fact, negritude is not essential of a biological nature. Beyond immediate biology, it obviously refers to something deeper, more precisely, to a sum of lived experiences which have defined and characterized one of the forms of human condition made by history. Its common denominator is not skin color as such but the fact that we all belong in one way or another to a people who has suffered and continues to suffer, a people who is marginilized and oppressed.
I shall never forget the day I saw in a bookstore window in Quebec a book whose title bewildered me: WE THE WHITE NEGROES OF AMERICA (Nous Autres Negres Blanc D' Amerique). Of course I smiled at the exaggeration, yet I said to myself: "Well, this author may be exaggerating, but at least he has understood negritude."
Yes we do constitute a community of a very particular type, recognizable for what it is and for what it has been. First, it is a community forged out of suffered oppression, imposed exclusion and discrimination. And to its honor, it is also a community of continued resistance, of stubborn struggle and of indominable hope.
At least that's what negritude was to us then as young students. There was Leopold Senghor, Leon Damas, myself, Alioune Diop and other fellowmen who met at Presence Africaine. Negritude is still all of that to the surviving members of that group. Discredited, misused and distorted, the term negritude continues to be difficult to apprehend.
Negritude is not a philosophy.
Negritude is not metaphysics.
Negritude is not a pretentious conception of the universe.
It is a way of living a history within history; the history of a community whose experience is indeed unparalleled with its populationdeportations, its forced migrations of men and women from one continent to another, the wreckage of slaughtered cultures and remnamts of long forgotten beliefs.
How can this coherence not constitute a specific heritage?
What more is needed to create an identity?
Who cares about chromosomes?
I believe in archetypes.
I believe in the value of all that is buried in the collective memory and even in the collective unconsciousness.
I don't believe that we come into the world with an empty brain in the same way that we come with empty hands.
I believe in the virtue of accumulated and secular experiences conveyed by cultures.
I have never been able to believe that the thousands of Africans that the slave trade transported to the Americas could have had no other importance than that of their animal strength--an animal strength similar to and not necessarily superior to that of the horse or the ox--and that they not impregnate the new civilization with a certain number of essential values, these new societies being potential carriers.
That is to say, that negritude in its initial stage can be defined as sudden awarness of difference, as a collective memory, as loyalty, and last, as a form of solidarity.
Negritude is not only passive suffering and enduring.
Nor is pathetic or painful.
Negritude arises from an active and aggressive attitude of the mind.
It is a sudden reawakening.
It is refusal.
It is a struggle.
It is a revolt.
But then--you may ask--revolt against what?
I believe that negritude has historically been a form of revolt against the world cultural order as it was constituted over the last centuries, characterized by a number of prejudices and presuppositions that led to a very strict hierarchy. In other words, negritude has been a revolt against what I call European redutionism. I want to talk about this system of thought, or rather of the instinctive inclination of an eminent and prestigious civilization to abuse even its own prestige in order to make a void around itself by abusively reducing the notion of universal to its own dimensions; that is, to think of universality from the point of view of its own assumptions an categories.
We have seen all too well the consequences this has wrought to cut man off from himself, from his roots, from the universe, from his own humanity and, as a result, to isolate him in a suicidal pride when not in a rationalistic and scientific form of barbarism.
But--you will tell me--a revolt which is only a revolt constitute no more than a historical dead end.
If negritude has not bee a dead end, it is because it was leading somewhere. Where? It was leading us to ourselves. After a long experience of frustration, we managed at last to seize our own past and, through the imaginary, grasp the intermittent flashing of our potential being.
A revolution of concepts, a cultural earthquake; all metaphors are possible here. The essential is that negritude spawned the rehabilitation of our values by ourselves; the plumbing of the depths of our past by ourselves; of our own re-rooting in a history, a geography and a culture; the whole given meaning not by an archaic dwelling on the past but by reactivation of the past in order to leave it behind.........

PEACE

femmedecouleur · Posted: Wed 28 Jun 2006 00:50 Post subject:

Interesting post!

Mariani · Regular User Joined: 15 Jun 2006 {Posts: 82 }

Interestingly the psychiatrist Franz Fanon always considered the concept of negritude too simplistic. In Black Skin White Masks he talks about the feelings of inferiority many people in the French Carribbean still have who according to him "after the white error are now living the big black mirage."

Fledgist · Posted: Sun 02 Jul 2006 01:25 Post subject:

Mariani · Regular User Joined: 15 Jun 2006 {Posts: 82 }

Negritude is even older. I think Fanon is still accurate in many ways and his analysis does not only apply to the French Carribbean in my opinion. I don't want to elaborate on this though because it's ugly. At the same time we see certain mentalities and ideologies embraced more than ever especially among younger people. It's definetively "the big black mirage after the white error".

Salsassin · Suspended Joined: 04 Apr 2005 {Posts: 3508 }

The concept of Creolite came as a counterpoint to Negritude

femmedecouleur · Posted: Sun 02 Jul 2006 20:00 Post subject:

Fledgist · Posted: Sun 02 Jul 2006 23:54 Post subject:

Fledgist · Posted: Sun 02 Jul 2006 23:57 Post subject:

Mariani · Regular User Joined: 15 Jun 2006 {Posts: 82 }