Negritude’s intellectual founding directly drew on the Harlem Renaissance

Evidence

By the early 1930s, many of the primary writers of the Harlem Renaissance were being read by young African intellectuals studying in Europe, prompted by the presence both of black American cultural producers in Paris, London, and Berlin and of Caribbean and African intellectuals in New York. Aimé Césaire, the first to coin the term “Negritude,” in a poem in 1939, had actually written a dissertation in 1930 on the Harlem Renaissance, and was fully informed both regarding the conceptual apparatus and its intellectual, existential, and political commitments, adapting them to the specific conceptual conditions of African anticolonial and antiracist struggles. These ideas spurred, in turn, projects in the 1960s and 1970s by African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and American Indians (AIM), for example, to shake the dominance of Euro-America, whether conceptually or materially, politically and institutionally. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 96

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the history of Pan-African thought and transatlantic intellectual exchange; pair with discussions of Black internationalism in other readings. — connects to: The Harlem Renaissance’s New Negro concept shaped the Negritude movement through direct intellectual exchange — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 96
• SEED: An essay angle: how diaspora intellectual circuits — Paris, London, Berlin, New York — served as the transmission belt for anticolonial theory, a forerunner of today’s globalized critical theory.