Negritude’s original explosive meaning has been flattened by later appropriations

Evidence

Paris a book entitled De l’egalite des races humaines, in which he tried to re-evaluate African culture in Haiti in order to combat the total and colorless assimilation that was characteristic of our early authors. You could say that beginning with the second half of the nineteenth century some Haitian authors - Justin Lherisson, Frederic Marcelin, Fernand Hibbert, and Antoine Innocent - began to discover the peculiarities of our country, the fact that we had an African past, that the slave was not born yesterday, that voodoo was an important element in the development of our national culture. Now it is necessary to examine the concept of Negritude more closely. Negritude has lived through all kind of adventures. I don’t believe that this concept is always understood in its original sense, with its explosive nature. In fact, there are people today in Paris and other places whose objectives are very different from those of Return to My Native Land. — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 341

Categorization

• QUESTION: Césaire says Negritude is misread in its ‘original sense, with its explosive nature’ — worth chasing what the explosive deployment was versus its co-opted later variants.
• XREF: Precedes Césaire’s own definition in 342; useful as the framing that the concept was initially a weapon against assimilation.