Negritude affirmed diasporic black solidarity across colonial and postcolonial geographies

Evidence

A.C.: Universalizing, living values that had not been exhausted. The field was not dried up: it could still bear fruit, if we made the effort to irrigate it with our sweat and plant new seeds in it. So this was the situation: there were things to tell the world. We were not dazzled by European civilization. We bore the imprint of European civilization but we thought that Africa could’ make a contribution to Europe. It was also an affirmation of our solidarity. That’s the way it was: I have always recognized that what was happening to my brothers in Algeria and the United States had its repercussions in me. I understood that I could not be indifferent to what was happening in Haiti or Africa. Then, in a way, we slowly came to the idea of a sort of black civilization spread throughout the world. And I have come to the realization that there was a “Negro situation” that existed in different geographical areas, that Africa was also my country. There was the African continent, the Antilles, Haiti; there were Martinicans and Brazilian Negroes, etc. That’s what Negritude meant to me. — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 344

Categorization

• XREF: ‘Negro situation’ as a trans-geographic condition prefigures the constructed ‘Other’ and racialized selfhood vocabulary of the Islamophobia field’s representation theme. — connects to: Africa functions as a signifier for repressed racialized experience; Negritude was born as a rejection of colonial self-alienation among Antilleans — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 332; Black struggles in the US function under domestic colonialism linked to worldwide anticolonialism (+9 more)
• ADDENDUM: The ‘we were not dazzled by European civilization’ line parallels how ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ treats European self-justifying civilizational narratives as ideological constructs.

Related

• Africa functions as a signifier for repressed racialized experience (similarity 0.86)
• Negritude was born as a rejection of colonial self-alienation among Antilleans (similarity 0.84)
• Diaspora distance sharpened Black opposition’s theoretical comprehension (similarity 0.81)
• Diaspora Africans held potential for grand racial combination against Africa’s colonization (similarity 0.79)
• Black struggles in the US function under domestic colonialism linked to worldwide anticolonialism (similarity 0.79)
• The ‘Negro’ category erased Africa’s contributions to Western civilization (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Diaspora distance sharpened Black opposition’s theoretical comprehension #expands (0.85)
• Black struggles in the US function under domestic colonialism linked to worldwide anticolonialism #corroborates (0.82)
• Sartre relativized negritude at a moment when Black consciousness needed absoluteness #complicates (0.80)
• Anti-Blackness forms a single connected global phenomenon #corroborates (0.78) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1117
• Slave communal practices preserved Black identity and nourished the radical tradition #corroborates (0.75)
• Colonial contradictions produced the radical Black intelligentsia from the native bourgeoisie #expands (0.72) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 21