4.1 The Négritude and Negrismo Movements

The New Negro movement in the US (3.11), Négritude in the French-speaking world and Negrismo in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean all affirmed the value of African heritage and Black culture. They influenced and strengthened each other. All three stressed cultural pride and the political liberation of Black people, but they didn't always imagine Blackness, or their relationship to Africa, in the same way.

Paris was a meeting point. African American jazz musicians, artists, writers and veterans, such as Josephine Baker, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Augusta Savage, spent time there alongside students and intellectuals from Africa and the Caribbean. Hughes helped connect the movements by translating Black writers from French and Spanish into English, and his own work into those languages. Like the New Negro movement, Négritude and Negrismo began among educated elites.

Négritude (French for 'Blackness') was a political, cultural and literary movement from the 1930s to the 1950s. It started with Black students and writers from French colonies who met in Paris, including Aimé Césaire of Martinique, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal (later Senegal's first president) and Léon-Gontran Damas of French Guiana.

France's colonial policy of assimilation told colonized people to adopt French language and culture and leave their own behind. Négritude writers protested both colonialism and this pressure to assimilate. They claimed Blackness and African heritage as sources of pride and creativity.

Negrismo emerged in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, especially Cuba and Puerto Rico, at the same time. Black and mixed-race writers and artists in Latin America took it up, honoring what Africans had given to the region's music, folklore, literature and art. The Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén was a leading voice (4.8).

Supporters of Négritude and Negrismo rejected the claim that European colonialism 'civilized' colonized peoples. They argued that racist ideas were used to justify colonial exploitation, violence and forced labor. In Discourse on Colonialism, a required source, Aimé Césaire argued that colonialism didn't civilize anyone; instead, it degraded the colonizers themselves and destroyed the societies they ruled. He also argued that Europe had tolerated brutal methods abroad long before it was shocked to see them used against Europeans during the Second World War.

African Americans who supported these movements saw links to their own critique of racism and global capitalism. Jessie Redmon Fauset, literary editor of the NAACP's magazine The Crisis, condemned racism and colonialism as connected ways of dehumanizing people of African descent.

Loïs Mailou Jones, an African American painter whose career began in the Harlem Renaissance, painted Les Fétiches (1938) while studying in Paris; it features African masks and reflects her interest in African art. The Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, of African, Chinese and European descent, painted The Jungle (1943), which fills the canvas with mask-like figures among tall plant stalks, drawing on Afro-Cuban religion and the history of the plantation. Both works use African forms to make modern art that claims African heritage.