Abstract
Abstract
The negritude movement emerged from the Black intellectual milieu of Paris in the 1930s and became one of the defining anticolonial modes of the postwar years. It stands as an exemplary case of primitivism beyond its canonical European forms, performing a striking détournement of primitivism in the unlikely direction of anticolonial liberation. This article places the work of leading writers of negritude, including Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, and Léopold Senghor, into dialogue with their friend and critic René Ménil to unfold the political stakes of anticolonial primitivism. Ménil, a Martinican Communist who moved in the same Parisian milieu as the negritude writers, developed a sustained critique of negritude in the postwar years. This critique allows us to see that, in making primitivism a basis for liberation, negritude reconfigures many of the common assumptions of leftist thought at the time, including the rejection of a stagist account of history and the development of a revolutionary subject defined not by its oppressed position within the structures of modernity but by its location outside of them. By imagining the divide between modern and nonmodern as a fault line along which the anticolonial struggle will be fought, these thinkers develop an alternate vision of liberation whose legacy resonates in contemporary political debates.