Négritude et Amérique Latine: From the Black South Atlantic to the Third World

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the second half of the twentieth century, during the rise of Third World internationalism, a series of conferences and festivals took place on both sides of the Atlantic, which were fundamental for the articulation of a Pan-African global community that linked the continent with its diaspora. These meetings provided spaces of encounter and circulation of ideas among artists and intellectuals, who were able to connect the struggles and emancipatory imagination of Afro-descendant peoples beyond national boundaries. This article focuses on the Négritude et Amérique latine conference, held in Dakar in 1974, under the ideological and political patronage of Léopold Sédar Senghor. It discusses the role of Négritude both as an ideological and political movement that sought to extend solidarity networks between Africans and Afro-descendants and served as ideological grounding of Senghorian politics. The author considers the Dakar conference as a trigger for an international cultural diplomacy articulated on the idea of a “racial fraternity” and Third World solidarity, which gain strength during the cold war in particular and constitutes a fundamental episode of the formation of the Global South not only as a geopolitical but also as a historical concept.