Gendered labour, negritude and the Black public sphere

Abstract

Abstract This article uses the landmark 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists to re-examine the gendering of the Black public sphere. Organized by Présence africaine, the journal/publishing house that served as the hub for the negritude movement, the congress is one of the iconic moments in African and Black intellectual history. Women were notoriously absent among its delegates, yet this article reconstructs the contributions of Christiane Yandé Diop, Dorothy Brooks and other collectives whose myriad contributions were critical to its success. It argues that the congress was representative of what feminist theorists and organizers have called the fused nature of ‘work’ (production) and ‘domestic work’ (social reproduction), that is, labour necessary to sustain life. As they have shown, where labour takes place impacts its gendering. Because most of the planning for the congress took place in social reproductive settings like homes and cafés, this often compressed re/productive labours, gendering negritude’s intellectual life in consequential ways. Yet though negritude’s women exemplify the frequently blurred lines between re/productive labour, between so-called ‘intellectuals’ and those who operated without such a designation, their own self-understandings sometimes reinstated these gendered divisions. Yandé Diop, Brooks and many others were critical to shaping negritude, and yet the alternative choices they made in that shaping need to be reckoned with on their own terms. I thus argue that we need to take such choices seriously at the same time as we do justice to the integral nature of their contributions. Doing so can help us negotiate with greater nuance the different choices that women made in their contributions to intellectual life.