Négritude

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani approaches negritude through Stanislas Adotevi's Négritude et négrologues (1972): he presents the book in 2017, then discusses it with its author12. He takes up its historical thesis. Negritude was necessary at first as a founding myth and as the stake of a struggle for recognition, but then becomes a hindrance1. Against all essentialism, he argues that identity is a relation and not a substance. To show this he draws on linguistic examples (the Welsh, the Walloons, the Gourmantché), and he holds that what is attributed to Black people applies to any relation between centre and periphery. He shows that "nègre" is a concept and not a colour, through the Slavs, Rimbaud and Lothrop Stoddard. He praises in Adotevi a negritude thought in terms of class and recalls the "Marxist prehistory" of the independences, which identity discourse obscures2. He links the theme to a critique of ethnology, from Delafosse to Lévi-Strauss, and to the rehabilitation of the universal1. With Adotevi, the discussion also turns to Senghor, to Césaire and to the "négrologues", who turn negritude into a business3.

1. 1Négritude et négrologues / Adotevi par Pagani (2017)8 Jun 2017
2. 2Adotevi : Négritude et négrologues (1)17 Jun 2017
3. 3Adotevi : Négritude et négrologues (2)17 Jun 2017

Introduction produced automatically from the 3 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.