In Praise of the Post‐racial: Negritude Beyond Negritude

Abstract

This contribution examines what the significance of the Negritude movement could be today. It argues that there is a form of ‘negritude beyond negritude’, and that to see it as racial essentialism (or racialism) from a bygone colonial time, bound to disappear in our postcolonial and hopefully post‐racial era, is to miss what it has to say today. In the way Senghorian Negritude presented itself as a contribution to twentieth‐century humanism, it still has something to say to the humanism of this early twenty‐first century. What it has to say, beyond the defence and illustration of the values of a certain race, is that in our global world, what Senghor used to call, following Teilhard de Chardin, the ‘civilization of the universal’ is still the task.