Black World Research Articles

L’Annonce faite à Marie: de l’héritage africain à une lecture postcoloniale

In this article, a postcolonial reading is undertaken of L’annonce faite à Marie (The annunciation of Mary), a 1912 play by Paul Claudel. Several celebrated authors from Africa and the Caribbean, belonging to the black postcolonial world, willingly acknowledge their debt to Paul Claudel, including Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Édouard Glissant and Saint-John Perse. Nevertheless, postcolonial theories generally exclude the study of Western and medieval works from the purview of postcolonial studies. It may thus appear paradoxical to propose a postcolonial reading of Claudel’s play, written by a French playwright who does not belong to the colonized world. The play is furthermore set in the Middle Ages. However, many critics, mostly Anglo-Saxons, have successfully matched medieval texts and postcolonial studies. In fact, postcolonial theoretical tools are capable of casting new light on the study of L’Annonce faite à Marie, regarding, for example, relations of gender or power, marginalization and migration. Given Claudel’s avowed impact on the literature of the black world, in view of the play’s focus on situations of domination, the postcolonial approach may be legitimately applied to the study of L’Annonce faite à Marie, despite the ‘medieval’ particularities of this play.

The Ethical Challenges of Photography in a Black and White World

This review of Peter Elliott’s book on the life and photography of the South African photographer, Constance Stuart Larrabee, traces her early fascination with the colourful houses and glass-beaded blankets of the Ndebele people living near Pretoria and her propulsion into fame following the inclusion of two of her images on Edward Steichen’s highly influential The Family of Man photographic exhibition in 1955. The review questions whether her appropriation of cultural exoticism was an act of admiration on her part, or is she guilty of “othering’ members of the Ndebele and Xhosa people? Following the author, this reviewer laments the lack of contextual detail (where, when and whom) provided by the photographer, but concludes that Stuart-Larrabee, otherwise immune to the politics of segregation, displayed empathy, compassion and admiration towards her human subject matter. She pursued her life-long obsession with photographing remote towns and rural settings throughout southern Africa, in the trenches of the Second World, and the Calvinist adherents of the Dopper Kerk.

Religion in the Life of Langston Hughes

ABSTRACT Langston Hughes published so much brilliant literature with a strongly religious flavor that many people, including academic critics, appear to assume that he was in some way ultimately a devout believer in God. This essay argues that while Hughes was fascinated and inspired by the dynamic role of religion in black American life, he himself, like so many writers black and white, was hostile to religion. Growing up with a sense of personal abandonment, he experienced God as a power that promised much but delivered little or nothing. Threatened because of his harshly irreligious poems (notably “Goodbye Christ”) written especially in the 1930s, when he was a radical, Hughes later embraced religious themes as a writer less because of his faith than because he saw this posture as likely to bolster his position against right-wing leaders, such as Senator Joe McCarthy, who wanted to silence him. Hughes's script for his own funeral, which explicitly excluded religion, reflected his bitterness on the subject and his rival belief in the redemptive power of values rooted in the black world, including jazz and the blues.

(Profitable) imaginaries of Black Power: The popular and political geographies of Black Panther

Taking in over $1 billion in ticket sales in its first month, the Marvel Studios film Black Panther (2018) represents a watershed in popular-geopolitical representation of Africa, particularly though its inversion of centuries of depictions of Africa as a ‘Dark Continent’ where primitivism reigns. The motion picture also makes a discursive intervention in the politics of African American-African relations through spatial representation of three geographic constructs presented in the film: 1) the ‘real’ city of Oakland, California; 2) the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda; and 3) the (geo)political imaginary of the black world. This article demonstrates the (limited) scope and scale of popular geopolitics as resistance, elaborating on how cultural producers as well as scholars, critics and prosumers can shift the discourse by reframing and reinterpreting geopolitics via progressive pop-culture. However, is also contests the liberatory frame that characterised the film's reception; this is done through an interrogation of ‘Hollywood's’ appropriation of human suffering for financial profit, with a close attention to how Black Panther promotes a neoliberal agenda while also engaging in various forms Orientalism and Othering. Lastly, this article serves as an empirical contribution with its analysis of the representations of Black Panther's political geographies, focusing on how this artefact intersects with ongoing transnational political movements including Black Lives Matter.

Black Youths’ Challenges in the “New” South Africa: Education, Language and Identity in Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut (2007)

Those who were born after the demise of apartheid in South Africa are generally referred to as the “born frees” because 1994 is regarded as a nodal point in the emancipation of the oppressed, especially black people. South Africa was finally a unitary state that observed fundamental human rights such as the right to basic education. Interestingly, when Coconut was published in 2007, the “born-frees” would have been thirteen years old and a lucky few black youths would have been in grade seven at the so-called “former white schools”1. The lucky ones would have been ready to embark on their high school journeys which would determine a life trajectory to the promised land, while the majority black youths’ dreams would have been deferred or even destroyed. It is important to note that, as it was the case with the likes of Bloke Modisane, Peter Abrahams and Can Themba in apartheid South Africa, “whiteness” still plays a critical role in black youth’s aspirations and identity formation. For the lucky few, “whiteness” is still a tool to access white privilege, while for the less fortunate it is seen as a means to escape grinding poverty. However, as demonstrated in this paper, the black youths’ attempt to pass as white only succeeds in undermining and in some instances destroying their languages and identities. The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the root causes of the failure of social cohesion. In this regard the paper encourages honest dialogue around sensitive issues such as racism and discrimination in schools. This paper focuses on how institutionalised racism and discrimination affect black youth in the current dispensation. In this regard, the paper will analyse the experiences of the main characters, Ofilwe, Tshepo, Fikile and Silas Nyoni. Following Derrick Bell’s critical race theory, the paper interrogates the entrenched institutional racism and discrimination and the impact they have on the black youths’ internal constitution, identity and social inclusivity. Finally, it discusses the black youth’s rejection from the white world and their equal alienation from the black world. Clearly, while access to better education extended to all post 1994, the unintended consequences to black youth a far-reaching and devastating.

The Unsung Hero of Birdsong, USA by Brenda Woods

Reviewed by: The Unsung Hero of Birdsong, USA by Brenda Woods Elizabeth Bush Woods, Brenda The Unsung Hero of Birdsong, USA. Paulsen/Penguin, 2019 [208p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-5247-3709-2 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-5247-3710-8 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 4-6 Gabriel Haberlin celebrates his twelfth birthday in 1946 with a new bicycle, which he promptly rides into an intersection just in front of the town’s worst driver. Happily, Mr. Meriwether Hunter pushes him out of harm’s way and repairs the bike to near mint condition. Mr. Hunter is a returned vet, looking for work as a mechanic; a grateful Mr. Haberlin owns a service station and has just lost a mechanic. It should be a match made in heaven, except for the fact that Mr. Hunter is Black, and Mr. Haberlin’s other employee, Lucas, is a no-holds-barred bigot. Mr. Hunter is a paragon of self-control, avoiding Lucas and slowly winning the professional respect of the white customers. He’s clearly chafing at the current parades for returning white veterans and holding back information on his own service, worried it might bring unwanted and perhaps violent attention; that worry is confirmed when Lucas’ actions lead to near-tragedy and the shadow of suspicion falling on Mr. Hunter. Hardly a brief chapter goes by without Gabriel thoughtfully learning life lessons delivered by his elders, and the ending, in which the Hunter family moves from Birdsong, SC to Michigan in search of better work and the hope of less overt racism, is bittersweet but somewhat unrealistically easy. Woods is at her best in exploring the reasons a Black World War II hero who fought in the Battle of the Bulge might keep that card close to the vest, and the closing note that observes that it took until 2005 to memorialize the 761st Tank Battalion’s valor will leave readers with plenty to think about. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore and W.E.B. Du Bois

From 1945 Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) developed close relations first with George Padmore (1902-1959), a Trinidadian, and then with Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois (1868- 1963), an African-American who became a Ghanaian citizen soon before he died. As men of thought and action, they exerted great influence on the affairs of their day; and, through their writings, they continue to exert considerable influence on contemporary thinking in the black world. They all lie buried in Ghana. This essay seeks to explore the basis of their relationship.* Originally published in Research Review, Vol 7, Nos. 1 & 2, 1991

Translation and the professional selves of Mercer Cook

AbstractThis article explores the ways in which African American Mercer Cook's translation practice reflects complex overlaps between his professional/personal selves and an ideological backdrop that encompasses black internationalism, US race struggles and mid-twentieth-century diplomatic relations with Africa. A first section explores how Cook, a university professor of French, uses what he terms the “close-to-home” value of translation in order to expose his African American students to what has been written about them in French. At the same time, translation is seen by him as essential to building a “shared elsewhere” where his students can reflect on their place within a black world that is neither nation-bound nor monolingual. A second section examines the way in which Cook's translation practice is inflected by his role as US ambassador in francophone West Africa during the 1960s. In this context, the convergence of US civil rights with official US Cold War policy on postcolonial African states is key to understanding Cook's stance as a translator and the way in which he seeks diplomatically to propel his translations of L.S Senghor's texts towards a racially riven US readership.

Contagion as Method

As elsewhere across the globe, categories of identification such as migrant expat dyke black white sudaca exiled tourist third world resident citizen student neighbour indefinite-leave lesbian work...

L’Union Fait La Force: Black Soldiers in the Great War

ABSTRACTThough the Great War is imagined and discussed as a European conflagration, an epic showdown between white Europeans, the simple fact remains that from the first, European battlefields mirrored the multiracial makeup of the empires doing battle. The Allies depended most heavily on their black soldiers, both as combatants and as labourers, even if it meant pressing these recruits into service at the end of a gun. And when the United States finally joined the war in 1917, it too leaned extensively on African Americans, this despite resistance from many white Southerners. An added consequence of the use of black soldiers in Europe – nearly one million of them from Canada, the Caribbean, Africa and the United States – were reinvigorated campaigns for more meaningful citizenship rights for blacks on the homefront, including calls for decolonization and an end to segregation. This paper examines how Allied nations enlisted and deployed black soldiers in Europe. With so many black men from so many different places in Great Britain, Belgium and France for the first time, the Black Atlantic world converged in Europe during its greatest crisis in civilisation. Drawn into the conflict by a desperate plea to save democracy, black soldiers ended the war determined to make real democracy for themselves.

Blinded by Bandung?

Research Article| May 01 2018 Blinded by Bandung?: Illumining West Papua, Senegal, and the Black Pacific Quito Swan Quito Swan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2018) 2018 (131): 58–81. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-4355133 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Quito Swan; Blinded by Bandung?: Illumining West Papua, Senegal, and the Black Pacific. Radical History Review 1 May 2018; 2018 (131): 58–81. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-4355133 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsRadical History Review Search Advanced Search This article explores West Papua’s struggle against Indonesian imperialism. Defined as Black for centuries, in the 1960s West Papuan organizers self-identified as Melanesian “Negroids of the Pacific.” Via travel, photographs and literature, they forged Diaspora with the broader Black world. In 1975, they established an office in Senegal, arguing that Melanesia and Africa shared a common destiny. Senegal’s Leopold Senghor facilitated this move as an act of Negritude.West Papuan activists argued that some Africana leaders refused to denounce Indonesia’s colonial violence because they were blinded by the Afro-Asian solidarity of the 1954 Bandung Conference. Indonesia used Bandung to codify its eventual colonization of West Papua. This article complicates Bandung as an iconic symbol of Global South solidarity.Excavating newspapers, indigenous magazines and archives on Melanesia, this article delineates how notions of the Black world have also been blinded by African Diaspora frameworks calibrated to the Black Atlantic. But by illumining Black internationalism in West Papua, it challenges the conceptual and racial invisibility cast over the Black Pacific. West Papua, Senegal, African Diaspora, Bandung, Leopold Senghor The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.2018 You do not currently have access to this content.

Kerner's Other Black Explosion: The Chapter 15 Mandate and the Birth of New York's Black Public-Affairs Television Programming, 1967–1968

ABSTRACTBlack public-affairs television programming in New York City between 1967 and 1968 happened because of a convergence of several factors. They include (a) the upheavals in urban America between 1964 and 1967, (b) the release of the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (a.k.a., the Kerner Commission report) and (c) the assassination of Martin Luther King, the latter two both within months of each other in 1968. Other equally important factors include the organic development of Black American-owned and Black American-oriented media—newspapers and radio outlets buttressed and informed by more than a century of Black Left/Nationalist/Pan-Africanist/integrationist intellectual thought and African-centered/Afrocentric ideology. Using and critiquing the emerging scholarship on such programming, a brief historical review of the creation and development of 4= such shows in 1967 and 1968—WABC-TV's Like It Is, WNEW-TV's Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant, and National Educational Television's two locally produced (but nationally broadcast) programs, Black Journal and Soul!—shows that these programs sought to correct the Kerner Commission's critique that the American mass media show “a White man's world” by attempting to show, for the first time, a Black world to large mainstream broadcast markets.

The Black Sea World and the Question of Boundaries

The Black Sea World and the Question of Boundaries

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction Hilda E. Kurtz and Deepak R. Mishra The papers in issue 58-3 of Southeastern Geographer highlight the range of research methods that invigorates contemporary geography. Derek Alderman, Joshua Inwood and James Tyner showcase historical geography in a contextual biography of a major sports figure at the turn of the 20th century. Their analysis draws on an archival record of news reporting, as well as secondary sources at the interface of historical geography, social history and sports history. Their paper showcases the synergistic quality of geography research inflected with the sensibilities of the humanities. Noah Goyke and Puneet Dwivedi analyses of recent African American migration to the southeasatern United States continues a tradition of empirical work and quantitative analysis that shaped much of the discipline from the quantitative revolution onward. Their paper theorizes and tests a set of qualities pertaining to this particular migration stream, and opens a suite of additional research questions. Paul McDaniel’s paper is grounded in a textual analysis of public rhetoric and policy documentation of municipal programs in three major cities, showcasing the kinds of work that qualitative research methods make possible. Georgianna Strode, Victor Mesev and Julianna Maantay developed a new technique for pre-processing disaggregated census data to apply to parcels with group living situations (e.g. college dormitories, nursing homes, etc.) while correcting for mis-matched geometric alignment. Substantively, the first three papers share broad thematic interests in how members of minority racial or ethnic groups make spaces for themselves in American society, in relation to broader structural conditions and power structures. As part of their ongoing examination of Black athletes and competitors, Alderman, Inwood and Tyner’s paper explores the “dynamic and contested terrain” of the reputation of turn of the century heavyweight fighter Jack Johnson. Johnson was a Black world heavyweight boxing champion from 1908 to 1915 who challenged racist social structures through a complex reputational politics. He owned the role of black villain ascribed to him by the white establishment and used it to taunt those who refused to accept that Black people should live lives of their own choosing. Alderman et al. reflect on the implications of Johnson’s life and actions for race relations throughout the 20th century, with attention to the contemporary recuperation of Johnson’s reputation. Noah Goyke and Puneet Dwivedi’s paper theorizes and tests for differentiated migration streams of African Americans to the southeastern United States. The region [End Page 224] has been a net destination for African Americans since the 1970s. The analysis of migration from 1976 to 2015 teases out rural and urban destinations, and theorizes different rationales for migration. Goyke and Dwivedi’s empirical analysis sheds light on the dynamism of the southeastern region of the United States, and suggests multiple avenues for continued research. Paul McDaniel’s paper draws on Jamie Winder’s (2011) typology of stances toward immigrants to examine “welcoming city” programs in Atlanta, Charlotte and Nashville. The welcoming city designation signifies municipal investment in immigrant integration. McDaniel examines rhetoric and documentation of welcoming city programs in these three cities to find that such programs are motivated by and linked to somewhat different policy outlooks and agendas. The paper suggests that further study of how municipal leadership navigates cross currents in relation to immigration is critical to an analysis of urban growth in new immigrant destinations. Georgianna Strode, Victor Mesev and Julianna Maantay developed pre-processing steps to integrate cadastral parcel data and census population data. Frequently, the geometrical extents of parcel data and census population units are mismatched, and this can result in underestimating population or mis-assignment of population to parcels. These issues are especially problematic for group living situations such as college dormitories, nursing homes, correctional institutions and shelters. Precision and accuracy in dasymetric population maps has broad implications for emergency planning and response as well as modelling at-risk populations. Their three-step pre-processing methodology can be easily applied to all dasymetric areal interpolation methods to reduce error. A review of the second edition of Natural Hazards: Explanation and Integration by Burrel E. Montz, Graham A. Tobin, and Ronald R. Hagelmann III is provided by Ben Wisner. Individual chapters...

"look. look. look.": The Work of Black Aesthetics in Toni Morrison's Jazz

"look. look. look.":The Work of Black Aesthetics in Toni Morrison's Jazz Jovonna Jones (bio) "Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now." (Jazz, 229) Click for larger view View full resolution Silent protest parade in New York City against the East St. Louis riots, 19171 [End Page 93] On July 28, 1917, thousands of people crowded New York's Fifth Avenue for the NAACP's Silent Protest Parade, demonstrating against lynching and the East St. Louis race riots. Official mottos and signs—as pictured above—included phrases like: "We are maligned as lazy, and murdered when we work," "Your hands are full of blood," and "Our music is the only American music."2 Supporters gathered along the sidewalks, watching the marchers move. Alice Manfred finds herself among these spectators during a scene in the middle of Toni Morrison's novel Jazz (1992), a story told through the voice of a nameless, omniscient narrator. For three hours, Alice watches the "tide of cold black faces, speechless and unblinking" while the marching drums speak and see for them.3 Alice knows the political context intimately: her niece Dorcas' parents were among the casualties of the East St. Louis riots. But the bodies and tempo of the parade render even more visceral this allconsuming paradox of black life: the fatal threat of black success and the burdened hope of black freedom. Rather than receive the call of the drums, Alice blames them: "No. It wasn't the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn't the droves and roves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played, and both dance to, close and shameless or apart and wild."4 For Alice, the lynchings and riots were not about Black World War I veterans who had the audacity to return alive, nor about the apparent threat of Black success in the urbanizing New South and Mid-West. No, this fever of the color line was about music. Jazz, Alice resolves, "made you do unwise and disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law."5 The narrator recounts that Alice's niece Dorcas, seven years old and newly orphaned, catches something different, something with no precise form, no slogan, and no past: […] although her earliest memory when she arrived from East St. Louis was the parade her aunt took her to, a kind of funeral parade for her mother and father, Dorcas remembered it differently. […] Resisting her aunt's protection and restraining hands, Dorcas thought of that life-below-the-sash as all the life there was. The drums she heard at the parade were only the first part, the first word, of a command. For her the drums were not an all-embracing rope of fellowship, discipline, and transcendence. She remembered them as a beginning, a start of something she looked to complete.6 Whereas the parade triggers in Alice a morally righteous response toward racial politics and culture, Dorcas locates an opening beyond the language of solidarity and progress, of labor and citizenship, of racial transcendence. Her earliest memory of New York marks the Silent Parade as a marker of genealogical death. This memory ruptures her past: the drums birth Dorcas into a realm of possibility beyond permission and propriety, beyond Alice's rightful caution and the parents' double death—that of the social kind and of the belief that the prosperous and dutiful ones could up-lift their way out. Dorcas remembers the Silent Parade as a revelation, something newly and divinely known from a place where knowledge is not supposed to come; she wants nothing else but these drums as her own origin. How does it feel to be a problem? Dorcas wants to find out. [End Page 94] The setting of Jazz unfolds through the historical backdrop of black movement, migration, and music in early twentieth century Harlem. The narrator appears to speak as the setting itself. Toni Morrison, when reflecting on her inspiration for the...

The Institute of the Black World and Atlanta as Black Intellectual Mecca in the 1970s

The Institute of the Black World and Atlanta as Black Intellectual Mecca in the 1970s

Thematic milestones and literary explorations of black existentiality in black literature

ABSTRACTTranscending beyond the older themes of colonialism, racial pride, Pan-African idealism, to those contemporary issues that have resulted to political independence, the emergence of black writing has necessitated the need to re-evaluate the African cultural, socio-political and economic status in the post-colonial era. The global spread of Blacks through migration has incurred great challenges for the existence of the Blacks whose presence are conspicuously announced by their natural pigmentation. From a sociological/historical perspective, this essay explores some of these thematic milestones against the historiography of black existence in new environments and how Black writers have successfully evinced this relationship. It focuses on shifts in perspectives to issues prevalent in the Black world. Apart from racial pride, other concerns that have recursively questioned the Black race afterwards are predicated on socio-political concepts such as colonial/modern slavery, human trafficking, racism, ethnicity, imperialisms, migration, Black women rights/sexuality, slum living, etc. The essay concludes that these issues have given impetus for responses from the perspectives of black writers, creating for Black Literature an active enterprise that is equally responsible for the direction of the Black race.

7. Universal Studios of Art: Professionalization and Contributions to Art Education in Nigeria

Abstract During the 2nd Black World and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, a lot of novel, creative and artistic events took place in Lagos. One of these was the construction of a monument, the National Arts Theatre, which also accommodated the National Gallery of Art. Invariably, the presence of the Gallery made the Arts Theatre management allocate the premises of the Theatre to some notable Nigerian artists for use as Artists in Residence. The premises eventually, by 1980, became an institutional and inspirational workshop for budding Nigerian artists. The activities of the artists were so professionally accepted that it was named the National Studios of Art. However, at the time the Studio had become the centre of sound informal art training, it was given a relocation order which caused serious controversy between the Gallery and the artists. The artists eventually accepted the relocation order, and this, necessarily, led to changing the name to the Universal Studios of Art (USA). As the professional artists became globally known, the USA also became a tourist centre for both local and foreign visitors and artists. Till today, the activities of the USA continue to attract national and international attention. Very as unfortunately, no scholarly study of the Universal Studios of Art has been carried out, despite its outstanding professional qualities.. For many years, the artists have developed valuable art forms and art styles that have contributed to the advancement of modern Nigerian art. It is the objective of this article, therefore, to document the artists of the Universal Studios of Art.

An Anatomy of Sexism: The Colonized Vagina

“Grab them by the pussy,” Donald Trump declared on a hot microphone in 2005. This statement went viral late in the 2016 United States (US) presidential campaign, indicating how the colonized vagina still shapes the anatomy of contemporary sexism. This article develops an intersectional genealogy of sexism at its point of emergence in early radical feminist writings of the 1960s and 1970s read through Franz Fanon’s influential work at the time on colonization and decolonization. This reading locates essentialism and universalism as two interconnected limits on sexism’s analytic purchase within a colonialist discourse used to identify women’s global oppression while simultaneously deploying it in ways that excluded Black and Third World women. A dualistic logic of colonization constituted by the three operations of internalization, totalization, and ossification arises from this analysis to reveal a colonialist logic woven into sexism’s conceptual fabric through the colonized vagina. Sexism retains colonial residues that resurface in contemporary feminist activism and discourse as illustrated by Western feminist organizing which uncritically equates the Designer Vagina industry with female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM/C) in African and Middle Eastern countries, a move that erases differences and hinders building cross-cultural coalitions much less a transnational feminist movement. Decolonizing the colonized vagina, occupied by a range of forces except the women in whom it resides, I argue, is critical to loosening the universalist and essentialist bonds on sexism enough to reclaim the vagina as home for women to advance their belonging as fully embodied heterogeneous subjects in various communities. Contemporary feminists, I conclude, should claim their “right to return,” in this case to the vagina as home and place of belonging on the fluid borderlands between the hymen and uterus, as a step toward ending sexism.

Despair and Disillusionment in Post-Negritude African Literature

In their spirited and desperate bid to correct the distorted notion of Africa held by some European ethnologists, Negritudian writers such as Leopold Senghor, Leon Damas, Aime Cessaire, Gilbert Gratiant, Leonard Sainville, etc tended to portray Africa and the black world in rather glowing terms of beauty and idealism. Despite the robust hope and idealism echoed in Negritude literature about Africa, the reality of life in post-Negritude paints a dismal picture of despair and disillusionment. This paper explores how some African writers of the post-Negritude era have committed their art to the exploration of such related themes of despair, disillusionment, corruption, brutality, conflicts, etc, that are quite contrary to the idyllic picture painted by the founding fathers of Negritude.