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If there's a word that has what it takes to delight the lexicographer, it's the word négritude.
-Michel Hausser1
The full meaning of négritude may always defy reduction to a dictionary definition. As Souleymane Bachir Diagne has pointed out, négritude "poses many questions" in domains as varied as ontology, aesthetics, epistemology, and politics.2 Other scholars say much the same: négritude is a "whole complex of attitudes," "something more than ... unambiguous affirmation."3 The delimitation of negritudes possible meanings nevertheless depends on answers to certain basic, seemingly tractable lexicological questions: Does the term derive directly from the Latin color term niger or from the French racial and racist term negre?4 Why the choice of -itude and not -ité for its suffix? Who coined négritude, Aimé Césaire or Léopold Sédar Senghor? When did the coiner coin it? And when did we know? As both used the term, are there then two négritudes, as Maryse Condé once proposed, or is this a "specious" distinction, as Abiola Irele asserted?5
At some point, nearly every one of négritude's lexicological elements has been disputed: definition; etymology; date of coining; and person responsible for coining. But even if debates continue about négritude's definition, we think we at least now have a handle on the rest. Whereas previous scholarly consensus had been that négritude first appeared in 1939 in Aimé Césaire's poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), we now seem to know that Césaire coined the word earlier, in 1935, in a prose piece titled "Conscience raciale et revolution sociale" ("Racial Consciousness and Social Revolution").6 And yet, reactions to two recent events-the 2007 coining of bravitude and the 2008 publication of négritude's earliest extant use-reveal that our knowledge belies lingering reverberations in the present of négritude's past. Some such contretemps inheres in the word itself, arising from Césaire's intentionally syncopated neologism. But scholarship has unwittingly created additional syncopations, errors about negritudes temporal unfolding. These contretemps hinder our understanding not only of the word but also of the idea that it names. Filtering out the interfering reverberations of the present will allow us to hear Césaire's syncopated négritude anew as it was in the past at the moment of its coining.
2007: Echoes of Négritude