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ABSTRACT
The origins of Aimé Césaire's famous neologism Négritude have long been shrouded in mystery; with many scholars speculating as to whether or not he coined the term before it appeared in his poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal in 1939. This article examines a previously lost early example of Césaire's writings that predates the Cahier, a 1935 issue of his student magazine L'Etudiant noir, in which the word Négritude appears. Through an examination of Césaire's allusions to the works of Marx and the Marxist thinker Paul Nizan, I argue that, contrary to accepted wisdom, Marxist thought was essential to Césaire's original conception of Négritude. This new discovery suggests that a reevaluation of the relationship of Négritude to both Marxist politics and to newer literary movements, such as Créolité, is in order.
Négritude, Aimé Césaire's famous neologism, has long been both his most influential contribution to posterity and, at the same time, his most enigmatic. For many years, the poetic and political origins of Négritude have remained shrouded in mystery.1 Despite the fact that, later in life, Césaire described himself to be, "à l'époque, . . . plutôt communiste ou 'communisant' " 'at the time, more or less communist or "communizing"' and despite the attention given by diverse scholars to Césaire's relationship with the Communist party over the years, including his ties to many communist American writers of the Harlem Renaissance, few, if any, scholars suspected that Césaire's reading of Marx in the 1930s might have had an influence on his ideas about black identity (Césaire, Nègre 24).2 Indeed, quite the contrary. Some scholars, such as Edward Ako, have denied outright the possibility that the term might have had Marxist (or even political) origins, arguing instead that it must have appeared for the first time, in its most poetic and apolitical guise, within the pages of the Cahier d'un retour au pays natale.3 Others, such as Lilyan Kesteloot, credited the invention of the term to the intellectual climate fostered by Légitime défense and La Revue du monde noir, two precursors of Césaire's own 1935 journalistic endeavor, L'Étudiant noir, but equally minimized the importance of Marx to Césaire's early social thought (Kesteloot 83). In the absence of any textual evidence, there was no reason...