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Reiland Rabak. 2015. The Negritude Movement: W.E.B. Du Bois, Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and the Evolution of an Insurgent Idea. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 431 pp.
Reiland Rabaka's scholarship has often been informed by the leaders of the Negritude movement and their exceptional cultural and political influence. However, The Negritude Movement is his first book devoted entirely to the subject, and it proves noteworthy from a variety of academic perspectives. Published in 2015, the book examines the way the Negritude movement engages with other Africana intellectual traditions and continues to remain pertinent today. Specifically, Rabaka reveals the intellectual lineage of the movement as based in the New Negro Movement and its most prominent thinker, W.E.B. Du Bois. Furthermore, the book unveils how Negritude creates a conceptual framework to connect the discursive continuity of Du Bois with Franz Fanon, who Rabaka considers Negritude's "most illustrious intellectual heir" (p. 247). From this perspective, The Negritude Movement illustrates how Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, and Leopold Senghor are positioned as a pertinent link attaching the ideologies developed by Du Bois with the later philosophy of Fanon in a transnational intellectual...