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T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Negritude Women. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. 168pp. $17.95.
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting's Negritude Women proffers an enlightening, revisionary analysis of the Negritude movement. Negritude, the term coined by the Martinican poet Aime Cesaire in the mid-1930s, signifies a new cultural and literary movement among Francophone African and Caribbean intellectual diasporas living in Paris. The movement is generally examined through the works of male writers, such as Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Leon Damas. Sharpley-Whiting, however, counters the male-centered interpretations and offers a new outlook on the gender politics within the Negritude movement. Sharpley-Whiting argues that the male leaders of the movement marginalized black female intellectuals such as Jane and Paulette Nardal and Suzanne Cesaire from Martinique. Concerned with the male-dominant discussions of Negritude, Sharpley-Whiting illuminates the path, which led to a significant black movement, taken by the outspoken and courageous Martinican women mentioned above. Referring to their brilliant essays, Sharpley-Whiting chronicles the history of Negritude from 1928 to 1945. Starting her discussions of Negritude several years earlier than the general understanding of the birth of the movement, Sharpley-Whiting recovers "Negritude women" and documents the formulation of philosophical and theoretical concepts which directly influenced the "founding fathers" of the movement. In effect, Negritude women enabled the emergence of the international black conscious movement.
Sharpley-Whiting begins her discussions of Negritude women with an examination of the social and cultural milieu of Paris after World War I. In post-war Paris, under aggravated living conditions, moral corruption, xenophobia, racism, and paternalism threateningly prevailed, and the frustrations of the black Francophone people at racial discrimination and French colonial policies accelerated. Accordingly, the climate to confront racism and to foster solidarity of the black race transcending class and ethnic differences was ripe enough to inaugurate multiethnic organizations and newspapers, which promoted the evolution of the international black movement. In particular, the interaction between the participants of the black movement and African American intellectuals and activists, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, advanced the debate on racial inequality and oppression from the international perspective.
The colonial-reformist newspaper La Depeche africaine (1928-1932), influenced by Du Bois's Pan Africanism and Garvey's black nationalism, internationally advocated social, political, and economic issues of French-speaking African descendants and...