16:00 - 17:30
Room: Arts – Lecture Room 2
Stream: Open Stream
Beyond Negritude: imagining race and independence in 1920s African anti-colonial writing
David Murphy
University of Stirling, Glasgow

The emergence of Negritude in 1930s Paris has long been seen as signalling the birth of a cultural and political
anti-colonialism amongst the black populations of France’s colonial possessions. However, a growing body of
historical (Dewitte, Sagna) and literary critical work (Miller, Hayes Edwards, Murphy) over the past few decades
has challenged this narrative and explored the writings and activism of various working-class, black anti-colonial
groups that flourished in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. This critical work may have provided
compelling evidence that pre-Negritude Africa was producing a vigorous cultural and political response to empire
but the myth persists of Negritude as the foundational moment in Francophone African culture and politics.


The aim of this paper is to examine some of the key ideas that emerged from the writings of African anti-colonial
activists in the 1920s. These groups published ephemeral newspapers that today can usually only be found in
major libraries or colonial archives but their work spoke of black identity and independence in radical ways that,
it might be argued, go well beyond the positions that would be advanced by their better-educated elders a decade
later. I will focus in particular on the Senegalese militant, Lamine Senghor (no relative of Léopold), who wrote
for several newspapers and who published one of the earliest ‘fictional’ texts in French by an African author. La
Violation d’un pays (1927) is a political fable that condenses the story of slavery and colonialism into a short tale
for children; and its publication indicates that Lamine Senghor fully understood the significance of carrying the
anti-colonial struggle into the cultural domain.


Reference:
Tu-OS5 Anticolonial Writing-P-003
Presenter/s:
David Murphy
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Arts – Lecture Room 2
Date:
Tuesday, 11 September
Time:
16:30 - 16:45
Session times:
16:00 - 17:30