Negritude

Négritude was a mid-twentieth-century literary and intellectual movement, associated with Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, that affirmed the value and dignity of African and African-diaspora cultures against European colonialism and racism. Haiti was one of its crucial antecedents: Jean Price-Mars, whom Senghor called a father of the movement, had already argued through indigénisme that Haitian elites must embrace their African heritage rather than mimic French culture. Anténor Firmin's earlier defense of Black equality in De l'égalité des races humaines (1885) pushed the genealogy back a further generation.