Department of French and Francophone Studies – African Studies Program

Transnegritude: Black Identity Politics in African Francophone Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

As this project investigates the broader evolution of scholarly discourses on questions of Blackness, African belonging and Afro-diasporic identities, I use the concept of Transnegitude—a term I have coined—as an interpretative and relational framework that aims to reflect on both the diachronic contribution and the synchronic significance which expressions of negritude bring to our understanding of racial issues. Indeed, while the negritude movement was iconoclastic in the 1930s, its legacy in subsequent decades and today is undeniable. Namely, its contemporary relevance is manifest in the diffusion and transformation of notions of Africanness—that emerged through concepts such as Afropolitanism and Afropeanism—in the works of African writers from the continent but also from Afro-diasporic writers in Europe and in the Americas.