<P> Négritude is a framework of critique and literary theory, developed mainly by francophone intellectuals, writers, and politicians of the African diaspora during the 1930s . Its initiators included Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor (the first President of Senegal), and Léon Damas of French Guiana . Négritude intellectuals disavowed colonialism, and argued for the importance of a Pan-African racial identity among people of African descent worldwide . Négritude intellectuals employed Marxist political philosophy, in the black radical tradition . The writers generally used a realist literary style, and some say they were also influenced somewhat by the Surrealist stylistics . In 1932, the manifesto "Murderous Humanitarianism" was signed by prominent Surrealists, including the Martinicans Pierre Yoyotte and J.M. Monnerot . </P> <P> The term négritude is a construction which appropriates the derogatory word niger, used to refer to people (in French) as nègre, so largely used exclusively in a racist context . The movement's use of the word négritude is a way of re-imagining the word as an emic form of empowerment . The term was first used in its present sense by Césaire, in the third issue of L'Étudiant noir, a magazine which he had started in Paris with fellow students Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas, as well as Gilbert Gratiant, Leonard Sainville, Louis T. Achille, Aristide Maugée, and Paulette Nardal . L'Étudiant noir also includes Césaire's first published work, Conscience Raciale et Révolution Sociale with the heading "Les Idées" and the rubric "Négreries", which is notable for its disavowal of assimilation as a valid strategy for resistance and for its use of the word nègre as a positive term . The problem with assimilation was that one assimilated into a culture that considered African culture to be barbaric and unworthy of being seen as "civilized". The assimilation into this culture would have been seen as an implicit acceptance of this view . Nègre previously had been used mainly in a pejorative sense . Césaire deliberately incorporated this derogatory word into the name of his philosophy . </P> <P> In 1885, Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin published an early work De l'Égalité des Races Humaines (On the Equality of Human Races), which was published as a rebuttal to French writer Count Arthur de Gobineau's Essai sur l'inegalite des Races Humaines (An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races). Firmin influenced Jean Price - Mars, the initiator of Haitian ethnology and developer of the concept of Indigenism, and 20th - century American anthropologist Melville Herskovits . Black intellectuals have historically been proud of Haiti due to its slave revolution commanded by Toussaint L'Ouverture during the 1790s . Césaire spoke, thus, of Haiti as being "where négritude stood up for the first time". </P>

Negritude as cultural movement vs negritude as political movement