The literary and cultural movement launched in 1930s Paris by Black writers from France's colonies that turned a word coined as an insult into a banner of pride, affirming a shared Black identity and the value of African heritage against a colonial system that taught the colonized to despise their own culture. Led above all by Aimé Césaire of Martinique, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, and Léon-Gontran Damas of French Guiana, it was one of the major cultural counterparts to political Pan-Africanism, and remains one of the most influential and most contested ideas in twentieth-century Black thought.
The word was an insult before it was a banner. In the French of the 1930s, "nègre" was the contemptuous term, and to speak of someone's "négritude" was to name what was supposed to be despised. A young poet from Martinique, Aimé Césaire, picked the word up and turned it around. He made it stand for pride instead of shame, for a Black self worth celebrating rather than erasing. That reversal is the whole movement in miniature. Negritude took the colonizer's category of contempt and wore it as a crown. And in doing so it raised a question it could never quite escape: can you defeat a system built on racial categories by celebrating the very categories it invented?