“The call is not the simple reproduction of the cry of the Other; it is a call of complementarity”
Upon first reading Senghor’s “Negritude” back in freshman year, I must admit I thought he was presenting a theory that had no room for diversity. I found this text very reactionary, an extreme response to an extreme state of world affairs. I couldn’t fault him with this response, but I most certainly wasn’t able to see a future in which this theory of negritude could be implemented for the common good of all. Upon reading this text again my opinion of it has softened, although I would be lying if I said that I wholeheartedly agree with Senghor’s vision of things. Perhaps I am still under the influence of Fanon’s parting words in Black Skins, White Masks to give Senghor and negritude a fighting chance.
But the two texts may not be as different as they may at first seem. Which is just another way of saying that there may be room for universalism in Senghor after all.
Negritude is about potential. It is a way of paying homage to the simple yet complex act of being. And so, while it is a literal celebration of blackness, negritude is also an idea. And it is this idea which houses the universal. To Senghor, it is evident, that understanding the meaning of negritude cannot be separated from understanding the meaning of meanings in general. So, while negritude is the very specific celebration of “African personality”, it is also “a network of life forces… a network of elements that are contradictory in appearance but really complementary”.
Negritude as a way of being paints its image of man as a “composition of mobile life forces”. It contains movement. How can binaries exist in a philosophy which believes in the flowing nature of the world? At times it seems like Senghor is overtly praising black culture as inherently superior. But it must also be remembered that, negritude is first and foremost a way of seeing the world— a way which, to quote Fanon, allows the individual to “touch the other, to feel the other” and perhaps, most importantly “to explain the other to” their self.
To ask if Senghor’s version of negritude has space for universalism, is another way of asking if the particular can contain the universal. Cesaire answers this more succinctly than I ever could:
“There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the ‘universal.’ My conception of the universal is that of a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars.”
Decoloniality and Decolonization 