1. Negritude and the Rest? A (Very) Brief History of West African Literature in French

2. Negritude 1930s-1970s Negritude ‘movement’ born in Paris in 1930s
Highly influenced by Harlem Renaissance
Educated elite who felt alienated from their black ‘roots’
Took negatives of colonial discourse and saw them as positives: Blackness positively defined as governed by emotion, nature, rhythm
‘Emotion is black, just as reason is Hellenic (Greek)’ (Senghor, 1939)

3. Senghor as poet
Senghor as theorist

4. The Caribbean dimension
Césaire, Notebook of a return to my native land (1939)
Damas, Pigments (1937)

5. 1966 Festival: A Living Illustration of Negritude

6. Ousmane Sembene—won fiction prize at 1966 festival
Le Mandat (1966)

7. Senegal’s Four communes: Dakar, Gorée, Rufisque and Saint-Louis

8. French West Africa: Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Niger, Benin (& later Togo)

9. Pre-Negritude Literature David Boilat’s Esquisses sénégalaises (1853)

10. Lamine Senghor, La Violation d’un pays (1927)

11. Publishing African Literature in French
Creation of Présence Africaine in 1947
Nouvelles Editions Africaines created in 1972
L’Harmattan emerges in 1980s
Most African literature still published in Paris

12. Novels of disillusionment (1968)
Ahamdou Kourouma
(Ivory Coast)
Yambo Ouologuem
(Mali)

13. Emergence of Women Writers
Mariama Bâ, Une si longue (1979)
Ken Bugul, Le Baobab Fou (1982)

14. Véronique Tadjo (Ivory Coast)
Champs de Bataille et d’amour (1999)
L’Ombre d’Imana (2001)

15. Tierno Monénembo (Guinea)
L’Ainé des orphelins (2000)
Le Terroriste noir (2012)

16. Third World Festival of Negro Arts (FESMAN 2010)