Antillean Women and Black Internationalism

Abstract

I n the late 1920s, Martinican writer Jane Nardal questioned blackness and developed an avant-garde analysis in her essay “Black Internationalism” pointing out the importance of Black movements worldwide and the necessity to assert the solidarity of global Black identities beyond borders. While Nardal’s essay highlighted key concepts of race consciousness, duality of Black Antillean identities and complexity of the French-speaking new Negro, her writing was dismissed and considered low-profile and politically insignificant. Nardal’s “Black Internationalism” was published in 1928, hence 10 years earlier than Aimé Césaire’s most influential Notebook for the Return to my Native Land (1939), but the latter is however considered as the historical landmark for the beginning of the Négritude movement. As matter of fact, to what extent did Antillean women contribute to the growth of Black consciousness in the French Caribbean and its diasporas and to what degree were their contributions acknowledged as valuable and significant within the global impact of the Négritude ideology? As a French Caribbean territory, Martinique has indeed forged its intellectual reputation thanks to a number of Black theorists and writers, mainly men, who have contributed to the global efforts for Black freedom, discursive assertion and Black struggles across the African Diaspora. Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Jean Bernabé, Raphael Confiant, Patrick Chamoiseau have all highlighted Martinique as a strong contributor to the development of Black Antillean ideologies on a global scale. The creative and theoretical contributions of Aimé Césaire as well as his political engagement made him one of the best known Martinican personality internationally, particularly as he was one of the founding fathers of Négritude with French Guyanese Leon Gontran Damas and Senegalese Leopold Sédar Senghor. Césaire and Senghor studied and became friends in Paris at the prestigious High School Louis-le-Grand; it was also in Paris that Césaire met numerous fellow African students and became increasingly aware of the ongoing alienation in the French colonial societies in his home island Martinique and in the French overseas territories overall. With a group of fellow students, Césaire created the newspaper L’Etudiant noir (The Black Student) in 1934, an activist journal condemning French colonialism. Aimé Césaire was a strong voice denouncing cultural assimilation processes in France and calling to value African cultures which were historically undermined by the French colonial system. Césaire was above all a humanist