THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE AND NEGRITUDE POETRY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF BLACK WRITTEN LITERATURE

The thesis examines the works of the major poets in the two movements, one Afro-American and the other African-Afro-Caribbean respectively, as stages in the on-going search by the Black man for cultures that differentiate him from the Western cultures that have enslaved and colonized him for centuries. Chapters One and Two briefly trace the origin of the search for "negritude" to the efforts of Haitian and Afro-American scholars who through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to revitalize those cultural traits that make the Black man unique in Western societies and link up the search of the Haitian and the Harlem Renaissance movements with that of Negritude.;Chapter Eight examines the works of the movements for their views of the cultural past of the Black man and concludes that contrary to the view of many critics, the writers were not reviving the past but creating new Black cultures that would incorporate materials from all Black experiences including Black experiences of Western cultures. The last chapter relates the cultural achievements and/or failures of the movements to recent developments in African literature's search for a truly African literature. Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, who best exemplifies this development would insist that only literatures written in African languages qualify as African and truly Black. This idea and its implications for the growth of future Black and African literatures are discussed.;The main focus is to determine how 'Black' the works of the movements are. As this is closely tied to the issue of what artistic and intellectual traditions inspired the works of the writers, Chapter Three describes the aesthetics of Black oral literatures that would have been necessary to produce a truly Black literary counter-culture. After discussing the elements that are borrowed from Black oral literatures, the thesis concludes that most of the writers approached their search for Black cultures through the artistic conventions of Western literatures, Romanticism and surrealism in particular. These are discussed in relation to the Black works and the ways that the factors of dependence on alien literary forms undermined the Black aesthetics of the movements are discussed in Chapters Six and Seven.