Reconstructing blackness: The Harlem Renaissance Movement (1920s) and Negritude (1930s)

The Dissertation makes the point that Africans and the Blacks of the diaspora were involved in writing to rectify the unfounded image of Blacks as spread by Europeans at the peak of Western imperialism in Africa and the rest of the world. The Harlem Renaissance Movement in the 1920s and Negritude in the 1930s evolved as literary movements that strived to reject the ways in which Blackness was perceived and described by the imperialist West. They also created images of Blacks that are more acceptable for black peoples. The perception of blackness as a homogenous entity was abandoned. For instance, Blacks in Africa were culturally different from Blacks in the Caribbean. The work is an in-depth analysis of the works by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude MacKay from The Harlem Renaissance Movement and Aime Cesaire, and Leopold Sedar Senghor from Negritude. The work is structured according to the different strategies adopted by these writers to reject the terms in which Blacks were translated. Consequently the thesis is divided into three major parts. The first part, "Political Rupture" is shows that all the authors studied wrote to reject capitalism which they felt was at the origin of all harms done to Blacks by Europeans. The second division, "Validation of Black Peoples Cultures" deals with these writers' efforts to document the fact that black peoples' cultures were not as inefficient as Westerners wanted the world to believe. In truth these cultures had to be erased in order to better dominate Blacks. The last part, "Rejection of Western Aesthetics Values" demonstrates these authors' deliberate choice not to write according to the existing aesthetic rules. Rather, they wrote in a new fashion that better reflected their individual cultures.