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1930s Paris and the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
'It is beautiful and good and legitimate to be nègre'

In the 1935 article 'Nègreries: Conscience raciale et révolution sociale', where he first coins the term 'négritude', Césaire makes the following statement about the importance not just of political revolt but of black consciousness: 'they therefore forgot the main thing, those who tell the black man that he should revolt without becoming conscious of himself, without telling him that it is beautiful and good and legitimate to be nègre'.1 The French term 'nègre' has a complex history, which will be discussed shortly, but which is distinct from corresponding English terms, so this term is retained here in my use of English translations in an effort to capture the meaning of Césaire's powerful redeployment of this derogatory term. Césaire's simple but hard-hitting affirmation is repeated in the Cahier, at the end of which Césaire reclaims 'la danse saute-prison / la danse il-est-beau-et-bon-et-légitime-d'être nègre' ['the prison-spring dance / the it-is-beautiful-good-and-legitimate-to-be-nègre dance'], as if the proud assertion of black identity here becomes a dance, the liberated self-expression of the body.2 The reprisal of the phrase demonstrates how Césaire's thinking migrates between genres, between the essay and the poem, in ways that this book will continue to explore. It also reinforces his fundamental insistence on the value of black identity and the importance of the black subject's reclaiming of a sense of self and of racial consciousness. This direct and lucid assertion is later cited by the Martinican psychiatrist and antiracist thinker Frantz Fanon. Fanon was both compelled by and ambivalent towards Césaire's thought, but nevertheless notes the significance of his being the first to say to Caribbean society 'that it is fine and good to be nègre'.3 Written before the establishment of Césaire's political career, during his restless years as a student in Paris struggling to make sense of his identity as a black intellectual, the statement is decisive, and captures the impetus of this early period of cultural creativity and activism in Césaire's career. This is the decade of the birth of negritude, of effervescent black internationalism in Paris, and marks a crucial foundation for successive movements of black solidarity across the globe.

Césaire was 18 years old when he arrived in Paris to study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1931. The eight years he spent in the city before returning to Martinique in 1939 were a period of introspection, fuelled by the cultural movements and journals alive at the time and in which he also participated. This early form of activism was much more cultural than political - Césaire's political career did not begin until 1945 - yet it serves as a compelling example of the power of cultural innovation in generating energy and changing attitudes. The assertion that 'it is beautiful and good and legitimate to be nègre' announces the principle of self-affirmation that lies at the heart of that movement of innovation, and its echoes resonate beyond that initial moment.

In January 1962, for example, photographer and journalist Kwame Brathwaite's photographs of the 'Naturally '62' fashion show held at Purple Manor nightclub in Harlem helped popularise the movement known by the slogan 'Black is Beautiful'. The show was for black models only and eschewed Western notions of beauty in favour of clothes influenced by African styles. This was part of a movement to condemn the internalisation of negative imagery of black bodies and to combat the use of skin-lightening products. The origins of the movement can be found in negritude and indeed in Césaire's assertion of the beauty and value of black men and women. It also serves as a bridge between 1930s negritude and subsequent black activist movements such as Black Lives Matter, which is more explicitly political than both negritude and 'Black is Beautiful', with its primary goal to combat police brutality and social injustice. Black Lives Matter is less explicitly concerned with the history of colonialism and slavery than negritude, and yet its insistence on black humanity and creativity can also be associated with the self-affirmation championed by these earlier movements. Black Lives Matter at the same time promotes the 'legitimacy' of black identity before the law in ways that play out Césaire's punchy assertion.

Césaire's insistence that it is beautiful and good and legitimate to be 'un nègre' is at the heart of his first article in the inaugural issue of L'Étudiant noir and summarises his early critique of cultural assimilation. The article again anticipates the 'Black is Beautiful' movement in its derision of European styles of dress. It opens with the image of a black man proudly seizing and donning a white man's tie and bowler hat, a practice he ridicules and describes as an attempt at a kind of self-destruction. It should not be forgotten that Césaire himself was very much an assimilated intellectual, and his derisory portrait of the black man dressed as a white man could also have reflected his own position. Nevertheless, while struggling with his own self-image as a black man studying at an elite institution in Paris, Césaire is acerbic in his critique of the aesthetics of assimilation and passionate in his call to black people to shed the costumes and performances that mask their own culture. This emphasis on the image and particularly the clothing of the black man in the metropole picks up on similar references made by some of his contemporaries. Césaire would have been aware, for example, of the work of the Nardal sisters, Jane and Paulette, whose salons were dynamic spaces in 1930s Paris for gatherings of black and mixed-race people seeking to explore and affirm black culture. Paulette Nardal had already denounced assimilation in an article entitled 'L'internationalisme noir', published in La Dépêche Africaine in February 1928. She also published 'Guignol Ouolof' alongside Césaire's 'Nègreries' in the first issue of L'Étudiant noir, another vilification of the black man's use of costume, this time a ridiculously decorated military outfit:

An immense black man. The costume of a general in an operetta. A black sheet on which there seem to erupt imposing brandebourgs, epaulettes, the flat helmet of a German officer with gold and red tassels, and - an even more unexpected detail - a monocle on a black string, fitted into the arch of his left brow.4

This fantastical portrait is created, according to Nardal, for the benefit of 'white consumers' and serves only to fuel racist stereotypes of the black man's appearance as comical and grotesque. A more sober questioning of the black man's image and clothing can equally be found in a piece by Louis-Thomas Achille in the highly influential Revue du monde noir in 1932. If the Revue set out specifically to explore and give voice to black culture in Paris, here Achille wonders, 'how should black people living in France dress?'5 These anxious tropes of clothing and performance clearly fuel Césaire's insistence on the beauty, goodness and legitimacy of blackness.

These early reflections on image and clothing demonstrate the emergence of negritude out of the critique of assimilation. Césaire's first coining of the term 'négritude' followed a burgeoning culture of black self-affirmation that had been growing since the 1920s and was animated by both francophone and American writers and intellectuals in Paris's lively cultural arena. Césaire draws on works by writers of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Alain Locke, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, who were engaged in dialogue with the Nardal sisters as well as with other contributors to the francophone negritude movement such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Gontran Damas. Locke had already in 1925 heralded the invention of the 'New Negro' in his volume of that name, which brought together writings by major figures such as Hughes and McKay, as well as W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston. In his foreword, Locke announces, 'we have, as the heralding sign, an unusual outburst of creative expression. There is a renewed race-spirit that consciously and proudly sets itself apart'.6 The concept of the 'New Negro' was a clear rejection of 'old' stereotypes around black identity and a call for self-creation that would resonate with Césaire. Indeed Césaire's announcement in the Cahier that 'la vieille négritude progressivement se cadavérise' ['the old negritude progressively cadavers itself'] could be read as a subtle reference to Locke's work.7 Jane Nardal had translated parts of Locke's volume into French, and...