Fanon Relationship to Negritude Movement
Negritude movement began in the 1930s to 1950s among Africans who were speaking in French and Caribbean authors who lived in Paris who had an objective to complain against policy assimilation and French colonial statute. The movement was formed by various individuals, including, the First President of Senegal, Leopold Sedar Senghor; Jean-Paul Satire and Aime Cesaire. Negritude movement was driven by several ideas including, attaining forte from its nearness to mother nature and commerce with ancestors, and that the numinous balminess of blacks’ life, should be placed in appropriate outlook against acquisitiveness and soullessness of western ethos.
Basically, the Negritude movement attempts to reclaim African identity and their consciousness, thus forming equality between races through the theorists of the movement, including Senghor, Cesaire, and Satire. Fanon’s relationship with Negritude movement is mined on Senghor and Cesaire who are impervious of political acclimatization. First, Fanon criticizes their thinking on essentialism of African experiences, he says, “……the motivations for desalinating a physician from Guadeloupe are essentially different from those for African contrition worker in the port of Abidjan”. This shows that Fanon feels the idea of African consciousness as uttered by Senghor is reductive because according to him there is a denial of alterations since Black Antillean has a variety of history and identities that African-Nigerians therefore, both have diverse antiquities and individualities than African-Americans.
Secondly, Fanon negative relationship with the movement can be traced when he says that the movement is over-reliance on histories and the pasts cannot be his guide in the real situations of things. This because Senghor aims to regain the black’s pasts that were traditionally devalued by the whites. In simple words, Fanon is opposing the concept that scientific novelty makes a community more superior but also distinguishes that whites’ societies were not scientifically superior than Africans even though he criticizes the idea of reclaiming the past to move forward. Therefore, Fanon relationship to Negritude is negative due to various criticisms he gave through writing.