USA Africa Dialogue Series - Review of Rabaka on Negritude

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December 2015 Vol. 53 No. 4

Lexington Books

The following review appeared in the December 2015 issue of CHOICE:

Social & Behavioral Sciences

53-1839

PN56

2015-11055 MARC

Rabaka, Reiland. The negritude movement: W.E.B. Du Bois, Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and the evolution of an insurgent idea. Lexington Books, 2015. 431p bibl index afp ISBN 9781498511353, $130.00; ISBN 9781498511360 ebook, $129.00.

This book joins the respected tomes on critical Africana social thought that Rabaka (ethnic studies, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) edits for the publisher's "Critical Africana Studies" series.  His book proves, if ever proof is needed, that there are kindred links between the Africana intellectual traditions in Africa and in the African diaspora.  He traces that intellectual lineage to the "central intellectual antecedent" of "Du Boisian Negritude" that is detected in the Pan-Africanism of Du Bois and in his influential text The Souls of Black Folk.  Rabaka organically links Du Bois to the New Negro Movement of the Harlem Renaissance and to the tendencies Rabaka identifies as Damasian, Cesairean, Senghorian, and, contentiously, Fanonian, negritudes.  Rabaka argues that negritude intellectual activists centered their social thought on Africa and must therefore be reinterpreted with the Afrocentric theories of Du Bois rather than depend on paradigms from Eurocentrism, against which most of those intellectuals rebelled.  Using the ideological differences between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington as a model, Rabaka suggests that there were conservative and radical tendencies in the Harlem Renaissance and in the negritude movement as well.  The repetitive introductory chapter needs closer editing.

--B. Agozino, Virginia Tech

Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries.