Sponsored by the Center for European Studies. Organized by the Madison East High School French Department.
This lecture will provide a brief history and context of Négritude before delving into its complex and competing philosophies about the meaning of Blackness in the West, from its anguished past to a troubled present and dangerous future. The final section of the lecture will look at how many of the questions explored by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sedar Senghor have yet to be answered by contemporary scholars.
Michelle M. Wright is the Augustus Baldwin Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where she teaches courses on African American, Black European and African Diaspora literatures and theories. She is the author of Becoming Black: creating identity in the African diaspora (2004) and Physics of Blackness: beyond the Middle Passage epistemology (2015).