Reinventing Negritude: African Women Poets and the Poetics of Decolonization

Reinventing Negritude reexamines negritude poetics in the work of six twentieth-century West and Central African women poets and activist-intellectuals writing in English, French, and Portuguese. Through a comparative approach that brings the poetic texts by African women poets writing from Senegal, Nigeria, and São Tomé and Príncipe, this book argues that the poets implicitly and explicitly mobilize negritude tropes in a range of ways to advance feminist critiques of the project of decolonization. It blends formal analysis of poems with archival research and interviews to reread negritude with and against its geographical, historical, linguistic, and authorial grains. This unconventional reading of negritude poetics not only challenges the pervasive silencing of African women’s knowledge in the male-centered discourse but also brings a fresh understanding of how women reinvent the poetics of decolonization.