AUDIO: Gendering Negritude with Shireen Lewis > voxunion

Gendering Negritude with

Shireen Lewis

Posted by on October 21, 2011

 

 

Dr. Shireen K. Lewis joined the show this week to discuss her work on Black women and Negritude.  Her book Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Negritude to Creolite’ was the basis of our interview and led us through the histories of Negritude and Creolite’, the politics of pan-Africanism, the work of Paulette Nardal, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Leopold Senghor and the gendering of Negritude.  Dr. Lewis shared also about her work with EduSeed’s Sister/Mentors program in Washington, D.C.

 

via voxunion.com

 

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I listen to the Shireen Lewis stream MP3 and really enjoyed her comments on Negritude...back in the 70's a friend taught an impromptu class at the Know Bookstore in Durham, N.C and his name was Dr. Thomas Hammond...it's was my first introduction to the term Negritude....What I remember about Thomas Hammond was that he also mention the Harlem Renaissance writer's in that class such notable's as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and maybe, now I'm guessing we also included Alain Locke and Countee Cullen...At that moment in time, I really dug the whole conception around Negritude...But the main focus was more on Aime Cesaire, Leopoldo Senghor, and I became captivate with Leon Dumas poems and Dr. Hammond said he was a close friend of Leon Dumas, they were in school together and taught at the college that was rename Howard University in Washington, D.C...And it was a regret that women were very seldom mention in the discourse on Negritude....I need to get her book and learn more about the women and their unsung contributions to Negritude. Edwin
— ayeawiekabea
(addendum) this may not be proper, but I want to add more to the discussion...Shireen Lewis said that Aime Cesaire was part of a middle class in Martinque...I came across something that Frantz Fanon said about the middle class that is worth quoting: " What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary" Frantz Fanon....please note that Fanon was once a student of Aime Cesaire, but I don't think there were any underlying contradiction in their goals or beliefs...Edwin
— ayeawiekabea