Foundations of Just Cross-Cultural Dialogue in Kant and African Political Thought by Gemma K. Bird

Author:Gemma K. Bird
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783319979434
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.4.2 Domination and Oppression

Underpinning the oppression of the colonial movement was a focus on ‘othering’, on establishing identities around race and heritage that presented colonised people in terms of lack in comparison to the ‘civilised’ coloniser. As such the ‘other’ was often used as a method of referring to non-Western cultures that were in some way alien to the understanding of the colonial administrators. In response to this many of the anti-colonial movements, Négritude included, looked to re-appropriate Otherness and Blackness and to build political movements and identities around them. Like with the poetic responses previously discussed, the hope was to establish a belief that, ‘we’re black and have a history, a history that contains certain cultural elements of great value; and that Negroes were not, as you put it, born yesterday… Negro heritage was worthy of respect … its values were values that could still make an important contribution to the world’ (Césaire, 2000, pp. 91–92) . I engage here with how the theorists achieved this. How they questioned coloniser policies. What methodologies they used to re-appropriate the concepts of Blackness and Otherness. Unpicking the relationship between the re-appropriation of these terms and the goal of establishing independence. As well as asking what independence and autonomy would look like according to these authors.

Lewis Gordon described Négritude as ‘a literary theoretical response to anti-black racism which posited a unique black soul that was a source and function of a unique black reality of intrinsically black values’ (Gordon, 1995, p. 31). The concept of ‘uniqueness’ refers to what it is that is special and important about Blackness and established, according to Gordon, the foundation of the movement. By focusing on what was special or different about being African or Black, the theorists responded to the ‘othering’ of Western anthropologists that belittled and oppressed a people based on their race. The assumption of a unique identity, that should be both re-discovered and shared, relies on the philosophical assumptions of purposiveness and the right of individuals to undergo a process of self-discovery. It indicates a faith in the individual to achieve their own enlightenment in line with the assumption that enlightenment is both a process and a choice on the parts of individuals to take up this process, and in this sense it can be viewed as both a right and a duty. Through establishing their own identity individuals become ‘gradually more capable of freedom of action’ (Kant, 2006, p. 23) or emancipation. Thus the role of the Négritude movement, as an emancipatory tool, was to share the value of what the thinkers perceived as Black culture, with both one another and the world, on the understanding that it had value and could lead to political emancipation.

Valentin Mudimbe argued that Présence Africaine provided an outlet through which the Négritude movement could make these claims. He argued that, ‘what Diop’s project represents is a questioning, not of the French culture per se but of the imperial ambition of the Western Civilisation… It wishes to

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