The Awakening of Race Consciousness

Introduction

Paulette Nardal published “L’éveil de la conscience de race chez les étudiants noirs” (“The awakening of race consciousness among Black students”) in the sixth and last issue of La Revue du monde noir in April 1932, in French with an English translation. The short essay traces a history: Antillean intellectuals had long sought to assimilate to French culture and to keep their distance from Africa, but in Paris, where they met Africans and African Americans and experienced racism, a new consciousness of belonging to a Black world was emerging. Nardal describes stages in this development, from imitation of European models to an interest in African history and in Black American literature, notes that women students had felt the need for racial solidarity first, and calls for a culture that joins Latin and African heritage. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting has shown its parallels with Alain Locke’s The New Negro and reads it as a founding text of Négritude.

Connections

Builds on

• The New Negro: An Interpretation1925 · Alain Locke