Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Senghor, Léopold Sédar - O. R. Dathorne （essay date 1974）

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O. R. Dathorne （essay date 1974）

SOURCE: “Négritude and Black Writers,” in African Literature in the Twentieth Century, University of Minnesota Press, 1974, pp. 217-48.

[In the following excerpt, Dathorne discusses Senghor's interpretation of negritude, ancestral archetypes, and the intersection of Western and African influences in his poetry.]

As has been suggested so far, négritude like Pan-Africanism was a Caribbean sickness. Only people unfamiliar with the norms of tribal life could have diagnosed in such wide conceptual terms a myth of the heart and boldly prescribed such an imaginative recovery. Senghor was Senegalese; he learned his négritude from deraciné West Indians, but to it he brought something new—the novelty of the initiated. He alone knew; they could only hazard guesses. Therefore it was in the language of Césaire and Damas that Senghor wrote that “those who colonised us justified our political and...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Newsweek （review date 27 July 1964）
   2. Gwendolyn Brooks （review date 13 September 1964）
   3. Robert W. July （review date 25 October 1964）
   4. O. R. Dathorne （essay date 1974）
   5. Lilyan Kesteloot （essay date 1974）
   6. Frederick Ivor Case （essay date 1975）
   7. Janis L. Pallister （essay date April 1980）
   8. Dorothy S. Blair （essay date 1984）
   9. Janet G. Vaillant （essay date 1990）
   10. Roger Shattuck and Samba Ka （review date 20 December 1990）
   11. K. Anthony Appiah （review date 5 July 1992）
   12. Isaac I. Elimimian （essay date 1994）
   13. Koffi Anyinefa （essay date Summer 1996）
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. African Literature