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Négritude and the Noble Savage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Edna L. Steeves
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Extract

The development of African studies in our time has unearthed what is regarded as a storehouse of esoteric lore, a happy hunting ground for ethnologists, anthropologists, and linguists, a paradise for the mythopoeic and archetypal critic. But as literature? Indeed, some ‘civilised’ people still feel a strange unease that the black man should have a literature at all. Yet African oral and written materials, even a decade or two ago regarded primarily as of ethnological and anthropological interest, are today being investigated as authentic literature, part of the international mainstream. Black literature has arrived.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 1973 , pp. 91 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

Page 91 note 1 The distinctions are those made by Jahn, Janheinz in Neo-African Literature (New York, 1968), p. 22.Google Scholar

Page 92 note 1 Kesteloot, Lilyan in Les Ecrivains de langue française (Brussels, 1963),Google Scholar discusses in detail the various meanings of négritude. See also Irele, Abiola, ‘Négritude or Black Cultural Nationalism’, and ‘Négritude – Literature and Ideology’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), III, 3 and 4, 1965.Google Scholar

Page 93 note 1 Damas, Léon, Black-Label (Paris, 1956).Google Scholar

Page 93 note 2 Steele's source is Richard Ligon's True and Exact History of Barbadoes (1657).Google Scholar

Page 94 note 1 Between 1680 and 1768 over two million slaves were imported into the West Indies to work on the sugar plantations; Bristol and Liverpool were the chief slaving ports. Wylie Sypher records these statistics: ‘From 1783 to 1793, 878 round trips were made by Liverpool slavers carrying 303,737 slaves from Africa to the West Indies where they were sold for over £15,000,000 –a profit of 30%’; Guinea's Captive Kings (New York, 1969), p. II.Google Scholar Of course, the slave markets also supplied Englishmen with domestic servants.

Page 96 note 1 Quoted from Chauncey Tinker, B., Nature's Simple Plan (Princeton, 1922), p. 10.Google Scholar

Page 101 note 1 ‘An Essay on Man: Epistle I’, lines 99–112; The Poems of Alexander Pope edited by Butt, John (London, 1963), p. 508.Google Scholar

Page 102 note 1 The Abolitionist Society was founded in May 1787. England abolished the slave trade in 1807, and slavery in her colonies in 1833. Slavery became illegal in the United States in 1865.

Page 103 note 2 Fairchild, Hoxie N., The Noble Savage (New York, 1961), p. 127.Google Scholar