From Negritude to “migritude”: the Janus-faced discourse on identity and integration in the African diaspora literature

Abstract

The concern of the new generation of African writers in the diaspora today is different from that of their predecessors of Negritude. The latter’s concern was to make black cultural heritage visible and to reclaim a place in the exchange among cultures and in so doing show pride in their Black African cultural values. In contrast, most of the new African writers in the diaspora are struggling to dissociate themselves somehow partially or completely from their African heritage thereby creating for themselves a new abstract place that Leonora Miano a writer from Cameroon called Afropea, which she defines as a place which is immaterial and internal for those who do not have the French root.

The times of the Negritude have been replaced by those of the “migritude”, given that immigration and the problems of identity and integration are at the center of the concerns of most of those writers.

The discourse of these African writers on identity and integration are often contradictory: sometimes they struggle to be recognized as French writers (as considered part of the French Literature) or at least cosmopolitan writers i.e. citizens of the world or even Francophone and other times they categorize themselves as writers and nothing more in order to avoid being classified as African writers.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the “identity crisis” of these writers which makes them continuously live in an identity limbo.