Crossing lines between Deleuze and Négritude: a vitalist ontology of post-colonial war machines

This chapter proposes a crossing of Western and post-colonial thought via a creative reading of the Négritude movement in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. Spanning poetry, philosophy and political writings, the Négritude writers Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Suzanne Césaire confronted racist 1930s societies with the provocative declaration of a superior Black consciousness. Black thought and culture, these authors argue, circumvent the modern Western binaries of mind/body, culture/nature and subject/object with their infusion in an ontology of emotion, creativity and vital relationality, which make them superior to the rigidity of colonial modernity. First, the chapter challenges the widespread reception, developed largely out of the legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s commentary on the movement, that such a use of African culture by Négritude produces a positively inverted racism and a “counter-essentialism” which remains incapable of eluding hierarchical borders between White modernity and African heritage. Against this backdrop, the chapter mobilizes Deleuze’s work to show how the engagement with Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche shared by the Négritude authors and the French thinker opens up new lines of flight that move beyond both essentialization of being and the dialectical rejection of modern reason. The chapter argues that, for Négritude, the vitality and creativity of African cultures, expressed primarily via art and poetry, is a strategic literary war machine in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, which aims to challenge modern liberalism in its ontological underpinnings and imperialist political-economic and institutional outgrowth. The strategic use of African rhythms, sounds and imagery serves the purpose of the creative rupture that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to art, and which is able to move beyond, rather than against, the shackles of white modernity. The ontological propositions of Negritude, therefore, should be read as a deeply politically situated and future-oriented call: the embracement of an ontology of affect, relational agency and vitalist becoming in Négritude is enfolded with the strategic—and profoundly human—end of creating political life after colonialism and capitalism.