Talk:negritude

The first English usage I can find in b.g.c is in 1895 in a brief passage in Freethinker (there are two spurious hits, dated 1829 and 1888, but these both refer to Aimé Césaire, who was born in 1913 -- in general one must be careful with b.g.c dates, particularly in serial publications)
 * We do not know about the much-married sultan's negritude, but expect that the bishop is right in describing him as full-blooded.

Note that the term is uncapitalized and refers only to a person's lineage and appearance.

There are plenty of earlier hits in French and Latin. I wouldn't be surprised if these use the term in the same sense and that the quotation above is a direct borrowing, but I don't know enough to assert that.

There's an interesting hit in Social Science
 * Camp fires and pine knots flickering from wagons and tents accentuated the density and negritude of the surrounding forest.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to give a reliable date as we don't know which issue it's in and the snippet isn't big enough to show the issue number or date. Clearly the sense is just blackness, referring to color.

There's also a hit from Dorothy Thompson's Let the Record Speak, which multiple sources show as dating to 1939, being a collection of columns from 1936-1939, but the hits (pp. 93-94) refer to the 1930s and 1940s in past tense. It refers to the philosophy of Negritude (capitalized).

Bridget G. MacCarthy's Women writers: their contribution to the English novel, 1621-1744 most likely from 1946, appears the word, uncapitalized, in the earlier sense. However, as far as I can make out, this is about the time Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor are starting to write about Négritude and more importantly to use the term in its modern sense.

As far as tracking the meaning of the term down, the original French cites are more relevant. Unfortunately for us, those primary sources are poetic, for example, Césaire's famous Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, a portion of which has been translated as:


 * my negritude is not a stone
 * nor a deafness flung against the clamor of the day
 * my negritude is not a white speck of dead water
 * on the dead eye of the earth
 * my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
 * it plunges into the red flesh of the soil
 * it plunges into the blaxing [sic] flesh of the sky
 * my negritude riddles with holes
 * the dense affliction of its worthy patience.
 * the dense affliction of its worthy patience.

So, um, good luck with that. Nice imagery, though.

By the 1950s there are plenty of English uses of the term, but they seem predominantly if not exclusively to be discussing what Negritude (capitalized or not) does or doesn't mean. My personal sense from this is that Negritude is "blackness" in the sense of "African-ness", consciously asserted as something of value in and of itself, without reference to European (or other non-African) values -- and much of the ensuing discussion revolves around what that might mean. The term itself seems to have expanded from an original sense having to do with poetic style to a wider, social/political sense, but that would take some documentation to establish, and it would be interesting to what extent critic's assertions that it meant something broader might have contributed to this.

Though it generally doesn't seem to have been used widely in English for its own sake, there are some at least near-misses:

A somewhat more natural usage than most, from 1959:
 * One example of an effort to produce a moral ideology in French West Africa has been the new political emphasis on negritude.

And another, which takes a dimmer view of the term (volumes 10-11 of this journal date from 1959-60; as usual it's hard to figure just where the snippet is from):
 * He is (or at least was) a racialist and was preaching negritude long before the word was coined.

This snippet seems to be somewhat between the literal sense and the modern sense, with a pejorative connotation
 * A very excellent piece of villainy (II.3.5-7) and he rejoiced in his negritude

(it's a bit hard to tell what's actually going on in the original text, as it's truncated in the copyright-friendly view)

As far as raw statistics (and unfortunately this includes a sizable portion of French usages):
 * 1900-1939: about 75 hits
 * 1940-1949: about 291 hits
 * 1950-1959: about 1400 hits
 * 1960-1969: about 30,900 hits
 * 1970-1979: about 56,200 hits
 * 1980-1989: about 48,100 hits
 * 1990-1999: about 49,300 hits
 * 2000-2009: about 64,400 hits

As always, these are only indicative, and in particular they should be normalized somehow to account from there being more documents total in more recent years. My guess is activity probably peaked in the late 1960s to early 1970s, which would make sense in the larger social context of those times.

Finally, Jean-Paul Sartre has been credited with introducing the modern sense of the term in Black Orpheus, but this was published in 1948, well after Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (completed in 1939 though only published in complete form in 1947). If he coined the sense, it must have been earlier. --dmh 06:26, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

RFV discussion
Rfv-sense: An affirmation of the independence of Black culture, and its African heritage. I thought:
 * 1) Consciousness of or pride in Black or Black African culture.
 * 2) State of being black-skinned or of black African descent. DCDuring TALK 14:52, 10 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Deleted. Equinox ◑ 00:11, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
 * b.g.c shows it ample attestation --dmh 01:43, 28 July 2010 (UTC)


 * But the purported citations are not in the entry available for review by those who evaluate whether they are suitable for attestation of the questioned sense. DCDuring TALK 10:20, 28 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Having been away for a while, I'm curious what current practice is. For the term to be accepted, do citations have to be in the entry itself, or in the rfv entry, or is it enough just to point at them?
 * In the present case, the term was on RfV for several months without anyone providing any verification, not even "try b.g.c", so the admin has every right to gun it. It's not the admin's job to look for verification.  Further, the RfV entry contains the deleted text, so little has been lost and it can easily be replaced.  On the other hand, I don't personally believe the citations should have to be cut-and-pasted into an entry in order for it to be considered verified.  That's certainly the considerate thing to do, time permitting, but in this day and age b.g.c is easily available to anyone and at worst you have an entry requiring cleanup, not one to be deleted.
 * Perhaps there should be a bot that would take any unresolved RfV entry with nothing added in the past month and
 * Copy the contents of the Wiktionary entry into the rfv entry
 * Delete the Wiktionary entry
 * (Possibly) move the rfv entry to some other page ("presumed dead"?)
 * This would likely
 * Save admins from trolling through RfV
 * Save arguments about entry X being deleted for lack of response but entry Y being inadvertently missed
 * Preserve the contents of the entry in case there was anything to them after all
 * Give contributors an incentive to come up with citations (and mark the entry as verified) as the entry will automatically be removed otherwise
 * Granted, someone could fool such a bot by adding "Hi mom" to an entry every 29 days, but such a person would be deliberately making mischief and could be dealt with appropriately. There could also be pissing matches about whether to mark an entry as verified, but that's an existing problem.  Thoughts? --dmh 06:44, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
 * As this is broader in scope than an RfV, to be treated adequately it would seem to need a discussion at WT:BP.
 * Re: rationale for having citations rather than links: We are trying to create a work that saves time. The idea of having a citation present while attestation is taking place is that is saves time for each person reviewing the RfV. Having the citations present in the entry rather than at the RfV saves the time needed to subsequently move the citations to the entry. Our objective is to have many usage examples and citations available at the entry, now facilitated by their being hidden by default. Using links instead of extracted citations slows down both RfV review and normal use of the entry. DCDuring TALK 11:03, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
 * The main question I was interested in was: In the case of an RfV for an entry where (unlike the present case) the question is whether the term is used at all, would a simple "Hey, I checked b.g.c. and found a bunch of legitimate usages." be enough to settle the request for verification? In my personal opinion, the answer is obviously yes, particularly since confirming or refuting such a statement is typically dead easy.  Of course, cites should also be brought into the entry to bring it up to standard, but that's a separate issue.  Does that clarify the question? --dmh
 * I believe that it is our general practice to require that the citations be in the entry. If it is not done by the person providing the assertion that the usage in question exists, then it should be done by the person closing the RfV. Closing an RfV is tedious enough without the burden of extra work of finding citations to support someone else's intuition. The whole point of RfV is to facilitate verification, not just once, but in principle for all time. Assertions and opinions of a changing group of contributors are necessary, but the necessary grist for the lexicographic mill consists of citations, unless we are not to progress beyond being plagiarists and copy editors (only of copyright-free sources of course} and Urban Dictionary imitators. DCDuring TALK 10:40, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
 * So, first of all, understand that I agree completely that cites are necessary and that otherwise it's just opinion. One of my major activities on Wiktionary over the years has been digging up actual usage in the face of unsupported assertions, mostly because the real picture is generally more interesting.  On the other hand, very few entries actually have them.  I just checked ten random English entries, for example, and none had cites.  That's not surprising.  Cites take a bit of effort to dig up and sift through and, sadly, quite a bit of cutting and pasting to get into proper form.  If someone has a macro that will turn a b.g.c link and a snippet of text into a proper citation, please let me know!  That would be great.
 * Given that 90+% of our entries could, technically, be RfVd and that doing so would be a major waste of time, actually getting things done depends on a less-formal agreement among editors only to RfV senses that look suspicious and perhaps to be a bit lenient about leaving an entry open if it looks like adequate verification exists. From what I can see, such an agreement looks, happily, to be in place,  so I'm just trying to come up to speed on current practice after a time away.  My main concern is that after spending a chunk of time digging through cites (trying searches, reading for context, checking dates and attributions, etc. -- see Talk:negritude for an example), I'd rather not have an entry gunned because I didn't get all the way to picking three good ones for each sense and pasting them in.  Frankly, I'm not really concerned about that in the present environment, but stranger things have happened. --dmh 21:07, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
 * If it is here, it tends to be debatable, in need of a factual resolution. Also, if it is here, someone is paying attention. If we don't attest these, with those advantages, what will we attest? And, if not not now, when? Finally, we have "widespread use" (ie, attestation by vote) for the really easy cases and for the hard-to-cite colloquial cases. DCDuring TALK 21:29, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Exactly. Out of curiosity, did I say something that sounded like I don't think entries should be backed up by actual citations?  I'm not being facetious here; from your replies it seems like I might have, but that was absolutely not my intention. --dmh 03:22, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Above you said: 'would a simple "Hey, I checked b.g.c. and found a bunch of legitimate usages." be enough to settle the request for verification? In my personal opinion, the answer is obviously yes, particularly since confirming or refuting such a statement is typically dead easy.'
 * My belief is that the cites need to be present in the entry for challenged items to be attested for the reasons stated above. DCDuring TALK 08:38, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Hmm ... I think I see where you're coming from. I think we both agree that cites are the basis for any real lexicography.  My view was that if it's clear that the cites exist, then we have a verified entry whether the cites have been copied into Wiktionary-land or not.  It's not a complete entry, nor as useful an entry as it might be, but at least we know there's a real basis for it.  And again, if you've found the cites, it's certainly good form to go to the extra length of copying them in.
 * With the RfV for headless in the computer sense, for example, I knew it was legit because I'm in that business, and I could also see how a simple search for headless doesn't obviously support that. But b.g.c for running headless server does.  Even though you wouldn't know it from this discussion, I actually do have other things to do, so I left it at that.  If I have more time, I do more, as I did with negritude and the RfV for binky (which, unfortunately, may not have quite enough for CFI yet). --dmh 05:29, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Either the article was never actually deleted, or it was undeleted. I didn't check which.  I've added three cites, but from finding them it looks like the situation is fairly nuanced.  In particular, the term itself and the literary/cultural criticism around it seem very much intertwined, and much ink is spent talking about it, and what it is and isn't, thus making the lexicographer's task that much more complex.  Note also that the capitalization varies. --dmh 07:11, 3 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Re: "Either the article was never actually deleted, or it was undeleted": Right. This was an RFV-sense, meaning that only one sense was listed here. When Equinox wrote "Deleted", he meant only that he had removed that sense — see negritude?diff=9344167 — not that he had deleted the entire entry using the "delete" feature. (This might also account, in part, for the above discussion between you and DCDuring: you wrote "b.g.c shows it ample attestation", apparently meaning that the word gets plenty of b.g.c. hits, but DCDuring thought you were saying that the word gets plenty of b.g.c. hits in the challenged sense. The former is easy to check, but the latter would take too much effort to be stated so flippantly.) —Ruakh TALK 12:39, 3 August 2010 (UTC)


 * This is certainly an interesting term, since it seems to serve as much as a starting point for social/literary criticism as a term in itself. Almost seems to blur the use/mention distinction.  IMHO the definitions given are a decent starting point, but teasing out what's actually going on is non-trivial.  In particular, I'm not sure to what extent the cites support either definition, but cites are where we start so there are some.  I'll try to do some more digging.  I was a bit tired when I put in that second comment.  If it came off as flippant, that wasn't the intent.  I eventually noticed that it had been and RfV-sense, but didn't want to go back yet again and correct the note. --dmh 04:28, 4 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Supporting material added on Talk:negritude. Not sure exactly what it supports, but I'm hoping it will eventually lead to better clarity. --dmh 06:28, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Offensive?
Should this be stuck with an Offensive label, as with negronegro?
 * No. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 05:50, 2 April 2017 (UTC)