Césaire explains, “I’m not going to entomb myself in some strait particularism. But I don’t intend either to become lost in a fleshless universalism…. I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.”
Negritude was bigger even than Africa, that we were part of an international moment which held the promise of universal emancipation, that our destiny coincided with the universal freedom of workers and colonized people worldwide—all this gave us a bigger and more important identity than the ones previously available to us through kinship, ethnicity, and race–Manthia Diawara
Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams
Gala Speech composed by Daniel Pemberton. Amsterdam, 2022.
