Global Journals Portal

Blackness

Blackness is a term that is still difficult to translate into other languages; it attempts to capture the transversal singularity ("-ness") of being black ("black"). In the French-speaking world, several translation attempts exist, such as “noirité”, “noiritude” or “noirceur”, but any of them has succeeded at taking over. The term “negritude” seems to be too attached to a bygone historical moment. Without neglecting the differences between the cultures and the social organizations in which this condition is embodied, the question is to understand the fact of being black as constructed and shared in a transnational way, heavily influenced by the experience of colonization and slavery. The diasporic experience emerges as a paradoxical base because as it is dispersed, it refers to blackness. In this database, the journals indexed with the term "Black studies" bear witness to the fact that being black implies a relationship with the world that has been captured in a history with social, cultural and political specificities. It also implied the construction of resistance model which allowed itself new practices, particularly in the aesthetic field.

The celebration of black artistic or textual forms, although linked to racial consciousness, does not boil down to it. It is more of a theoretical, political, literary or artistic prism that questions the invisible partition of lines of color.