Damas, Léon-Gontran (1912-1978)

Writer and politician born in French Guiana, Léon-Gontran Damas (1912-1978) was one of the founders of the Negritude literary movement, alongside Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Author of several collections of poems from the 1930s onwards, he evolved within a network of black intellectuals of African, Caribbean and American origin who met in Paris. A great admirer of the Haitian philosopher, writer and ethnographer Jean Price-Mars, he went to French Guiana in 1934 on an ethnographic mission after following courses at the Institute of Ethnology in Paris. Engaged in politics, it was above all on the cultural level that he would later lead the fight, refusing assimilation and seeking to promote the cultures of Africans and Afro-descendants on both sides of the Atlantic. Having settled in Washington D.C. in 1970, he taught literature at Howard University.

Keywords: Literature | Negritude | French colonialism | Colonisation | 20^th century | Caribbean | French Guiana | African-American studies | Oral literature | Anthropology and literature