 For both Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Negritude was the cultural fruit of the historical process of intellectual cross-fertilization known as métissage. Within this dynamic history, new cultural forms developed that could offer intellectual nourishment to the developing social movements striving for self-determination (Denean Sharpley-Whiting 2003, 117). “For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond…It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, with all the fraternity of olden days” (Césaire 1955 [1972, 31]). Thus, Negritude articulated a new set of norms and values that aimed to depart from Europe’s barbarism. Rejecting colonialism involved turning toward rather than away from the historical tie to indigenous African cultures. This would prove to be a productive relation, since these cultures were neither modern nor liberal by Europe’s lights but communal, cooperative, and anti-capitalist, with their own forms of democracy (Césaire 1955 [1972, 23]). Decolonization required not simply nation-building but a reassessment and realignment of cultural forms and related social ideas about human possibilities (Getachew 2019). Negritude was the name given to this endeavor.