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Fanon’s thinking syncretizes intellectual movements of the time — from Negritude to Existentialism, as well as thoughts on clinical psychology and colonialism — giving them voice in a dramatic style: soaring, sermon-like, poetic.

In the 1960s, Mr. Senghor helped foster the Negritude library movement that championed the idea of a shared identity among Africans across the world.

Those years, the years of decolonization that followed World War II, are the subject of a book by anthropologist and historian Gary Wilder, “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World.”

I remember believing that the key to all life lay in articulating the precise difference between “the Black Aesthetic” and “Negritude.”

She cited Black Label by Léon-Gontran Damas, a founding father of the Negritude cultural movement, and a native, like Taubira, of Cayenne, French Guiana.