Jamaican Claude McKay is credited with inspiring France's Negritude ("Blackness") movement, as well as being a founding father of the Harlem Renaissance.

Birago Diop, a Senegalese poet, novelist and diplomat and a founder of the Negritude movement in the 1930's, died on Saturday in Dakar, according to an announcement on national television in Senegal.

In the 1930's the two men helped form the Negritude movement, which rejected assimilation in favor of African cultural values.

Cultural rejections of colonialism, such as the Negritude movement, or simply the embracing of seemingly authentic local culture are then seen in a post colonial world as a necessary part of the struggle against domination.

The Harlem Renaissance, centered on Harlem in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, had a significant influence on the Negritude movement.

"The dominant intellectual culture in Martinique is the Negritude movement," said Mr. Chamoiseau.

His writings championed the Negritude movement in Haiti, which "discovered" and embraced the African roots of Haitian society.

Much controversy in the Cuban art world followed, as well as the lasting fame of Nicolas Guillen as one of the premier poets of the Negritude movement.

Associated with the Negritude movement, Dabo Sissoko helped form a Malian cultural identity, drawing from a range of ethnicities and oral literary traditions.

His legacy includes the titles of novelist, diplomat, a founder of the Negritude movement and veterinarian.