Créolité can perhaps best be described in contrast with the movement that preceded it, la négritude, a literary movement spearheaded by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas in the 1930s. Négritude writers sought to define themselves in terms of their cultural, racial and historical ties to the African continent as a rejection of French colonial political hegemony and of French cultural, intellectual, racial and moral domination. Césaire and his contemporaries considered the shared black heritage of members of the African diaspora as a source of power and self-worth for those oppressed by the physical and psychological violence of the colonial project. In the words of Lewis, it is a “transitory” movement, “agent of revolutionary change” stimulated by a desire to express a Black singularity and a Black unity. Later writers such as the Martinican Edouard Glissant came to reject the monolithic view of "blackness" portrayed in the négritude movement. In the early 1960s, Glissant advanced the concept of Antillanité which claimed that Caribbean identity could not be described solely in terms of African descent. Caribbean identity came not only from the heritage of ex-slaves, but was equally influenced by indigenous Caribbeans, European colonialists, East Indian and Chinese. Glissant and adherents to the subsequent créolité movement stress the unique historical and cultural roots of the Caribbean region while still rejecting French dominance in the French Caribbean. Glissant points out that the slaves that were brought to the Caribbean and their descendants are no longer merely African “migrants”, but became “new beings in a different space”, part of a new identity born from a mixing of cultures and differences. The authors of Eloge de la créolité describe créolité as "an annihilation of false universality, of monolinguism, and of purity.". In particular, the créolité movement seeks to reverse the dominance of French as the language of culture and literature in the French Caribbean. Instead it valorizes the use of Antillean Creole in literary, cultural and academic contexts. Indeed, many of the créolistes publish their novels in both Creole and French. Thus the créolistes add specificity to the polemic of multiple Caribbean identity. They advocate a heterogenous identity and proudly bear their differences and are "neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Créoles"..
