Abstract This chapter concludes that Negritude allowed black poets to be full participants of the “aesthetic regime.” This “aesthetic regime” is a lyric regime, and the poetry of Negritude establishes itself solidly as a text-based (rather than oral) movement. Negritude poets not only adopted typographic innovations introduced by other writers; they also developed their own way of harnessing the resistant force that the printed word harbors in its material being. The poets of Negritude in this sense raced textuality. They drew on the complex specificities of the irracialization under modern capitalism to exert pressure on thematic, lexical prosodic, typographical, and rhetorical norms. Moreover, the Negritude poem offers the promise of an identity that can be performed but will never resolve into essence, the promise of an identity that acts like a resistant force of “materiality as it plays itself out in/as the work of art.”