Senegalese poet, philosopher, and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor, together with Aimé Césaire and others, developed the influential and perennially relevant negritude movement – a Black artistic, philosophical, and political expression of Black presence in the modern colonial world. The Essential Senghor provides a new opportunity for English-language readers to engage with Senghor’s critical and philosophical writings spanning from 1937 to 1985. This collection includes Senghor’s key philosophical interventions in discourses on freedom, Blackness and being, humanism, history, and more. It portrays Senghor as a pivotal intellectual in the fields of African and Black studies whose work engages a wide range of disciplines, including literature, linguistics, anthropology, religion, and art history. The Essential Senghor invites readers not only to reflect on negritude and its importance for our political present, but also to reconsider intellectual genealogies of decolonial thought, Black liberation, and African philosophy.
Translators’ Note vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction. “Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001): A Reintroduction” / Doyle D. Calhoun, Alioune B. Fall, and Cheikh Thiam 1
Part 1. Negritude: A Humanism for the Twentieth (and Twenty-First) Century
1. Constitutive Elements of a Civilization of Negro-American Inspiration 27
2. Negritude Is a Humanism of the Twentieth Century 63
3. Negritude and Modernity:, or, Negritude Is a Humanism of the Twentieth Century 75
4. Concerning Negritude 105
5. Negritude, as the Culture of Black Peoples, Shall Not Be Eclipsed 129
6. For a Modern and Negro-African Philosophy 145
7. As Manatees Go to Drink from the Source 175
Part 2. Negritude, Aesthetics, and Philosophy
8. What the Black Man Offers 189
9. The Contributions of Negro Poetry to the First Half of the Century 209
10. Negro-African Aesthetics 225
11. The Function and Meaning of the First World of Negro Arts 241
12. For a Negro Criticism 247
13. From French Poetry to Francophone Poetry; or, The Contributions of Negroes to Francophone Poetry 251
14. Oral Tradition and Modernity 271
Part 3. Negritude, Métissage, and the Dialogue of Cultures
15. The Problem of Culture in French West Africa 281
16. Perspectives on Black Africa; or, To Assimilate, Not Be Assimilated 295
17. Why an Indo-African Department of the University of Dakar? 329
18. Negritude and Mediterranean Civilization 343
19. French and African Languages 355
20. The Dialogue of Cultures 373
Index 387
