The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics

The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics

Senegalese poet, philosopher, and politician Leopold 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. “This invaluable reader makes Senghor’s thought directly available to an English-language audience, offering a very good overview of his philosophy, perfectly capturing his original text, and assembling selections with precision and care. It will become a touchstone for those in African studies, philosophy, art, and beyond.”― Souleymane Bachir Diagne, author of , African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) was a poet, philosopher, and the first president of Senegal. Doyle D. Calhoun is University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. Alioune B. Fall is Assistant Professor of Black Studies and French at Providence College. Cheikh Thiam is Department Chair of English and Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College.