Leopold Sedar Senghor
Culture often precedes politics. In other words, artists
and intellectuals often lay the conceptual groundwork for later political
movements. Their work gives shape and direction to the otherwise inchoate
yearnings and aspirations of people who go on to effect political change.
Consider the examples of two of the most important political movements of
the twentieth century. The American civil rights movement of the late 1950s
and 1960s was anticipated in part by the Harlem Renaissance in New York City.
This remarkable cultural flowering included creative intellectuals as diverse
as essayist Alain Locke, poet Langston Hughes, and novelist Zora Neale Hurston.
In their different vocabularies these writers drew attention to the vitality
of black American culture and to the injustices suffered by African Americans.
Their analyses of race and society and calls for social justice were later
transformed into the social activism of the civil rights movement. Similarly,
the postwar decolonization of African and the Caribbean was anticipated, in
the French colonial world, by the negritude movement. Like the Harlem Renaissance,
negritude was essentially an intellectual and artistic movement. Its leaders
were philosophers and poets such as Aimee Cesaire of Martinique and Leopold
Sedar Senghor of Senegal, about whom you read in chapter 34. They and their
fellow intellectuals articulated a rich conception of blackness that helped
to inspire the black nationalist movements of the fifties and sixties. Use
the links below to learn more Senghor, his world, and negritude.
- Begin by reading this brief history of Senegal,
giving special attention to the later colonial period that shaped Senghor's
life and thought.
- Leopold
Sedar Senghor offers a fuller biography of Senghor with emphasis on his
political life.
- Go to Negritude - La Négritude
for an overview of the movement and short biographies of its central figures.
At Negritude
you can find a more detailed discussion of the movement and its philosophical
underpinnings.
- If Senghor had grown up in British
Africa rather than French, his life and thought would no doubt have developed
quiet differently than they did. Go to French
Colonial Policies to learn more about the colonialism experienced by Senghor.
- Senghor is perhaps best known to
the world as a political leader. However, he spent most of his life practicing
the art of poetry. Read the examples of his poetry at Senghor.
- Finally, go to Poets and sample the
work of some other negritude poets. Compare those poems with those of Senghor
you just read.
