Overview
Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) was a Senegalese poet, theorist of Négritude, and Senegal’s first president. With Césaire and Damas he forged a black cultural affirmation in French; his essays treat Négritude as an ontology and aesthetics of vital force as well as a politics of cultural rendezvous.
Main ideas
He defined Négritude as the sum of the cultural values of the black world and controversially wrote that emotion is Negro as reason is Hellenic—meaning a participatory, rhythmic knowing rather than a denial of African reason. He sought a ‘civilization of the universal’ of mutual giving and receiving among cultures.
Major works
- Liberté (essays)
- Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache
- poetry collections
Legacy
Senghor made Négritude a philosophical keyword; later critics (including Hountondji) challenged its ethnophilosophical risks while retaining his humanism of cultural exchange.