by Unglid Paul
Doyle D. Calhoun is a University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse. He researches African and Caribbean literatures and cinemas, particularly Senegalese literature and film in French and Wolof, as well as the archives and afterlives of slavery in the French-speaking world. He is the author of The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire (2024). Alioune B. Fall is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and French at Providence College. His research examines Francophone African and Afro-diasporic literatures as well as transnational Black identities and mobilities. Cheikh A. Thiam is a Professor of English and Black Studies and Chair of the English Department at Amherst College. His research focuses on African and Afro-diasporic literature and thought, with particular attention to Négritude, African philosophy, and African epistemologies. His most recent book is Epistemologies from the Global South: Negritude, Modernity and the Idea of Africa (2024).
Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) was a Senegalese poet, philosopher, and the first president of independent Senegal. He was also one of the leading theorists of Négritude, an idea and movement which primarily emerged among Black Francophone intellectuals in 1930s Paris and sought to affirm Africa’s cultural heritage and Black intellectual life in the shadow of European colonialism and universalism. Senghor’s efforts to develop Négritude’s philosophical foundations, while simultaneously navigating the fraught political relationship between France and its former African colonies, have made him an enduring figure in African and Afro-diasporic thought. In The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics (2026), Calhoun, Fall, and Thiam edit and translate selections from Senghor’s Liberté 1: Négritude et Humanisme (1964), Liberté 3: Négritude et civilisation de l’universel (1977), and Liberté 5: Le Dialogue des cultures (1993). By addressing the linguistic barrier that has limited an Anglophone audience’s access to much of Senghor’s French prose, this collected volume offers a timely reintroduction to a thinker whose work continues to inform debates in history, literature, Black Studies, African philosophy, and decolonial thought. For the JHI Blog, Unglid Paul interviews the editors about the challenges of translating Senghor, the debates surrounding his philosophical and political legacies, and the continued relevance of Négritude today.
Unglid Paul (UP): The introduction (“Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001): A Reintroduction”) opens with an epigraph from Senghor: “Négritude therefore [. . .] will not disappear; it will play, once more, its role, an essential one, in the edification of a new humanism” (1). In the decades since Senghor first fashioned the concept in the early twentieth century (alongside the likes of Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, and the Nardal sisters), Négritude has been alternately celebrated as “the watershed that marks the emergence of a modern African consciousness” (Irele 1965, 522), dismissed as a reproachful form of racial essentialism, or cordoned off as a contextual response to the assimilatory pressures of the colonial order. How does your “collective undertaking” (xiii) in The Essential Senghor—“translating, rereading, and reintroducing Senghor to an Anglophone audience” (xi)—seek to intervene in this long and uneven history of Négritude’s reception? More plainly put: Why return to Senghor now?
Doyle D. Calhoun, Alioune B. Fall, and Cheikh A. Thiam (DC, AF, & CT): You are quite right. Over the past century, Négritude has, indeed, been read and assessed in fundamentally different—and often contradictory—ways. On the one hand, scholars such as Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Abiola Irele, and Donna V. Jones have shown Négritude to be a groundbreaking intellectual movement, a genuine political response to colonialism, and one of the most fully articulated expressions of pan-African and Afro-diasporic thought. On the other hand, Négritude’s detractors, such as Stanislas Adotevi, Wole Soyinka and Ezekiel Mphalele, have characterized it as a historically necessary (albeit reactionary) formation at best and, at worst, a politically defunct form of romanticism or an ingrained colonial inferiority complex. What is interesting, however, is that the various and divergent representations of Négritude are all, to some degree, defensible. Despite the appearance of contradictions, there are elements in Senghor’s writings that support each of these interpretations. Does this mean that we should understand Senghor’s work as inherently contradictory? Or should we take these tensions as signs of a more complicated personal trajectory and intellectual project? Our volume does not provide a definitive answer. What it does make possible is a more informed and nuanced conversation, based on a fuller understanding of Senghor’s intellectual production.
Senghor’s prose has often been difficult to access. The Liberté volumes have largely been out of print for approximately three decades, and much of Senghor’s philosophical writings have never been translated into English. Yet, English (specifically what John Mugane calls “vertical English”) has become the dominant language of African Studies. As a result, many scholars in the field have had to engage with a thinker generally recognized as foundational to the discipline, without having access to a substantial portion of his work. By bringing together translations of Senghor’s most important writings in a single volume, The Essential Senghor gives Anglophone readers a direct insight, often for the first time, into the breadth and intricacies of his thought, from his first public speech in 1937 to his final writings in the early 1990s. Above all, the volume creates space for a more rigorously informed engagement with Négritude, grounded not merely in inherited interpretations or decontextualized quotations but within the wider context of Senghor’s extensive body of work and its corresponding evolutions.
So, why return to Senghor now? Because the questions with which he grappled have not disappeared. What does it mean to understand Blackness simultaneously as a mode of being, a lived experience, and a political position? What tensions arise between a Black lived experience and the universal claims of Western humanism and Euro-modernity? How might a shared world emerge without erasing differences and the specificity of historical experiences, including colonial ones? His answers are not always satisfactory. His thought, undeniably, contains lapses. Yet, it is precisely because Senghor’s philosophical production is so unresolved that returning to his writings remains so generative and necessary.
UP: This collection includes a range of Senghor’s philosophical essays, lectures, and speeches, which circulated across various journals, editions, translations, institutional settings, and social contexts. And, as you state, “these texts all had a life of their own” (vii). Considering how different genres carry different rhetorical expectations, how did you account for the specific form and function of each text? Or, in other words, how did you negotiate the tension in trying to make Senghor’s ideas newly legible for a contemporary readership, while still preserving the traces of address, audience, and historical context that informed the texts’ original “lives”?
DC, AF, & CT: Genre was central to this project from the outset. Senghor’s scholarly reception has long been shaped by a somewhat problematic distinction between genres or between “poetry” and “prose.” Even though poetry is often characterized as notoriously resistant to translation, Senghor’s poetry has traveled far more widely in English than his prose (his collected poetry was translated into English in 1991, although earlier translations and bilingual editions of selected poems appeared in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s). This asymmetry perhaps says less about the perceived translatability of the two genres and more about a longstanding assumption that prose lacks the poéticité or the “literariness” of verse. Senghor was acutely aware of this perception, and his writing actively resisted this reductive precept. Many rhetorical features of his prose—figures de style, repetition, cadence—seem motivated as much by a concern with rhythm and style as by communicative function.
In his introduction to the first published volume of his collected prose works in French—Liberté 1 (1964)—Senghor gestures toward the range of genres he gathers under the heading of “prose”: essays, prefaces, articles, lectures, speeches. Markers of these respective genres are often most visible in a text’s introduction and conclusion, where an address to an original audience—whether members of the Chamber of Commerce, congregants at a university lecture, or readers of an edited volume—might be softened, retained, or removed in a later, published version. Such markers are also evident in a text’s overall structure: a public address tends to be shorter and more simply organized, relying on anecdote and exemplification, while a scholarly essay accommodates multiple subsections, denser moments of intertextuality, and a fuller bibliographic apparatus. These, however, are not watertight categories. For Senghor, genre operates more as a spectrum, and he deploys various features unevenly across the types of texts.
We tried to honor this tension—between a legibility for a contemporary audience and a fidelity to each text’s original “life”—in a few ways. Extensive explanatory footnotes reinscribe historical and cultural context; an unnumbered headnote for each text recounts its original occasion and subsequent republications; and a considerable amount of editorial labor went into reconstructing Senghor’s often unmarked citations, which register as a genre-specific feature of (non-)attribution in its own right. Finally, in selecting texts, we aimed for a representative assortment of genres, so that readers might encounter the different shapes that Senghor’s thought takes. It also helped that our training spans Philosophy and African Studies (Dr. Thiam) as well as Francophone and African Comparative Literatures (Drs. Calhoun and Fall). Simply put, we approached these texts as literary scholars, ever attentive to their specificity as texts.
UP: You emphasize the difficulty in tracking Senghor’s citational practice: misquotations, altered editions, missing references, and sources that Senghor sometimes omitted or transformed altogether. How did this archival and editorial labor shape how you interpreted and ultimately translated Senghor? Were there moments when recovering a citation, correcting a misquotation, or confirming an intellectual source either clarified a prior perception or exposed something new about Senghor’s methods or philosophical commitments? And how did Senghor’s invocations of personal memory, lived experience, and his deliberate self-fashioning further impact your understanding of his citational practice?
DC, AF, & CT: A basic starting point for studying any historical figure is to read, as much as possible, what they read. In the case of Senghor, we took this responsibility seriously. We not only read the published texts—literary, philosophical, linguistic, historical, political, scientific—that Senghor cited, but also the “cultural texts” that informed his thought (West African worldviews, Wolof proverbs, Sereer oral traditions). We wanted this volume to be a scholarly translation and something like a critical edition, which meant undertaking the bibliographic and archival labor needed to bring Senghor’s engagement with all kinds of texts into sharper focus. As a result, we have supplied complete bibliographic references for Senghor’s citations, which are often incomplete or missing in the original versions; corrected and noted obvious errors; and introduced references for implicit or unattributed citations. Where multiple editions of a cited text exist, we referenced the edition Senghor used whenever possible, even cross-checking inventories of his own library whenever necessary. This work took us to archives across the United States, France, and Senegal. Admittedly, we were unable to be exhaustive in this endeavor. However, we hope any remaining gaps will become openings for future research.
All this labor not only reveals the diversity of Senghor’s interlocutors but also shows how he placed African and Western traditions on equal footing. An insight from Henri Bergson or René Descartes is not a priori weighted more heavily than an unattributed Wolof proverb, a Dogon philosophical concept, or an anecdote from his Sereer upbringing. This is, we think, a contribution in its own right, since much scholarship on Senghor has focused on his engagement with Western and continental thought. Close attention to the African sources of Senghor’s thought also clarifies his self-fashioning as a thinker who worked at the crossroads of multiple linguistic, cultural, and intellectual traditions, and illuminates his capacious view of intellectual production—one that remained translational and “hospitable,” in the words of Diagne, to the thought and idiom of the Other. Recovering a citation or correcting a misquotation, then, was never simply philological housekeeping. These acts repeatedly exposed the immense scope of what Senghor read, remembered, and transformed; and deepened our sense of how personal memory, lived experience, and deliberate self-fashioning shaped his citational practice as much as any text on a shelf.
UP: In the essay “Concerning Negritude” or “Problématique de la Négritude” (1971), Senghor lingers over the suffix of “-itude” in order to clarify what Négritude is and what it is not. He writes: “It is true, people have not failed to reproach Césaire for choosing the word negritude instead of Negroness [negrite] . . . [T]he two words have the same meaning, formed as they are with suffixes having the same meaning; it is only that the suffix-itude is more learned” (107). This is one of several moments where the assorted essays invite readers to attend closely to the linguistic formation of the concept. Given that Négritude is itself so deeply rooted in the morphological and semantic specificity of French, your use of brackets to provide Senghor’s original term proves especially helpful here. How else did you approach the terms, passages, neologisms, idioms, or syntactical choices in Senghor’s conceptual vocabulary that resisted easy translation and produced distinctly unresolved tensions among you as translators? At what moments did the specific exigencies of translating into English produce visible compromises when placed beside the original French? What impact did Senghor’s other languages—Sereer and Wolof, for example—have on your work?
DC, AF, & CT: Senghor is often cast as a champion of the French language alone. However, Senghor was a trained linguist who specialized in the study of the genetically related West African languages of Wolof, Sereer, and Pulaar. Having trained in Paris under leading Africanist linguists and ethnologists—including Lilias Homburger, Marcel Cohen, and Marcel Mauss—Senghor held the Chair of Linguistics at the École nationale de France d’outre-mer from 1944 to 1960, only stepping down to become president of a newly independent Senegal. Across his academic work, Senghor consistently called attention to the “génie des langues” (10) and the lexical resources of African languages. Most strikingly, he suggested that the “Frenchness” of Négritude was something of an afterthought: “Negro-African” languages already possessed resources for expressing cultural belonging and shared “ways of being,” including ways of being Black (ix). In “Concerning Negritude,” he cites, for example, the Pulaar terms pulaa-gu (“the sum total of qualities characteristic of the Fulɓe” [109] ethnic group in West Africa) and pulaa-gal (“the manner in which these qualities are manifested by an individual Pulo” [109]). For Senghor, these two meanings “correspond respectively to objective negritude and subjective negritude” (109). Senghor proposes these examples as evidence of how “our Negro-African civilization […] offer[s] us the most effective solution” to various problems or quandaries, “be it in the realm of politics or economics, culture or health” (109). In short, these Africans idioms were just as equipped to furnish philosophical concepts as any language.
Our respective training and backgrounds were especially useful here—one of the many reasons why a notion of “multiple translatorship” proves so generative. Dr. Calhoun brought a strong linguistic foundation to the project, with his expertise in linguistics and his background as a native speaker of English, a near-native speaker of French, and a fluent speaker of Wolof. Dr. Fall is a native speaker of Wolof and French and a near-native speaker of English, while Dr. Thiam is a native speaker of Wolof and French, a near-native speaker of English, and has a good working knowledge of Sereer. In turn, we consistently grounded our approach in African languages before extending it to English, without necessarily being constrained by the limitations of French. We simply could not have achieved the same results working individually.
Close attention to language is, of course, part and parcel of any translation project. What makes translating Senghor a particular challenge is the extent to which most of his key terms—related to Blackness and Africanness—resist straightforward translation. Achille Mbembe offers a useful starting point for thinking about translating Blackness in Critique of Black Reason (2017), where he writes: “‘Black’ [Nègre] is first of all a word—a word that always refers us to something. But the word has its own weight, its own density” (151). Words, as most know, do not mean anything in isolation. Meaning is co-constituted by the network of other signifiers to which a word refers (or does not refer). Nègre means what it means because it is neither Noir nor Black. Each term accrues its own historical weight, and this process of accretion also includes the task of translation.
We discuss translating this constellation of terms—nègre, noir, Black, Negro, négro-africain, among others—at length in our “Translators’ Note” and the “Introduction,” terrain also mapped by scholars and writers like Brent Hayes Edwards, Laurent Dubois, and Léonora Miano. In turn, perhaps the most distilled response to your question is that we often operated in the realm of what Barbara Cassin calls the “untranslatable”—not what resists translation absolutely, but what one never stops (not) translating. As an untranslatable, nègre becomes a fraught yet generative site for thinking through language’s role in articulating Black, African, and Afro-diasporic subjectivities. It is through translation—through the impossibility and necessity of finding a semantic equivalent—that we run up against the limits of any single idiom. When Senghor writes nègres noirs (“Black Negros”), translating nègre simply as “Black” produces a nonsensical tautology (“Black Blacks”). Similarly, because nègre so often functions adjectivally in Senghor’s prose—not only le Nègre, but sociétés nègres, peuples nègres—leaving it untranslated throughout the running text becomes unwieldy (e.g., “societies nègres”). Rather than smoothing over these moments, we tried to flag them as nodes of untranslatability, retaining the French in brackets to invite readers to dwell, in Mbembe’s terms, on the word’s weight and density.
UP: Senghor uses Négritude to name an aesthetics, an epistemology, and a humanism, and subsequently positions “the Negro-African” and their “conception of the world” as opposite to what he calls “classical philosophy” (66). How should we understand the history of this distinction, particularly in light of his famous formulation that “Emotion is negro, as reason Hellenic” (191)? If Négritude does not speak to “classical” philosophy in the sense of a particular European tradition of abstraction or rational system-building, what alternative conception of philosophy does Senghor invite us to recognize?
DC, AF, & CT: You are absolutely correct. Senghor builds a clear philosophical system that starts from a specific African ontology and unfolds into a distinctly African epistemology. He articulates this philosophy, most often, in opposition to “classical philosophy.” In his work, “classical philosophy” corresponds to the European Cartesian tradition inherited from Greco-Roman antiquity, namely Aristotelianism. This philosophical tradition culminated in a positivism that was “based on discursive reason and facts, on logic and matter (65), or what Senghor often calls “la raison-œil” (132). In this tradition, “man” is the Homo faber who attempts to know “Nature in order to make of it the instrument of his will to power: to utilize it. He will fix it through analysis, will turn it into a dead object in order to dissect it” (217). For Senghor, this “static, ob-jective [sic], dicho-tomous [sic]” (66) rationalist trajectory shifts in 1889 with Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience.
Senghor’s encounter with Bergson’s thought—as well as with the work of Father Placide Tempels—as a student in Paris during the interwar years proved particularly important to his later articulations of an African life philosophy. This was a period of intense intellectual exchange regarding Africanist scholarship—a time when, as Senghor recalls, “German ethnologist Leo Frobenius’s Histoire de la civilisation africaine . . . was our bible in the Latin Quarter” (130). Bergson, according to Senghor, shows for the first time that “facts” and “matter” are the superficial aspects of the inner reality of things, which need to be surpassed by “intuition, in order to have an in-depth vision of the real” (65). This is not to say that Senghor is a Bergsonian in the traditional sense of the term. Rather, it is arguable that he considers Bergson’s lebensphilosophie as similar to, or commensurate with, African conceptions of being as ontologies of “life forces.”
One of the sources for Senghor’s force vitale (“vital force”) is the Dogon myth of creation. Senghor often recalls that God (Amma) created the world by breathing life into existing things through His harmonious and rhythmic words, thereby transforming all potentialities into life. In this sense, all existing things have as their “vocation to live: to express God in turn, by playing the ordination of forces that came from God, toward God” (67). “Classical philosophy,” in its specific attempt to know the nature of things, denatures or “de-forces” (80) things. The vitalist nature of being in the “Negro-African” world, therefore, leads to a different type of engagement with reality and a different type of knowledge: a “higher state of knowledge” based on “e-motion” (37). E-motion is understood here as a more reciprocal form of intuitive knowledge—movement toward and with the Other, rather than a will-to-power over the Other. It is in this sense that one can read—or reread—Senghor’s famous formulation, “Emotion is Negro, while Reason is Hellenic.” It is not that the Negro-African “lacks” Reason but rather demonstrates another way of approaching reality—a distinctly African way of knowing—that supplements reality.
UP: The structure of this volume seems to move from Négritude as a philosophical and aesthetic articulation in the early twentieth century toward Négritude as a practical problem of culture, language, and post-colonial institution-building in the mid-to-late twentieth century. How should we understand the history of this shift? And what does it tell us about the evolution of Senghor’s ideas on “the Negro-African,” their place in the modern world, and Négritude?
DC, AF, & CT: Our volume traverses different moments in Senghor’s life and major transformations in African and world history: from Senghor’s time as a colonial student in Paris during the interwar years and as a member of the Assemblée nationale during the postwar period, to the immediate wake of decolonization and independence in the 1960s, to the many challenges of leading a new African state in the 1970s and 1980s against the backdrop of Cold War tensions. It is tempting to want to map Senghor’s intellectual output directly onto this personal and professional trajectory. And certainly, these writings are illuminated by attending to the specific historical contexts from which they emerged. However, we think it would be an oversimplification to suggest that Négritude functions as a philosophy of aesthetics during the colonial period only to become a “practical problem” in the post-colonial period. In some ways, this narrative reflects well-established characterizations of Senghor that distinguish, as Jacques Louis Hymans does in his influential intellectual biography, between a young, radical, and essentialist Senghor and a late (or later) Senghor: the experienced statesman and mature philosopher of métissage.
From the outset of his public career, Senghor theorized Négritude and métissage, defended the practical importance of French while insisting on the need to valorize African languages, and affirmed both the pragmatic necessity and importance of African methods and epistemologies. These positions, however, did not constitute successive stages, in which one position gradually replaced another. His ideas remained in productive tension throughout his intellectual life. Writing during his first term as president, Senghor insisted that “since his years in the Latin Quarter,” he had only ever been concerned—indeed, “obsessed”—with the same four ideas (Négritude, Humanism, Nation, and African Socialism), and that these ideas “explain his life and his work, even when he is writing about sixteenth-century French poetry” (Senghor 1964, 7). All of this is to say that Senghor’s thought constitutes a sophisticated yet consistent body of work organized around a set of enduring concerns (even as individual texts present different variants, emphases, and formulations). Arranging Senghor’s texts chronologically might have reinforced the prevailing impression that Senghor moved progressively from one position to another. However, we intended for our thematic arrangement to allow readers to trace the continuities, tensions, reformulations, and recurring concepts that structured Senghor’s intellectual project across several decades. As Senghor put it, “In the country to be built, in the nations to become, the politician, or even the intellectual, should not fear repeating himself” (Senghor 1964, 7).
UP: Senghor has often been accused of seeking an overly conciliatory balance between African traditions and Euro-modernity. The tensions inherent in this intellectual balancing act also manifested in his political career, particularly in his relationship to France. As you note, “It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Senghor is frequently decried for his ambiguous position vis-à-vis France’s neocolonial policies in West Africa” (3). However, French West African leaders like Senghor, Fredrick Cooper argues, “saw the heritage of France as valuable too, especially the tradition of the rights of man and of the citizen” (9). The Essential Senghor seems deeply informed by this complex history and carefully presents Senghor as a thinker of syncretism, difference, and what you call a “fundamentally plural” (5) universal. How might rereading Senghor help us rethink the value of ideas like humanism and, more specifically, universalism, at a moment when such terms still carry the weighted histories of imperial abstraction and exclusion?
DC, AF, & CT: One of the reasons that we argue for a rereading and recentering of Senghor’s thought in African Studies and Black Studies in extenso is that his philosophy turns difference into a generative force that enhances our understanding of modernity. His reflections on universalism are not just characterized by a blind attempt to reconcile Western logos with African metaphysics or a desire to “balance” African and European traditions. Rather, Senghor displays a critical engagement with European modernity, rooted in interrogating the values that sustain modern Western thought, while showing the different ways in which the African and African-diasporic experience ultimately questions and enhances our inherited discourses of modern humanism. Senghor thus proffers an invitation to transcend the Manichean legacy of a Euro-modernity, rooted in the suppression and eradication of the “non-modern” African subject conceived as the inherent opposite of the “modern” Western subject. As he states in “Negritude and Modernity; or Negritude Is a Humanism of the Twentieth Century” (1977), “In this sense, Negritude is, essentially, a rejection and an engagement, a negation and a going beyond of negation through synthesis: through symbiosis” (76).
In Senghor’s thought, the rejection and negation of the dehumanizing values of Euro-modernity must come with a desire to reimagine a fundamentally pluralist conception of the world by making sense of the Black presence in modernity. His thought valorizes the fundamental role played by the “Black Man” in the construction of the “Civilization of the Universal” (72) and in the edification of a new humanism. And insofar as Négritude affirms Black identity and reckons with anti-Blackness, it very much remains a humanism for our twenty-first century.
Unglid Paul is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Romance Studies, specializing in French and Francophone Studies, at Duke University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English and French/Francophone Studies from Union College. Her research explores the relationship between literature and history in Haitian studies, comparative Black and feminist theory across West Africa and the French Caribbean, and twentieth-century Black diasporic movements through decolonial theory.
Edited by Tomi Onabanjo.
Featured image: “Léopold Sédar Senghor, Presidente do Senegal” (1964). Triplicated and edited. Wikimedia Commons (public domain, Arquivo Nacional Collection).