African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude

Introduction

Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s “Léopold Sédar Senghor : l’art africain comme philosophie” appeared in Paris in 2007; Chike Jeffers translated it into English as “African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude” (2011). Diagne argues that Senghor’s Négritude is above all a philosophy of art: African sculpture, music and dance express a way of knowing the world through rhythm, participation and intuition, which Senghor described in Bergson’s terms as opposed to the analysing intellect. The book follows the sources of this idea – Bergson’s philosophy of intuition and of the élan vital, the ethnologist Leo Frobenius, Teilhard de Chardin, the modernist discovery of African art – and defends Senghor against the reading of his famous sentence “L’émotion est nègre, comme la raison hellène” as an essentialist claim about races. Diagne presents Négritude as a philosophy of creation and of cultural mixing.

Connections

Builds on

• Creative Evolution1907 · Henri Bergson
• Négritude and Humanism (Liberté I)1964 · Léopold Sédar Senghor

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