Leopold Seder Senghor, first Senegalese president, poet and politician and one of the pioneers in the Pan-African philosophical movement known as Negritude. He got a scholarship in 1925 and went to college in Paris. During his college years, he met Aime Cesaire and Leon Damas and together they established the negritude movement. In 1955 he is elected secretary of state of the French presidency before becoming in 1960 the first Senegalese president until 1980. Senghor promotes a quest for the authentic self, and a rediscovery of African beliefs, values, institutions, and civilizations. Senghor’s Negritude was rooted in his experience of living in Paris – the experience that opened his eyes to his Africanize and especially to the racial marker
…show more content…
Senghor uses the concept of Negritude to symbolize what the black man stands for. And he defines it as “the whole complex of civilized values, cultural, economic, social, political which characterize the black peoples or more precisely, the Negro-African world”. Leopold Seder Senghor, the well-known black intellectual in Senegal, arguing against those accusations of negritude as racialism and self-negation because of its simple reversal of white/black dichotomy, defines negritude as “the sum of the cultural values of the black world” or “a certain active presence in the world, or better, in the universe”. Senghor's anthology Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (An Anthology of the New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in French), published in 1948, along with its preface by French Philosopher and intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre found in Orphee Noir (Black Orpheus), was largely responsible for establishing the concept of Negritude at the heart of the post-war Francophone debate regarding black identity. Sartre illustrates the Negritude in terms of his existentialist philosophy as "a weak stage of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis". Sartre's interpretation of the role of Negritude in the formation of the history of blacks clearly appropriates a Hegelian/Marxist view of history. As Azzedine Haddour rightly observes, in “Sartre and Fanon: On Negritude and Political Participation” that [Sartre‘s] dialectics posits white supremacy as the thesis and negritude as its antithesis. The synthesis is a classless society without racism. Senghor explains the concept in contradistinction to Europe, as it is "the sum total of the values of the civilization of the African world" – not an antithesis but a fundamentally different culture. In this essay,
Senghor uses the concept of Negritude to symbolize what the black man stands for. And he defines it as “the whole complex of civilized values, cultural, economic, social, political which characterize the black peoples or more precisely, the Negro-African world”. Leopold Seder Senghor, the well-known black intellectual in Senegal, arguing against those accusations of negritude as racialism and self-negation because of its simple reversal of white/black dichotomy, defines negritude as “the sum of the cultural values of the black world” or “a certain active presence in the world, or better, in the universe”. Senghor's anthology Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (An Anthology of the New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in French), published in 1948, along with its preface by French Philosopher and intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre found in Orphee Noir (Black Orpheus), was largely responsible for establishing the concept of Negritude at the heart of the post-war Francophone debate regarding black identity. Sartre illustrates the Negritude in terms of his existentialist philosophy as "a weak stage of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis". Sartre's interpretation of the role of Negritude in the formation of the history of blacks clearly appropriates a Hegelian/Marxist view of history. As Azzedine Haddour rightly observes, in “Sartre and Fanon: On Negritude and Political Participation” that [Sartre‘s] dialectics posits white supremacy as the thesis and negritude as its antithesis. The synthesis is a classless society without racism. Senghor explains the concept in contradistinction to Europe, as it is "the sum total of the values of the civilization of the African world" – not an antithesis but a fundamentally different culture. In this essay,