"Locating Senghor's École de Dakar: International and Transnational Dimensions to Senegalese Modern Art, c. 1959-1980." (original) (raw)
Sembene in Senegal: Radical Art in Neo-colonial Society
University of Birmingham UBIRA e theses, 1998
Abstract This study asks whether it is possible to produce revolutionary art – in this instance cinema - in the neo-colonial context. It defines revolutionary art in terms of its ability to expose the exploitative structures of neo-colonialism in a language accessible to the masses, and to inspire the exploited to fight back. It takes as a case study the films of Ousmane Sembene produced during the first two decades of neo-colonialism in Senegal. The study first examines Senegal and Sembene prior to 1960, confirming that France's continuing grip on Senegal is the result of a high level of hegemonic control. Sembene emerges as a complex product of the contradictions of French colonialism in its specific Senegalese form. The production of the films is looked at as concretely as possible, taking into account the ideological conditioning of Sembene himself, the contradictions of the medium and mode of production, the direct and indirect interventions of the state, and the ideological and cultural obstacles to communication between the artist and the masses. The study concludes that it is possible to see Sembene's work as stretching to the maximum the margin of manoeuvre provided by the contradictions of neo-colonialism in Senegal, or as an example of the power of hegemonic forces to incorporate even the most radical artist such a society can produce.
Draft paper - Senegal and the 1966 "First World Festival of Negro Art and Culture" in Dakar
This paper examines the urban transformations of Dakar between 1963 – 1966 before the First World Festival of Negro Art and Culture using the archives of the newspaper Dakar Matin. The paper’s main finding is that Dakar’s transformations in the premices of the Festival were mostly based on the State’s concern to shape a touristic city. First, these touristic concerns brought about the construction of international infrastructures in Dakar, especially in the sectors of transportation, trade and housing. Second, the concerns led State’s to increase its control over local behaviours and even repress marginalized people in the city center since they were seen as threats to the capital’s touristic reputation. In the end, dicourses on urban modernit interact with perceptions of modern nation-state, in the Weberian sense.
Poetic Injustice: The Senghor Myth and Senegal’s Independence
Review of African Political Economy | Africa Is a Country, 2020
The mythification of ‘poet-president’ Léopold Sédar Senghor has blurred our understanding of his real legacy. This article argues that recalling that he was both a poet and a president is a fact, but associating both, while refusing to recognize the authoritarianism he displayed, creates a dangerous historical myth.
Souleymane Bachir Diagne explores in detail Léopold Sédar Senghor’s philosophy of Negritude as a product of Africa and its diaspora in an important historical period of transition marked by the questioning of Western values and the breakdown of colonial rule. Negritude is presented in the wider context of resistance to colonialism and affirmation of difference influenced by Black American ideology and Marxism. But the author also presents Senghor’s personal philosophical exploration of what he calls Africanity, within universal questions of what it means to be human, drawing from diverse sources of inspiration from Jean Paul Sartre, Henri Bergson, Lucien Lévy-Brühl, Karl Marx, and Friendrich Engels, to Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, Pablo Picasso and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin among others.
The growth of artistic nationalism in Senegal
In the 1960s, Senegal's first national leaders narrowly defined how artists should practise nationalism through their work, particularly in the weaving craft, and enforced this definition through selective state patronage. This ideological and stylistic control echoed state control over economic markets. As subsequent administrations have restructured the economy, leading to a powerful informal business sector, so have independent contemporary weavers redefined artistic nationalism. Using ethnographic and archival interviews, this article examines nationalism in Senegalese weaving, placing the perspectives of contemporary weavers alongside those of two arts administrators who helped to develop state-sponsored programmes in the 1960s and 1970s. I argue that contemporary weavers find inspiration from Senegalese nationalism of the mid-twentieth century, yet have modified it to encompass individual expression. Because definitions of artistic nationalism in Senegal have shifted, it remains a significant ideology within the national arts scene.
Inside Dakar’s Musée Dynamique: reflections on culture and the state in postcolonial Senegal
World art, 2019
, a conference was held in Dakar to mark the 50 th anniversary of the First World Festival of Negro Arts which had been held in the city from 1-24 April 1966. The conference closed with the public reading of a declaration that the organizers would later publish in the Senegalese daily newspaper, Le Soleil ('Déclaration finale' 2016). One of its main demands was the restitution of the former Musée Dynamique to the Ministry for Culture. This was unsurprising, as the destiny of the museum had been a bone of contention between the government and key figures in the Senegalese cultural scene ever since the building was abruptly closed in December 1988 and handed over to the judiciary as the new home for Senegal's Supreme Court. Senegalese President Léopold Senghor had envisaged the 1966 festival as a celebration of Negritude, his concept of an essentialised blackness centred on emotion, rhythm and spontaneity. The Musée Dynamique, specially constructed for the event, hosted the festival centrepiece, an exhibition, entitled Negro Art, which featured over 600 objects of 'traditional' African art, borrowed from major museum collections in Europe and North America, from private collectors, and also from traditional kingdoms across the African continent. The objects had been chosen on the basis of aesthetic criteria and were designed to illustrate the richness of Africa's cultural heritage. For two decades, the museum lived on as the most tangible legacy of the 1966 festival: after the museum's closure in 1988, however, it became the most visible symbol of the decline of President Senghor's cultural programme and the occupation, appropriation and interpretation of buildings. London: Routledge.
SENGHOR, GLOBALISM AND AFRICANITY
A reflection on the challenges of African identity within the context of the persistence of European Modernity as the ideal of globalisation offers an opportunity for a fresh perspective on the life and work of Léopold Sédar Senghor. We subject Senghor's life and intellectual output to a critical triangular prism of: (1) Paul James's critique of globalism as an ideology of globalisation; (2) Walter Mignolo's enunciation of the epistemico-cultural implications of Western-led globalisation on the postcolony; and (3) Paulin Houtondji's Afrocentric critical literary theory. The result is a claim we make that in the devotion of his literary talent and intellectual prowess to the nurturing of the 'French way', Senghor not only nurtured an imperialistic French globalism, but betrayed an opportunity to assert a political space for an enduring decolonial African epistemology during a critical period in the history of Africa's relationship with Europe. Senghor's life praxis is in this way presented as a typology of the psycho-political pitfalls facing African thought leaders in their postcolonial engagement with Western modernity.
Development and Change, 1998
This article analyses French assimilation policy towards the four communes of the colony of Senegal, placing it in a new conceptual framework of globalization' and`post-colonial studies'. Between the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century, the four cities of Saint-Louis, Gore e, Ru®sque and Dakar were granted municipal status, while their inhabitants acquired French citizenship. However, the acquisition of these political privileges went together with a refusal on the part of these`citizens' to submit themselves to the French code civil. Their resistance manifested itself in particular in the forging of an urban culture that diered from both the metropolitan model and the Senegambian models of the independent kingdoms on the colony's fringes or the societies integrated as protectorates. This article argues that, at the very heart of this colonial project and despite its marked assimilationist and jacobin overtones, a strong project of cultural and political hybridization developed. The inhabitants of the quatre communes forged their own civilite which enabled them to participate in a global colonial culture on the basis of local idioms.``W e have left Senegal, the ballot boxes colony, Blaise's Kingdom, the ten thousand citizens of the four`fully empowered' communes Ð empowered to practice prestidigitation, boxing and kickboxing! Here are the Blacks, the real ones, the pure ones, not the children of universal surage, but those of Old Cham. How polite they are! They rush out of the bush to say Hello to you!'' (Albert Londres, Terre d'eÂbeÁne, 1929) 1. This article is a heavily revised version of a piece that will appear in V. Y. Mudimbe (ed.) Encyclopedia of African Religions and Philosophy, under the title`Islam, christianisme et assimilation: Histoires des religions dans les Quatre Communes du Senegal'. I thank Rene Collignon, who agreed to read and comment on this paper. 2. On this, see the classic studies of Michael Crowder (1962) and G. Wesley Johnson (1991/ 1971). The prevailing interpretation stresses that the natives lost their African identity.
Entangled Histories of Art and Migration. Theories, Sites and Research Methods, 2024
The article explores the contribution of African American artist and scholar Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998) to the Black Arts Movement and a transnational art history of the African diaspora. It examines Jones’ keynote speech, “The African Influence on Afro-American Art”, which she delivered in 1976 in Dakar on the occasion of Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor’s 70th birthday. In her talk, Jones emphasizes the African roots and cultural influences on African American art, positioning the Black Arts Movement within a global, pan-African context. Her portrait painting “Hommage au Président Léopold Sédar Senghor” reflects her conviction that diaspora art is shaped by shared traditions and the connection. The article illustrates how Jones uses the concept of “influence” to reveal historical entanglements and build bridges across cultural spaces and generations—a perspective that challenges Western-centered art histories.
Introduction for Jean-Loup Amselle "French Artistic Networks in Africa"
2018
The text introduces Jean-Loup’s Amselle’s polemical critique of French culture brokers in promoting the arts as instruments of soft power in Africa, 1957-2005, drawn from his book, L’art de la friche. Amselle touches on André Malraux, the founding of French Cultural Centers, the Institut français, and Afrique en creations.
Postcolonal Agitations: Avantgardism in Dakar and London
ON the opening night of Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, a much-anticipated exhibition held in conjunction with africa'95, the British art world's year-long "celebration" of Afri can arts and cultures, a hushed audience gathered in one dimly lit end of the Whitechapel Gallery to watch three men perform a solemn ritual of mummification. These privileged few were witness to a performance that sought to educate them in (and initiate them into) the workings of vanguard practice within Senegalese modernism.1 This particular exhibition and performance space was separated from the larger halls by high makeshift walls, constructed from thin sheets of rusted and cor rugated metal that were battered, stippled, and perforated to produce the faintest profiles of human figures.