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

Informationen zum Autor Souleymane Bachir Diagne Klappentext "A distinct, incisive look at an important figure in African literature and politics that will be welcomed by scholars in African studies and philosophy. Lâeopold Sâedar Senghor (1906-2001) was a Senegalese poet and philosopher who in 1960 also became the first president of the Republic of Senegal. In African Art as Philosophy, Souleymane Bachir Diagne takes a unique approach to reading Senghor's influential works, taking as the starting point for his analysis Henri Bergson's idea that in order to understand philosophers one must find the initial intuition from which every aspect of their work develops. In the case of Senghor, Diagne argues that his primordial intuition is that African art is a philosophy. To further this point, Diagne looks at what Senghor called the "1889 Revolution," and the influential writers and publications of that time-specifically, Nietzsche and Rimbaud, as well as Bergson's Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. The 1889 Revolution, Senghor claims, is what led him to the understanding of the "Vitalism" at the core of African religions and beliefs that found expression in the arts"-- Leseprobe INTRODUCTION TO THE 2023 EDITION   ON 28 NOVEMBER 2017, having traveled to Burkina Faso, French President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech in which he expressed his will to rebuild the relations between France and Africa on new foundations. He had already spoken in the same sense on different occasions, acknowledging that the new partnership France wanted to build with Africans, with the continent’s youth in particular, was impeded by France’s history of colonialism, calling into question a relationship that needed repair. During his visit in Burkina Faso, before an audience of students at the University of Ouagadougou, Macron chose to focus on one aspect of the reparation of what he had himself called the colonial “crime against the human”: the spoliation, by violence, of African artefacts, taken from the continent to be stored in ethnographic museums in Europe. Recognizing that most classical African art was in European museums, he declared: “The African heritage cannot only be in private collections and European museums. African heritage must be promoted in Paris, but also in Dakar, Lagos and Cotonou, and this will be one of my priorities.” Senegalese academic Felwine Sarr and French academic Be´ne´dicte Savoy were then tasked by Macron with the mission of preparing a report on the issue. They completed The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, Toward a New Relational Ethics in 2018. Following the report and after the French parliament granted legal authority to the required operations, France has now given back to Senegal and Benin objects that were taken by its soldiers as spoils of war: a sword that belonged to Senegalese religious leader and resistant Shaykh Umar Tall (1794–1864), twenty-six objects that were taken from the palace of King Behanzin (1844–1906) of Abomey when it was sacked by the French army in 1892: royal seats, portable altars, sculptures . . . To be sure, Macron’s speech in Ouagadougou was followed by effective decisions and results, but it is necessary to recall that Africa had launched a struggle for its art in the late 1950s, a time when African nations were in the final stages of their march towards independence: the restitution of their heritage was an important dimension of their struggle. That dimension is precisely the topic of Be´ne´dicte Savoy’s Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat , about the restitution of African art. Going through the different stages of the struggle, Savoy puts a particular emphasis on the years 1965 and 1966, when the president of Senegal, the poet and philosopher Le´opold Se´dar Senghor (1906–2001), was fully engaged in the preparation of the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (First Worl...

Product details

• Authors: Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Chike Jeffers
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 05.09.2023
• EAN: 9781635423211
• ISBN: 978-1-63542-321-1
• No. of pages: 208
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 202 mm x 14 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art; Social sciences, law, business