“Let me just say that Negritude is back!” declared Souleymane Bachir Diagne, a Columbia University philosopher and scholar of Negritude. Diagne was talking only about Gary Wilder’s important Freedom Time, the launch of which occasioned his remarks, but other important works on Negritude that preceded it, including his own thorough re-examination of Senghor’s Negritude in African Arts as Philosophy, first published in French in 2007.
This rebirth of Negritude belies the obituary of the movement. The Nigerian critic Denis Epko described it in 2010 as “ideologically defunct,” writing, “Today, Africa and the world have forgotten Negritude.” He was channeling many critics of the movement going back decades who saw Negritude as an inadequate way of conceptualizing African life in the modern world. In 1971, the Cameroonian philosopher Marcien Towa argued that Negritude was a means to enslave rather than free Africans.
Towa’s rejection of Negritude is connected to his rejection of ethnophilosophy in African philosophical debate. Ethnophilosophy is an essentialist discourse that ascribes specific ways of thinking and being to Africans. Towa saw Negritude as rooted in this essentialist discourse because of what might be described as incriminating statements in Senghor’s corpus that describes Africans as emotional, intuitive, and non-violent. Towa saw this way of thinking as inimical to life in the modern world.
Since Diagne proclaimed Negritude’s rebirth in 2015, several significant works that examine the movement have been published, including, most recently, two significant translations of Senghor’s work by Duke University Press: one by Yohann Ripert (2025) on which I will focus here and the other by Calhoun, Fall, and Thiam (2026).
Why has interest revived in Negritude, an anticolonial movement that had been trenchantly critiqued and left for dead? Could it be because the movement addressed a perennial question in the encounter between the west and the non-western world, the question of racism that continues to bedevil relations not only in the west but also in the non-western world? Could it be that Negritude is still important because it is connected to global Black thought which has recently seen a revival, including in movements such as the Black Lives Matter, due to the continued virulence of antiblackness? Could it be that Senghor’s conciliatory and nuanced approach to the question of race relations identified a way forward in a racialized world? Or could it be the sheer depth of the intellectual output of Senghor, whose Negritude was influenced by the western, especially French, intellectual tradition?
In the west, Senghor’s Negritude is often read, as Ripert does in the Introduction of his translation, not in terms of his African background, but in terms of his western influences. Ripert connects Senghor’s Negritude to the Platonic tradition of the philosopher-king. Senghor’s Negritude attempts to bring philosophy and politics together in imagining a political community, according to Ripert. Seen in this light, Negritude is a movement rooted at the heart of western intellectual tradition.
This approach makes the case that even though Senghor was from Senegal, the movement he was part of transcends his context. In fact, an important biography of Senghor describes him as Black, French, and African. Thus, Negritude is not so much about Africa as it is about the world. It is not so much about the Black life which its purveyors sought to address as it is about reimagining life in a racialized world. Advocates of this position suggest that, in a global context, there is much to be gained from engagement with the thought leaders of the movement, especially Senghor.
From this perspective, the recent translations of Senghor’s writings are welcome developments. The Anglophone world is not familiar with much of Senghor’s corpus, especially his work not yet been translated into English. While Senghor’s poetry has been translated, most of his philosophical writing, such as those found in his seminal Liberté 1-5, has not been translated. This is starting to change: of the thirteen essays Ripert translated, five are from Liberté 1, three from Liberté 2, four from Liberté 3, and one from Liberté 4.
Beyond the newly translated essays, Senghor: Writings on Politics frames Senghor’s vision of Negritude not simply as a racial discourse but as discourse about and around race. As Ripert notes, “Negritude is more than a racial movement. It is a peri-racial critique shaping a space around race rather than defining race itself.” This is a critical observation because it challenges the essentialist understanding of Negritude as a counter-racist discourse. In seeing Negritude as a peri-racial critique, Ripert sees it probing the conditions and possibilities of racial thinking rather than advocating racial discourse. It is discourse about issues of race, and it which revolves around issues of race; Negritude is not itself a racial discourse (contra Donna Jones).
However, there is, in fact, an essentializing dimension of Senghor’s Negritude, which sometimes presents Black people as ontologically different from white people. Those who note this essentializing dimension are not wrong. What they fail to see is that there are also dimensions in Senghor that transcend race and even nation, veering towards cosmopolitanism. It is important to acknowledge these two sides of Senghor.
For Ripert, Negritude opens a space that needs to be built upon rather than insisting on essentialist discourse. Negritude, especially Senghor’s Negritude, is receiving a new lease of life as scholars interpret Senghor in ways that downplay the potentially essentialist dynamics of his work, focusing on only one side of Senghor’s thought.
Ripert presents Negritude as an evolving movement that sought to imagine not only a local political community in the time of colonialism but also a global one. He presents Senghor’s thought in four moments: the time before he embraced Negritude (through 1938), the way Negritude shaped his anticolonial struggle (through 1948), how Negritude shaped his presidency in Senegal (through 1960), and visions of Negritude after his presidency (through 1981). With these moments, Ripert presents Negritude not as an essentialist discourse but as discourse that is shaped by time and specific political and cultural situations.
In Ripert’s view, Negritude does not end by imagining a Black world, as is often believed, but by imagining a world beyond the Black world. Senghor’s vision of a world that transcends the nation-state, which he failed to realize through the Mali Federation or by Senegal becoming independent as part of France, ends in la Francophonie, the organization that connects former French colonies to France. Ultimately, then, Senghor’s vision of Negritude as discourse beyond race, as discourse about Blackness which moves beyond Blackness, culminates in an organization that connects African countries to France.
Ripert is right in framing Senghor’s Negritude as resolving in la Francophonie, but he does not clearly show that la Francophonie continues to be a point of contention among Africanists. In Africa, the idea of la Francophonie is often connected to the notion of Françafrique, twin ideas that bespeak France’s continued domination of the continent. The fact that Senghor’s quest for a local and global political community culminated in la Francophonie seems to prove Marcien Towa right when he said that Senghor’s Negritude sought to politically and culturally subordinate Africans to France. This subordination is perhaps nowhere more evident than in France’s continued control of the currency that many former French colonies use to this day, the CFA Franc.
For some Africans, the fact that la Francophonie is a culmination of Negritude is an indictment of Senghor. In Ripert’s framing of Senghor’s Negritude, one hardly gets the sense of just how unwelcome that imagined community is to many Africans today.
***
Translating Senghor’s political writing shows the continued relevance of Negritude in the conceptualization of political community in the wake of the encounter between Africa and Euro-America. However, we ought to pay attention to Senghor’s African critics when we engage with his work.
Further, it is widely acknowledged that Senghor’s intellectual and political life was deeply influenced by religion, especially African indigenous traditions and Catholicism. I show how this is so in my recent work, Senghor’s Eucharist. I draw from just one of Senghor’s poetry collections, Black Hosts, to show how relevant he could be to contemporary political theology. Ripert’s framing of Senghor’s intellectual and political life should have given some attention to how religion shaped Senghor’s politics. These contentions notwithstanding, the translation is a generative way of engaging Senghor’s political and intellectual life.
