Senghor, Léopold Sédar (1906–2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Taoua
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
African Culture ◽  
Black African ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Philosophy Of Culture ◽  
African Spirituality ◽  
European Thought ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Cultural Theorist

Léopold Sédar Senghor is one of the most influential African poets of the modern era. He also left his mark as a controversial cultural theorist and president of his native Senegal from 1960 until 1981. The poet and statesman participated with Aimé Césaire and Léon Gontran Damas in founding the négritude movement during the interwar period in Paris. Négritude was a cultural revolution that affirmed black African culture across geographical borders, combining a political vision of social justice for all peoples of African origin with an innovative poetic idiom. Senghor’s distinctive contribution to this avant-garde effort was a set of inter-related concepts with which he developed his theory of black African culture. The first was a notion of cross-cultural creativity entailing an interpenetration of African and European cultures. The second was a selective assimilation of certain aspects of French culture into an African conceptual framework. The third was an African version of socialism that integrated a community-centred ethics with a traditional African spirituality. Senghor believed that African culture had unique contributions to make to European thought, and worked to define a theory of culture based on dialogue, reciprocity and an inclusive humanism, which would pave the way for Africa’s integration into a civilization of the universal. His philosophy of culture is unsystematic; it appears as a collection of insights derived from various sources on the central theme of négritude.

scholarly journals FROM ŁÓDŹ TO LEIDEN – ON INTERNATIONAL CONNECTIONS OF THE POLISH INTERWAR AVANT-GARDE

Muzealnictwo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 203-210
Author(s):  
Michał Wenderski
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
De Stijl

This article is dedicated to international connections between selected representatives of Polish and Western avant-gardes in art and literature of the interwar period. Both the nature and the scale of such relations have been exemplified by a number of artists from the “a.r.” group – Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński, Henryk Stażewski and Jan Brzękowski, as well as their relationships with the representatives of Dutch and Belgian formations, inter alia “De Stijl” group. The origin of those connections has been briefly presented, along with their nature, dynamics and an impact they made on artworks and theories of chosen artists. Their description is based on archival documents and publications, from which a picture of direct relationships between the leading artists of the European avant-garde emerges – some of them personal, some correspondence-based; they have also been presented in form of a diagram that illustrates the text.

scholarly journals Francophone conjunctures

1997 ◽  
Vol 71 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 291-307
Author(s):  
Chris Bongie
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Old French ◽  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
University Of Minnesota ◽  
Hybrid Identity ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Black African ◽  
The Face ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Second World

[First paragraph]Decolonizing the Text: Glissantian Readings in Caribbean and African-American Literatures. DEBRA L. ANDERSON. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. 118 pp. (Cloth US$46.95)L'Eau: Source d'une ecriture dans les litteratures feminines francophones. YOLANDE HELM (ed.). New York: Peter Lang, 1995. x + 295 pp. (Cloth US$ 65.95)Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers. MARY JEAN GREEN, KAREN GOULD, MICHELINE RICE-MAXIMIN, KEITH L. WALKER & JACK A. YEAGER (eds.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. xxii + 359 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Statue cou coupe. ANNIE LE BRUN. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1996. 177 pp. (Paper FF 85.00) Although best remembered as a founding father of the Negritude movement along with Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor was from the very outset of his career equally committed - as both a poet and a politician - to what he felt were the inseparable concepts of la francophonie and metissage. Senghor's has been an unabashedly paradoxical vision, consistently addressing the unanswerable question of how one can be essentially a "black African" and at the same time (in Homi Bhabha's words) "something else besides" (1994:28). In his "Eloge du metissage," written in 1950, Senghor ably described the contradictions involved in assuming the hybrid identity of a metis (an identity that offers none of the comforting biological and/or cultural certainties - about "rhythm," "intuition," and such like - upon which the project of Negritude was founded): "too assimilated and yet not assimilated enough? Such is exactly our destiny as cultural metis. It's an unattractive role, difficult to take hold of; it's a necessary role if the conjuncture of the 'Union francaise' is to have any meaning. In the face of nationalisms, racisms, academicisms, it's the struggle for the freedom of the Soul - the freedom of Man" (1964:103). At first glance, this definition of the metis appears as dated as the crude essentialism with which Senghor's Negritude is now commonly identified: in linking the fate of the metis to that of the "Union francaise," that imperial federation of states created in the years following upon the end of the Second World War with the intention of putting a "new" face on the old French Empire, Senghor would seem to have doomed the metis and his "role ingrat" to obsolescence. By the end of the decade, the decolonization of French Africa had deprived the "Union franchise" of whatever "meaning" it might once have had. The uncompromisingly manichean rhetoric of opposition that flourished in the decolonization years (and that was most famously manipulated by Fanon in his 1961 Wretched of the Earth) had rendered especially unpalatable the complicities to which Senghor's (un)assimilated metis was subject and to which he also subjected himself in the name of a "humanism" that was around this same time itself becoming the object of an all-out assault in France at the hands of intellectuals like Foucault.

From Political Theater in Yugoslav Socialism to Political Performance in Global Capitalism: The Case of Slovenian Mladinsko Theater

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-82
Author(s):  
Marko Juvan
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Political Theater ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Performance ◽  
Dramatic Practice

Political theater is a trend that, during the avant-garde 1920s, emerged at the intersection of efforts to liberate artistic forms and oppressed groups in society. It was an influence on Slovenian theatrical artists at the Workers’ Stage (Delavski oder) already in the interwar period. A trend towards ‘political theater’, one of the tendencies of politicized performing arts in the period, flourished in Slovenia and other republics of the former Yugoslavia in the 1980s. Against the background of an identity crisis of the Yugoslav state and its ideology, political theater addressed great stories of History and the Revolution in a post-avant-garde manner. During the transition, political theater initially lost its edge but was reborn in the 21st century. As a post-dramatic practice associated with performance, it now parses its own politics. It is a forum for critiquing small, local stories that nonetheless evince the contradictions of a peripheral nation-state in the era of transnational late capitalism.

Numbers and Codes in Ancient Peru: The Quipu

1992 ◽  
Vol 39 (9) ◽  
pp. 42-44
Author(s):  
Raymond A. Zepp
Keyword(s):  
African Culture ◽  
Black African ◽  
American Schools

Students should be aware of the contributions their cultures have made to mathematics. This view led Zaslavsky (1973) to travel to Africa to collect examples of African mathematics and to write her well-known book Africa Counts. She then used her material in American schools to instill in her students the notion that black African culture had created quite sophisticated mathematical inventions.

scholarly journals Über Dichter, Proletarier und Apachen

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gérard Raulet
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Collective Dimension

It is somewhat surprising that Walter Benjamin, who has been very much involved with French literature, has shown so little interest in the most prestigious social novelists and in the great social romance cycles. Unlike Lukács, Benjamin evaluates the form of the novel negatively: the novel is not, or no longer, the modern epic. The contemporary novelist differs from the epic narrator in that he has lost the collective dimension. Instead of complaining about this loss, Benjamin accepts it and looks critically for authors and works that experiment new narrative means and at the same time explore new social worlds. But most novels to which Benjamin attributes experimental, or even avant-garde, value have met this challenge the least. They betray their breakthrough either by a purely private social criticism (Julien Green), by a kind of “infantile disease” of commitment (Malraux), or by a mere “cry of indignation” (Céline), which at least has the merit of reintroducing the voice of the Lumpenproletariat into the realm of the novel without mobilizing the “mimicry” of belonging to the proletariat. This essay is part of a larger project on Benjamin and the French intelligentsia of the interwar period.

scholarly journals Przekład w perspektywie awangardowości

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (49) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Bożena Tokarz
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
Avant Garde

Translation in the Perspective of Avant-garde Avant-garde is a kind of precursor that precedes some fundamental change. Translation can provoke such a change in the host literature, presenting works that have the potential to make a turn in it, or it can become revolutionary in the art of translation. The avant-garde function of Polish literature in Slovenia is fuzzy. It is present in the minds of some authors although they do not exhibit it in an explicit way. Therefore, it is not possible to assign its translations an avant-garde role in the interwar period, which abounded with stormy transformations of European art and not only. The Polish historical avantgarde was unknown to the reader, and the poetry of one of the central poetic groups, the Krakow Avant-Garde, has remained so. The translations of avant-garde prose and drama of that time are late to fulfill such a function because they only appeared after the 1970s.

scholarly journals PHILOSOPHICAL STATUS OF ARTISTIC AVANT-GARDE

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-40
Author(s):  
N.G. Krasnoyarova
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Philosophy Of Culture

The article asserts the exhaustion of art criticism and culturological approaches to the artistic avant-garde. The context of the philosophy of culture as an actual section of philosophy makes it possible to reveal the essential moments of culture as a whole in the artistic avant-garde and to manifest the function of the avant-garde as a special “new phenomenon” imparting dynamism to culture in ways of accepting or rejecting cultural values.

Philosophy of War: A Brief History

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-116
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Just War ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Natural Justice ◽  
Perpetual Peace ◽  
Comparative Review ◽  
European Thought ◽  
Modern Era

The article provides a brief historical overview of the understanding of war in European thought. It provides a chronological account of the transformation in the perception of war as a socio-political phenomenon, particularly from the standpoint of ethics and political theory. The author examines the main approaches that ancient philosophy applied to the moral assessment of war. Plato and Aristotle are ambivalent toward war, maintaining that judgment of a war depends on its compatibility with natural justice. In the works of Christian authors, the basis of this uncertainty rests on the idea that God is the source of justice. The paradigm of punitive war became the core of the Christian doctrine of just war. In the modern era, the philosophical perception of war came to be secularized. Theological evaluation of armed conflicts was replaced by a legalistic appraisal. The article considers the influence of Grotius and his followers on the process of replacing the punitive paradigm of just war with a legalistic paradigm. However, by the eighteenth century renunciation of war and yearning for perpetual peace had become a popular line of thinking exemplified in Kant’s comments on that matter. The author then invokes the legacy of Clausewitz in order to explain the main features of modern views on war as a function reserved exclusively for the state. The article concludes with a comparative review of approaches to the evaluation of war by political realists and contemporary just war theorists.

Pariah Modernism

2020 ◽  
pp. 87-122
Author(s):  
Amy Feinstein
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Character Study ◽  
Ethical Authorship ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Final Text ◽  
Indefinite Pronouns ◽  
Character Types

Chapter 4 considers the solely-metaphorical presence of Jews in the final text of The Making of Americans. Paralleling the evolution found in Stein’s notebooks, the novel’s narrator largely abandons storytelling in lieu of character study. Stein replaces the Jewish and Anglo-Saxon character types from the notebooks with a purely behavioral nomenclature and, as a result, the published volume contains no explicit references to Jews. The narrator nonetheless maintains a focus on a categorically Jewish and modern type: the pariah. He introduces several pariah figures, from servant girls and parvenus to avant-garde writers, who join him in a fraternity of what he calls “Brother Singulars.” With an eye to Hannah Arendt’s notion of the modern Jewish visionary or “conscious pariah,” the chapter argues that Stein’s narrator, with the characterological “plot” he is writing for himself and strangers, estranges narration by increasingly abstracting his characterology with indefinite pronouns as the novel progresses. Amidst the formal experimentation of ever-increasing repetition and abstraction, the narrator’s Jewish pariahs recede into textual indistinguishability while still differentiating themselves from others. Through this association, Stein sets the agenda for ethical authorship in the modern era.

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