Rhythm and Knowledge

In his book African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, professor of French and philosophy at Columbia University, suggests that in order to understand Léopold Sédar Senghor's philosophical and critical work, we must look to his treatment of African art. It is here, Diagne argues, that we find "the Senghorian enterprise of making an African knowing, an African comprehension of reality" (11). Furthermore, according to Diagne, Seng hor uses the reality—and the tangibility—of the plastic arts to establish the central premise of his work: there is an African philosophical tradition with its own mode of conceptualizing one's "being-in-the world," and this tradition is both the equal of and complementary to European rationalist discourse.

Diagne suggests that the idea that African art is philosophy is what led Senghor's work from the aesthetic and political into the metaphysical, an area that other Négritude thinkers such as Aimé Césaire avoided (8). And, Diagne argues, it is especially the moments when Senghor touches the philosophical that have caused scholars to see his work as essentializing, as with the famous statement, "L'émotion est nègre, comme la raison héllène" ("Emotion is Negro, just as reason is hellenic") (69).¹ Diagne would like us to reconsider this "awkward" statement by looking at the larger body of work that produced it (9). Indeed, an exploration of "the Senghorian enterprise of making an African knowing, and African comprehension of reality out of African art" (11), rather than of Senghor's creative work, is at the core of Diagne's project, and he develops the idea of how, from his earliest work, Senghor's project was to develop a theory of art as philosophy, a theory that was intended to present African arts, cultures, and metaphysical traditions as equal interlocutors to other traditions, particularly the rationalist European one.

In Diagne's analysis of Senghor's infamous phrase, "L'émotion est nègre, comme la raison héllène," we find an exploration of its place in Senghor's biography. As Diagne demonstrates, from his years as a student in colonial Catholic schools, to his work in Paris and the Négritude movement, to his work on politics and ethnography, Senghor positioned himself as an interlocutor with European texts and teachers whose aims were in fact to create a hierarchy between races and cultures. In other words, from his earliest formation in Catholic schools, Senghor was drawn to "interlocution . . . to respect what the other has to be" (153), with the understanding that this respect equally be given to the African subject. As Diagne shows through different examples that include projects as varied as Senghor's work on African art to his first public speech to the Chamber of Commerce in Dakar in 1937, Senghor's approach was to display the problems of colonial thinking by re-creating the conversation itself, by placing himself and African cultures within it. Senghor's work always reaches toward a mode of being that places dialogue and becoming at its center. Establishing African philosophy as an equal interlocutor with European thought is central to Senghor's project, because only when the traditions work as equals can there be a movement toward mixture, or métissage, which for Senghor was an ideal of artistic and human development.

While Diagne's discussion about the nature of Senghor's infamous phrase is compelling, we also find an element of interest that Diagne overlooks: the rhythm of the phrase itself. Because Diagne has narrowed his focus to Senghor's philosophical texts, he misses how, as both a critic and a writer, Senghor provocatively manipulated language.² Diagne suggests that Senghor drew his focus on movement and becoming from his observations of African art, but this important claim is perhaps the least well developed within the book. Diagne writes, "[A] rhythmic attitude for [Senghor] is not confined to aesthetic domain alone; it is, in a...