Critical Standards of African Art

Poet, thinker, and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor is best known as one of the founders of the Négritude movement and as the first president of his native Senegal at its independence in 1960. His life story reflects the challenges of a rising group of French-educated African intellectuals during the colonial period. He spent formative years as a student in Paris, where he attended the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand and became an agrégé in grammar with a specialization in Classics. An erudite scholar and homme de culture, his lifelong commitment to the defense of Francophonie as a unifying global concept earned him a chair at the French Academy in 1983.

As the poet-president of Senegal, Senghor sought to unite his country’s plurality of languages and ethnic identities, although as a devout Catholic of Serer origin, he neither reflected the majority religion of Islam nor was he a native speaker of the country’s first national language of Wolof. Senghor’s defenders argue that he laid the foundation of today’s secular state and set a lasting model of religious and ethnic tolerance. Detractors point to the silencing of voices critical of his embrace of the so-called universal values of French culture.

Senghor envisioned Négritude, the movement he founded with Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas, as reflecting “the whole of black civilization’s values,” seeing black culture as a full-throated affirmation of African identity. In 1966, his vision reached its apotheosis with the First World Festival of Black Arts, in Dakar. But Senghor’s thought was also the target of fierce criticism from fellow Pan-Africanists such as Nigerian author Wole Soyinka and Martinican essayist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon. Furthermore, Senghor spent his career rebutting the understanding of Négritude as an “anti-racist racism,” a phrase memorably coined by Jean-Paul Sartre in his preface to Senghor’s seminal Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948).

Scholarly responses to Senghor’s work have often deemed his language fundamentally essentialist and favorable to the very racial stereotypes it aims to critique. However, recent years have seen a critical reconsideration of Senghor’s ideas. In this vein, philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne (in African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, 2011) has pointed out Senghor’s elevation of art to the realm of philosophy, while historian Gary Wilder (Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World, 2014) has reevaluated Negritude as a radical, world-making project focused on the historic potentialities of an unknown postcolonial era.

—Brian Quinn, translator

President Senghor sees the critical standards of African art as originating from the nature of the black soul, and the black soul as originating from the environment that gave it life. These standards, long unknown to the white world and now exerting influence in contemporary art, will henceforth play a more integral role in the art world.

Acountry, like a continent, can be described in myriad ways. Manuals of all kinds can tell us, in color, about the relief of a place’s landscape, the itineraries of its major passageways, its economy and history, its vision of God and the Universe, its understanding of time, and its desire to preserve, for its dead, timeless caverns nestled among the ages.

But history, geography, ethnography, and anthropology all fall short in depicting, in all of its fullness and nuance, man’s journey on this planet.

Before it even occurred to man to arrange his screams into language, his hand weighed, measured, signaled, and thought.

At play for art in any human agglomeration described by natural borders is the story of the close relationship between thought and hands. This is why art alone expresses the depths of human consciousness. It elucidates the nightmares that lurk in darker corners, gives worldly and otherworldly dimensions to dreams, and reinvents the colors of life with the inexhaustible resources of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.

Just as Surrealism was born out of the chaos of war’s...