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Conclusion: Négritude Reconsidered In this final chapter I will reexamine the relationship between the interpretation of ethnicity offered by the National Ballet of Senegal on the stage of the theater and the interpretation of ethnicity offered by Négritude ideology on the stage of national politics.To do so we need to interrogate the ways in which Négritude, as the ideology of the Senghorian state, was integrated into the project of nationhood—what in chapter 2 I call the second phase of Négritude. In his earliest elaboration of the concept, Senghor defined Négritude as the “ensemble of the cultural values of the Black world,” clearly referring to the indigenous, ethnic-centric cultures of the country.1 What role, then, did ethnicity play in the nation’s cultural politics? Just as the project of Négritude during the struggle of decolonization was inserted into a larger universalist project (the civilization of the universal), with the coming of independence Négritude was articulated within a dual dialectic of enracinement and overture.Within this dialectic,Senghor reasserted the ideological stance of western ethnologues vis-à-vis African ethnicities.He assigned African ethnicities to the pole of enracinement. Thus,ethnicity came to stand for introverted closure; it marked a movement inward,a turning away from the world, albeit a rooting down. In this articulation, ethnic identity stands in contradiction to “modern” citizenship in so far as it can only represent localized identities insufficient by themselves as the basis for the construction of a common national culture inserted within a wider international world. For Senghor the project of national integration could not be animated through the articulation of ethnic identities, but rather it required the me- diation of universalist elements—overture—embodied by the French cultural world and its universalist values. This view is expressed clearly in Senghor ’s discussion of language and its role in education: We can,at the present moment,establish this general principle: that the study of West Africa and France constitute the two poles of instruction in French West Africa, and that this bicephalism will be found at all levels. As one will proceed, the African pole will lose its attraction in favor of the French pole. It is necessary to start with the milieu of the Negro-African civilizations, in which the child will be immersed. The child must learn to know and express knowledge first in his maternal language, then in French. Little by little, he will expand the circle of the universe, where, man, he will engage tomorrow. With his race, he will [also] need a subtle and richer knowledge of French. This is to say that bicephalism means bilinguism. (Senghor 1964b:14) In Senghor’s view, education in African languages and about African cultures cannot make a complete adult. Rather, French is considered necessary for the intellectual growth of a proper citizen capable of taking upon himself the task of building a meaningful future. The African world is conflated into a narrow universe, the world of a child with its limited spatial coordinates , while French stands in for universal knowledge, which alone can insert the African into the modern world. Senghor’s theorization of bilingualism signaled the way in which Négritude was to be implicated in the project of nation building and influenced his government’s approach to language policies. We can now consider the interplay of language policies and the language of politics to gain a better understanding of the way in which Négritude figured within Senghor’s vision of the nation. At the eve of independence in 1960,Senegalese society inherited a national school system modeled after the French and structured during the colonial period (under Faidherbe at the end of the 1880s) to educate the elites of all French West Africa. At the end of Senghor’s presidency, after twenty years of governance (1960–80), the French educational system continued to function primarily as a means of integration into the state bureaucracy rather than as a form of popular education. Furthermore, because mastery of French was still necessary to enter the political structure, it served to mask the exclusion of “unqualified” popular elements from the domain of politics. In this context , the prime interface of political discourse between the government and civil society was the western-educated stratum of the urban intelligentsia (Diaw 1993). The figure of Senghor himself embodied emblematically this 198 . conclusion [18.226.169.94] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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