Locating Senghor’s École de DakarInternational and Transnational Dimensions to Senegalese Modern Art, c. 1959–1980

In September of 1960, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001)—poet, philosopher, statesman, and cofounder of the loosely conceived Négritude movement in Paris beginning in the 1930s—became president of the newly independent Republic of Senegal. Over the next two decades, Senghor devoted considerable resources to the arts,¹ including the creation of a government-supported cadre of modern visual artists known as the École de Dakar. To date, virtually all who have studied the state-funded École de Dakar, for reasons that are in many ways logical and compelling, have read its core fabric as quintessentially nationalist. This reading first became prevalent among critics who faulted Senghor for subordinating the École’s production to what they saw as his Négritude philosophy-cum-nationalist ideology (Pataux 1974, Samb 1995 [1989], Ebong 1991).² More recently it has been taken up by pioneering scholars who argue generally that École artists preserved their integrity even while relying on state patronage (Sylla 1998, 2006; Harney 1996, 2002, 2004; Grabski 2001, 2006, 2013).³ Yet the École de Dakar also stands to be explored for its international and transnational dimensions, which confirm art historian Elizabeth Harney’s important observation that Senghor aimed to cultivate “supranational (i.e., pan-African and humanist) models of community” (2004: 50).⁴ Whereas nationalist readings suggest a decisive rupture with the French and a mandate to build Senegalese identity, I contend that cross-cultural collaboration and worldly participation lay at the core of Senghor’s enterprise.

In pursuing this argument, careful distinctions must be drawn between, on the one hand, notions of mid-twentieth-century territorial nationalism in Africa (aiming to transform colonies into independent nation-states), and on the other hand, two closely related terms: “international” (usually denoting interactions between states), and “transnational” (applying especially to phenomena existing across national borders and/or transcending allegiance to any one state). Readers familiar with Négritude but unfamiliar with the École de Dakar may not be surprised by a wider conceptualization of the École, given that Négritude is well known as a pan-African movement aimed at building broad solidarities.

Nationalist readings have nevertheless been explicit in the existing literature and are on some levels persuasive. While curator Ima Ebong stressed that “Senegalese art … from its inception, was incorporated into a national agenda” (1991: 199), art historian Joanna Grabski stated more directly that “the visual propositions of the first generation of modernists responded to Senghor’s call for a national art” (2006: 38). And in Harney’s thesis, “Senegal’s artists have engaged with the histories and practices of modernism and have participated in attempts to link a new aesthetic to the project of nation building” (2004: 4). These readings all feature Senghor using art to enhance post-independence Senegalese nationality—presumably by encouraging people who had long identified as Wolof or Serer or Haalpulaar to prioritize national belonging and by showcasing productions of Senegalese national culture to the rest of the world.⁵ Such readings are logical insofar as Senghor is well known to have retrofitted black nationalist Négritude with a Senegalese nationalist function in the 1960s (Markovitz 1969, Diouf 2003, Diaw 1993), and insofar as postcolonial African nation-states faced a common challenge of forging cohesion among disparate cultural groups (cf. Askew 2002, Hess 2006, Straker 2009, Ivaska 2011, McGovern 2013).

Yet in considering Négritude as a prelude to the École de Dakar, it is important to recall that Senghor’s agenda always included cultivating an African presence within global modernity and what he called Civilisation de l’Universel (Civilization of the Universal) (Senghor 2003 [1939], 1963], 1966b: 16; Mouralis 1988: 5; Edwards 2001: 47–48; Jachec 2010; Diagne 2011; Wilder 2015: 51–64). Senghor’s Négritude, in other words, took root in diaspora consciousness, but it also aimed to interfere with Eurocentrism on its own terms. Building on this essential but sometimes overlooked aspect of Senghor’s project, I will argue that the École de Dakar was significantly international: Its core mandate involved facilitating cultural diplomacy with foreign national...