In Materializing Imaginaries in Senegal, Fatoumata Seck shows how cultural revolutionary projects in Senegal and beyond in the 1960s shaped African literature, cinema, and intellectual thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. She charts an intellectual and literary history that positions Global 1968 as a defining moment in modern African literature. Seck analyzes African literature of this period through the prism of creative dissidence, revolutionary fervor, and cultural experimentation. Seck examines the role of African students and intellectuals in forging decolonizing aesthetics underpinned by pan-African and internationalist solidarities of the 1960s. She traces the presence of these revolutionary projects in African letters, illuminating how revolutionary imaginaries sediment and remain as latent possibilities, while also reframing the emergence and reception of works by figures such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop, David Mandessi Diop, Aminata Sow Fall, Ousmane Sembène, Awa Thiam, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Ken Bugul, Boubacar Boris Diop, and others. In so doing, Seck demonstrates that unfulfilled revolutions do not prevent the materialization of revolutionary imaginaries.

Fatoumata Seck is Assistant Professor of French and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature at Stanford University.

"Fatoumata Seck meticulously and aptly traces the performative construction of narratives and discourses that carved out a territory of dissidence and contestation within President Léopold Sédar Senghor’s favored realm of arts, literature, and culture. She proposes an archaeology and a cartography that documents how creative imaginaries engender subversive practices and how culture effects political change while opening new futures beyond imperial and post-imperial constraints." –Mamadou Diouf, author of Africa in the World’s Time

List of Abbreviations  ix
Note on Othrography  xiii
Acknowledgments  xv
Introduction. Sixties Revolutionary Imaginaries in Modern African Literature  1
Part I. Modern African Literature and Global 1968
1. Revolutionizing Writers: Poetry, Passeurs, and Transnational Literary Networks, 1946–1960s  68
2. From Reform to Revolution: Decolonizing Independence, 1940s–1960s  68
3. Making African Classics: The Countercultural Movement and the New Creative Unconscious, 1969–1980s  107
Part II. Reading Sedimented Traces
4. Manifesting Revolution: The Underground Literature of the Senegalese Cultural Front, 1976–1984  153
5. Reclaiming the Past: The Stakes of Memory in the Early Works of Boubacar Boris Diop, 1981–1987  192
6. Reinventing Ordinary People: Discernment in the Works of Ousmane Sembène, Aminata Sow Fall, Djibril Diop Mambety, and Ken Bugul, 1979–2000s  222
Coda. Waiting for the Revolution  255
Notes  271
Bibliography  307
Index  333