Materializing Imaginaries in Senegal: Modern African Literature and Global 1968

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 throughout 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, analyzing the 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 a decolonizing aesthetics underpinned by the 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.