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Senghor: Writings on Politics brings Léopold Sédar Senghor’s most vital essays, speeches, and political writings to English-language readers for the first time. Spanning the colonial and postcolonial years between 1937 and 1971, this volume captures Senghor’s evolution from a pioneering poet and cofounder of Négritude to the president of Senegal as he grappled with the complexities of postcolonial identity, governance, and cultural hybridity. Senghor’s reflections on topics ranging from federalism and decolonization to Francophonie reveal his commitment to weaving African and European cultural threads into a vision of global solidarity in ways that resonate with contemporary debates on race, culture, and politics. Inviting readers to engage with a seminal figure whose legacy continues to inspire new ways of thinking about freedom, independence, and coexistence, this landmark book furthers our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s most influential cultural thinkers.

Senegalese poet, philosopher, and politician Leopold Sédar Senghor, together with Aimé Césaire and others, developed the influential and perennially relevant negritude movement—a Black artistic, philosophical, and political expression of Black presence in the modern colonial world. The Essential Senghor provides a new opportunity for English-language readers to engage with Senghor’s critical and philosophical writings spanning from 1937 to 1985. This collection includes Senghor’s key philosophical interventions in discourses on freedom, Blackness and being, humanism, history, and more. It portrays Senghor as a pivotal intellectual in the fields of African and Black studies whose work engages a wide range of disciplines, including literature, linguistics, anthropology, religion, and art history. The Essential Senghor invites readers not only to reflect on negritude and its importance for our political present, but also to reconsider intellectual genealogies of decolonial thought, Black liberation, and African philosophy.