1st Edition
Epistemologies from the Global South Negritude, Modernity and the Idea of Africa
This book argues that the pervasiveness of the modern paradigm and its corollary, the colonial matrix of power, have led scholars of Negritude to think of Leopold Sedar Senghor’s work either as an anti-thesis to the anti-Blackness constitutive of European modernity or as another manifestation of the West as subject of history. As opposed to this tradition, the book reads Negritude through the prism of endogenous African world views without the filter of the modern Western paradigm.
Print edition not for sale in Sub Saharan Africa.
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Introduction
1 Negritude: The Africa-Centered Imperative
2 From Senghor’s Negritude to Glissant’s Relation and Back: Orality, Writing and the Critique of Colonial Reason
3 Africa Unveiled: Decolonising the Black Atlantic
4 Decolonising France: Senghor, Mabanckou and the Future of the Republic
Conclusion: Beyond Coloniality
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Cheikh Thiam is professor of English and Black Studies at Amherst College and the author and editor of several volumes on Negritude and African philosophy and literature.