14

Nostalgia and Postcolonial Utopia

in Senghor’s Négritude
Nadia Yala Kisukidi

Négritude took shape as a plural movement, at the nexus of theory,

literature and politics, in the 1930s and after the Second World War,
in Paris, around the figures of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Birago Diop,
Aimé Césaire and Léon Gontran Damas. The concept of Négritude, such
as Léopold Sédar Senghor theorised it, was received with hostility but
also with passion. For many it still appears as outdated and obsolete.
Stanislas Adotevi, Marcien Towa, Mongo Beti, to name only a few,
have rejected the concept of Senghor’s Négritude. Senghor’s theorisation
of Négritude is twofold. The term Négritude, which was first coined by
Césaire during the 1930s, consists of subjective and objective aspects in
Senghor’s view. Subjectively, it refers to an experience lived by Blacks
and grounded in the historical form of their human condition in the
face of the violence of slavery and colonisation. It comprises ‘all the val-
ues of the black civilisation’ (Senghor, 1988, p. 158). In Senghor’s early
writings, this so-called objective Négritude was based on the assertion
of a dichotomy between European rationalism and emotion, usually
ascribed to the black man. This aspect was prominent in an early essay
published in 1939, ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’, exemplified in the
now famous phrase: ‘Emotion is black as much as reason is Greek.’1 This
dichotomy appeared as an avatar of the Lévy-Bruhlian thought of ‘prim-
itive mentality’, as if Senghor’s Négritude ‘accepted colonial stereotypes’
(Jones, 2010, p. 131), thus encouraging a discourse that implies a racial
and absolutised approach to difference.
The revival of this racial dichotomy between reason and emotion led
some to reject the possibility of reading Senghor’s theory of Négritude as
one of emancipation. The concept of Négritude does not, at first glance,
appear to withstand Mongo Beti’s scathing analysis: Senghor’s univer-
salism and his philosophy of the melting pot are represented as highly

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K. Niemeyer (ed.), Media and Nostalgia

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2014
192 Creative Nostalgias

suspect notions that are embedded in a lyrical and mystical enterprise

for conciliation, before building up as anti-colonial projects (Beti and
Tobner, 1989, p. 206). However, in reality, this little opening does not
break through an ordinary practice. As Francis Abiola Irele ironically
notes, in the wording of Lydie Moudelino, the evocation of Senghorian
Négritude always involves the assertion of its necessary and now effec-
tive replacement (2008 p. 12). But this hides the multi-dimensionality
of Senghor’s Négritude. Négritude may well have been a ‘State ideol-
ogy’ (p. 73) during Senghor’s time in power, but it also allowed an
underground stance to emerge that was both political and ethical. This
position was based on a transvaluation with true critical potential: by
proposing the construction of a shared world, the despised and domi-
nated group, assuming that it does not consider itself to be the exclusive
owner of suffering,2 may hold the promise for a form of emancipation
in which it is certainly the object, but also the subject.
This ethical underground stance in Senghor’s Négritude finds expres-
sion in a peculiar experience of nostalgia in his poetry, especially in
the collections Chants d’Ombre (1945) and Hosties Noires (1948), but
also through his theoretical texts. The expression of this stance, how-
ever, cannot be understood in Jankelevitch’s sense of ‘unreal chimeras’
that are inextricably tied to the idea of ‘reviving the already-lived’
(Jankélévitch, 1974, p. 69).3 While Senghorian nostalgia emphasises the
development of the myth of Africa and of the race it was once based on,
it also plays an important role in the development of an anthropological
and political thought that aims at the construction of a shared world.
How does the affective experience of nostalgia help in producing a
cosmopolitical and postcolonial utopia in which the myths of Africa
and Negro-African civilisation play an important role? This problem
finds a twofold mediation, in both Senghor’s theoretical discourse and
his poetic voice (especially in Chants d’ombre [1945] and Hosties noires
[1948]). These mediated forms, which we will examine now, contribute
to the construction of an experience of nostalgia that is more than a
simple affective experience of recollection, but also becomes a discursive
and ethical proposal.

The ‘Kingdom of Childhood’

Senghor’s constructions of the myth of Africa and Negro-African cul-

tures have contributed to the creation of a ‘metaphysics of essence’, as
shown by Edward Said (1994) in Culture and Imperialism. But, first and
foremost, this mythical construction in Senghor’s thought takes shape