Interruptive discourses: Léopold Senghor,African Emotionand the poetry of politics

Abstract

This paper suggests that Senghor's political and poetic work can be understood as connected to his position as a sophisticated critical thinker. In order to move past a hasty rejection of his work, one might analyse Senghor's work as part of the more serious anticolonial, epistemological activism that emerges in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that, for Senghor, politics is an art of interrupting discursive closures. I characterize Senghor's thinking as focused on epistemological questions, a recognition of the embeddedness of these questions in everyday political decision-making, and an awareness of the way his own thinking develops over time. I examine Senghor's On African Socialism in order to unpack the nuances in his approach. In thinking about international politics and the legacy of colonialism, I suggest that Senghor was successful in keeping open discursive closures and that from him we can learn how to prioritize the critical analysis that the development of critical questions entails.

After inclusion. Thinking with Julian Go's ‘Thinking against empire: Anticolonial thought as social theory’

“…Finally, to do this in practice, especially if one finds oneself not to engage with epistemic Blackness directly, I have found the idea of curating as offered in Shiera el‐Malik and Isaac Kamola's edited volume The politics of African Anticolonial Archive (2017) quite inspiring and appealing as a way to envision what knowledge cultivation might look like. el‐Malik sees curating as ‘collecting materials and organizing according to a set of meaningful (…) as an act of contemporary politics’ even (el‐Malik, 2017, pp. 40–42).…”

“…(…). The process of curating then is one that is alive with possibility’ (el‐Malik, 2017, p. 50). Pedagogically, the image of curation can be a powerful alternative to guiding students to find that ‘gap in the literature’.…”

“…Singh (2018) points to Unthink[ing] Mastery ; Azoulay (2019) to thinking about Potential History and how this relates to Unlearning Imperialism . I then turn to the generative potential of approaches such as Connected Sociologies (Bhambra, 2014), epistemic Blackness , re‐membering (Ndlovu‐Gatsheni, 2018; Stack, 2017), and curation (el‐Malik and Kamola, 2017) to illustrate the method(ological) implication of connecting the desire to take Anticolonial Social Thought serious to our disciplines. So, rather than offer a ‘correct’ or single alternative anticolonial way, the paper explores the pluriversally inspired method(ological) avenues that appear when we commit to thinking about what happens after inclusion when the goal is decolonisation or thinking against empire .…”