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Epistemologies from the Global South argues that the pervasiveness of the modern paradigm and its corollary, the colonial matrix of power, have led scholars of Negritude to think of Léopold Sédar 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, Cheikh Thiam reads Negritude through the prism of endogenous African world views without the filter of the modern Western paradigm.
The Africa-centred perspective that Thiam adopts leads him to postulate that Negritude functions as an Africa-centred philosophy that offers a groundbreaking critique of the limits of coloniality. He argues, in turn, that since Negritude is one of the most important intellectual interventions in Africana studies, reading it from an Africa-centred perspective will necessarily have repercussions on the ways we think of post-Negritude Africana scholarship. In this light, he explores the ways a decolonial reading of Negritude can clarify, nuance or even expand more or less pivotal interventions in the discipline of Africana studies that have developed in contradistinction to Negritude, namely, Édouard Glissant’s ‘Poetics of Relation’, Paul Gilroy’s theory of the Black Atlantic and Alain Mabanckou’s conception of a more inclusive French Republic.
Cheikh Thiam is a Professor of English and Black Studies at Amherst College and the author and editor of several volumes on Negritude and African philosophy and literature, including Return to the Kingdom of Childhood: Re-envisioning the Legacy and Philosophical Relevance of Negritude, the first book-length study of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s theory of Negritude as philosophy.
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