Virtual Poetry Reading

Remembering Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Négritude Movement

Sunday October 10, 2021 – 2pm EST

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84532069956?pwd=c2VzQWMrWnN6a3oxR3ZvaVVEWS93UT09

Meeting ID: 845 3206 9956, Passcode: 704102

Léopold Sédar Senghor (10/9/1906 – 12/20/2001) and the Négritude Movement

In May 1935, the word ‘Négritude’ appeared for the first time in the only issue of the literary magazine L’Etudiant noir, edited by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas. Négritude was defined it as “the simple recognition of the fact that one is black” and transcended the borders of the black Francophone literary world.

Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka countered the idea with his famous quote, “A tiger does not shout its tigritude, it pounces.”

Léopold Sédar Senghor was president of the Republic of Senegal from 1960 to 1981 and Africa’s most famous poet. His poetry, alive with sensual imagery, contrasts the lushness and wonder of Africa’s past with the alienation and loss associated with assimilation into European culture. Ideologically an African socialist, he was the major theoretician of Négritude and the founder of the Senegalese Democratic Bloc party, was the first African elected as a member of the Académie française and won the 1985 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Négritude is a framework of critique and literary theory developed during the 1930s, aimed at raising and cultivating “Black consciousness”. Drawing on a surrealist style their work often explored the experience of diasporic being, asserting ones’ self and identity, and ideas of home, home-going and belonging and inspired the birth of many movements across the Afro-Diasporic world, including Afro-Surrealism, Creolite in the Caribbean, and black is beautiful in the United States.

This is a dual language anthology in collaboration with the Alliance Francaise de Philadelphie.

Join us as contributors to this new Moonstone Anthology read their work.