Ecologies of Knowledge | Re-Reading Senghor: A Roundtable Discussion

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ABOUT THE EVENT: "Re-reading Senghor," was a roundtable discussion convened by Felwine Sarr, the Anne-Marie Bryan Chair in French and Francophone Studies at Duke University. This gathering looked at the work of poet, writer, and former Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, which follows the themes of culture, emancipation, vital impulse, and political philosophy. The group examined why we re-read Senghor today and how his thoughts can help us rethink critical contemporary issues.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS:
• Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Professor of French and Philosophy, and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University
Reading: "On the Civilization of the Universal"
• Fatoumata Seck, Assistant Professor of French and Italian at Stanford University
Reading: "Senghorian Negritude as Ideological Independence"
• Beata Stawarska, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon
Reading: "Senghor's Relational Ontology"
• Cheikh A. Thiam, Professor of English and Black Studies at Amherst College
Reading: "Negritude, Endogeneity, and Decolonial African Studies"
On the Entanglement Project at Duke-FHI: Climate catastrophe cannot be thought outside of the context of empire and the forms of racialization central to global capitalism, including the degradation of peoples, ecosystems and lands facilitated by states in the global North. Threats to the very existence of the planet and all its inhabitants result from this genocidal global development project, yet the effects are being borne more grotesquely by those who live in the global South. Environmental justice efforts that overlook the longue durée trajectory of the historical operations of capitalism, and the raciality that affixes a disproportionate burden onto ex-colonized areas of the planet and its inhabitants, fall short of pointing us in a direction of systemic and just change.
ECOLOGIES OF KNOWLEDGES is part of The Entanglement Project, a multi-stranded initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Ecologies of Knowledges will create spaces of conversation around two main ideas: emancipation and dignity. This series of events will seek to articulate a political economy of dignity, attending to its philosophical ground and concrete outcomes (e.g. in terms of rights, well-being, care, universal income). Through panels, workshops, and film screenings, we will ask how African philosophy might contribute to the re-institution of life and the concretization of dignity. Ecologies of Knowledges is convened by Felwine Sarr (French and Francophone Studies, Duke).