"This translation and critical edition offers the first comprehensive English-language collection of writings on African aesthetics and philosophy by Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001), the first president of Senegal and major theoretician of Negritude, a movement of African and Caribbean intellectuals and artists in the 1930s. It brings together over twenty essays published in the five-volume series Liberté published in Paris by Le Seuil between 1964 and 1993, on topics that include African philosophy, ontology, and religion; African art and aesthetics; African culture, society, and civilization; African literature, languages, and linguistics. Across these essays, Senghor articulates his theory of Negritude as a philosophy, ethics and aesthetics in action-grounded in African worldviews. Beyond Negritude, key concepts include métissage or cultural hybridity, the "dialogue of cultures," and the "Civilization of the Universal." In his work, Senghor draws on a wide range of historical, philosophical, cultural, literary, and linguistic examples-from Africa, Europe, North America, and Asia. He reflects on questions that remain urgent and relevant today, including conceptions of Blackness, Africanness, and existential freedom. Taken together, these essays reveal Senghor to be a complex and wide-ranging thinker and a key figure in African intellectual history as well as decolonial thought more broadly. Accompanied by a translators note and robust critical introduction, the volume is organized into three parts: a first part on Negritude as an African humanism; a second part on Negritude, aesthetics, and philosophy; a third part on Negritude, métissage and the "dialogue of cultures.

""-- Provided by publisher.