Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Cultures de l’Afrique Noire et de l’Occident (1960): Eurafricanism, Negritude and the Civilisation of the Universal

Abstract

This essay considers the impact of the Cultures de l’Afrique noire et de l’occident: première table ronde (1960) on Senghor’s thinking regarding Euro‐African cultural relations between the late 1940s and the 1960s. As the first formal encounter between black African and white European intellectuals, the Roundtable sought to define the idea of the civilisation of the universal as a common cultural basis upon which to build a shared, globally relevant culture. The Roundtable’s advocacy of the creation of a new universal culture appealed to Senghor, who had already embraced the concept of Eurafricanité – Euro‐African hybridity – on economic and political levels. Yet the discussions in Rome and their aftermath encouraged Senghor, by then a leading statesman, to take a more rigorously Africanist approach to cultural relations between the two continents, and gave him a new perspective from which to contest contemporary African culture’s place within world culture.