Interruptive discourses: Léopold Senghor, African Emotion and the poetry of politics

This paper suggests that Senghor's political and poetic work can be understood as connected to his position as a sophisticated critical thinker. In order to move past a hasty rejection of his work, one might analyse Senghor's work as part of the more serious anti-colonial, epistemological activism that emerges in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that, for Senghor, politics is an art of interrupting discursive closures. I characterize Senghor's thinking as focused on epistemological questions, a recognition of the embeddedness of these questions in everyday political decision-making, and an awareness of the way his own thinking develops over time. I examine Senghor's On African Socialism in order to unpack the nuances in his approach. In thinking about international politics and the legacy of colonialism, I suggest that Senghor was successful in keeping open discursive closures and that from him we can learn how to prioritize the critical analysis that the development of critical questions entails.