In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon delivers a searing critique of intellectuals with “colonized minds”: “The native intellectual accepted the cogency of [Western ideals], and deep down in his brain you could always find a vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Greco-Latin pedestal.” (45) Fanon is alluding to Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001), theorist of Négritude (francophone intellectual and artistic movement that took pride in Blackness), poet, and founding president of Senegal (1960-1980). Senghor, the first Black African professeur agrégé of Greek and Latin in France, was well aware of the apparent tension between cherishing Greek and Latin and his thinking on Blackness. In La Poésie de l’Action (1980), an autobiography in the form of interviews with Mohamed Aziza, Aziza introduces Senghor with a series of “contradictions.” The final contradiction concerns Senghor’s Greco-Roman sympathies: “that this ‘champion of negritude’ would … maintain the teaching of Greek and Latin in the education system of his own country.” (9-10)

Though much work on Senghor acknowledges his classics training, none commits to examining the impact of Senghor’s Greco-Roman studies on his work. This talk presents early findings toward a monograph that demonstrates that underpinning much of Senghor’s work is a lifelong effort to reconstruct a multiracial and multicultural antiquity. Senghor held that in order to believe that an equal, culturally and racially integrated world was truly possible, one must see that such a world already existed. To this end, Senghor studied ethnology, which he combines with his literary analysis to develop a scholarly method for reading Blackness in antiquity at least as early as the 1940s. Though he soon leaves more focused academic work to embark on his political career, he continues to “reconstruct” this antiquity in his theory and policies. In this talk, I will discuss both the ethnological method Senghor develops to study antiquity, and we will look at some of its products, which include theoretical interventions, political and educational policies in Senegal, and readings of Blackness in Greco-Roman literature.