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Contents
editorial
KEVIN DAVIDSON
“Soulbrother #1”
TESHOME GABRIEL
Ruin and The Other: Towards a Language Of Memory
MLADEN DOLAR
Singing in Pursuit of the Object Voice
Theme Graham Newcater
STEPHANUS MULLER
Sapphires and serpents: In Search of Graham Newcater
ARYAN KAGANOF
Of Fictalopes and Jictology (2018)
MEGAN-GEOFFREY PRINS
Toccata for Piano (2012): The gift of newness
OLGA LEONARD
The Leonard Street Meetings (2008-2012)
ARYAN KAGANOF
Her first concert - 15 October 2011
STEPHANUS MULLER & GRAHAM NEWCATER
Interview (2008, transcribed 2010)
AMORÉ STEYN
The Properties of the Raka Tone Row as seen within the Context of other Newcaterian Rows
STEPHANUS MULLER
The Island
GRAHAM NEWCATER
CONCERTO in E Minor Op. 5 (1958)
ARNOLD VAN WYK
A Letter from Upper Orange Street, 14th June 1958
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Concert Overture Op. 8 (1962-3)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Variations For Orchestra Op 11 (1963)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Nr.1 Klange An Thalia Myers (1964)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Allegretto e Espressivo (1966)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Variations de Timbres (1967)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
String Quartet (1983/4)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Songs of the Inner Worlds (1991)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
ETUDE I For Horn with Piano Accompaniment (2012)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
ETUDE II For Horn with Piano Accompaniment (2012)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
SONATINA for Pianoforte (2014)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
CANTO for Pianoforte (2015)
LIZABÉ LAMBRECHTS
The DOMUS Graham Newcater Collection Catalogue
galleri
TAFADZWA MICHAEL MASUDI
Waiting For A Better Tomorrow
ILZE WOLFF
Summer Flowers
NIKKI FRANKLIN
Sans Visage
BAMBATHA JONES
Below the Breadline
TRACY PAYNE
Veiled
STAN ENGELBRECHT
Miss Beautiful
ALEKSANDAR JEVTIĆ
We Are The Colour of Magnets and also Their Doing
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Augenmusik & Some Tarot Cards
EUGENE SKEEF
Monti wa Marumo!
borborygmus
PASCALE OBOLO
Electronic Protest Song As Resistance Through the Creation of Sound
AXMED MAXAMED & MATHYS RENNELA
A Conversation on the Bleaching of Techno: How Appropriation is Normalized and Preserved
FANA MOKOENA
A problem of classification
PHIWOKAZI QOZA
Choreographies of Protest Performance:
MASIXOLE MLANDU
On Fatherhood in South Africa
VULANE MTHEMBU
We are ancestors in our lifetime – AI and African data
TIMBAH
All My Homies Hate Skrillex – a story about what happened with dubstep
TETA DIANA
Three Sublime Songs
LAWRENCE KRAMER
Circle Songs
NEIL TENNANT
Euphoria?
frictions
LYNTHIA JULIUS
Vyf uit die Kroes
NGOMA HILL
This Poem Is Free
MSIZI MOSHOETSI
Five Poems
ABIGAIL GEORGE
Another Green World
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships
RIAAN OPPELT
The Escape
DIANA FERRUS
Daai Sak
KUMKANI MTENGWANA
Two Poems
VADIM FILATOV
Azsacra: Nihilism of Dancing Comets, The Destroyer of the Destroyers
claque
ZAKES MDA
Culture And Liberation Struggle In South Africa: From Colonialism To Apartheid (Edited By Lebogang Lance Nawa)
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The Promise of genuine literary stylistic innovation
ZUKISWA WANNER
[BR]OTHER – Coffee table snuff porn, or...?
SEAN JACOBS
Davy Samaai The People's Champion
KNEO MOKGOPA
I Still See The Sun/ The Dukkha Economy
CHRISTINE LUCIA
Resonant Politics, Opera and Music Theatre out of Africa
ARI SITAS
The Muller’s Parable
ZIMASA MPEMNYAMA
CULTURE Review: The Lives of Black Folk
RIAAN OPPELT
Club Ded: psychedelic noir in Cape Town
DYLAN VALLEY
Nonfiction not non-fiction (not yet)
DEON MAAS
MUTANT - a crucial documentary film by Nthato Mokgata and Lebogang Rasethaba
GEORGE KING
Unknown, Unclaimed, and Unloved: Rehabilitating the Music of Arnold Van Wyk
THOMAS ROME
African Art As Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, And The Idea Of Negritude. By Souleymane Bachir Diagne.
SIMBARASHE NYATSANZA
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Making Africa visible in an upside-down World
ekaya
BRIDGET RENNIE-SALONEN & YVETTE HARDIE
Creating a healthy arts sector ecosystem: The Charter of Rights for South African Artists
KOPANO RATELE
What Use Would White Students Have For African Psychology?
NICKI PRIEM
The Hidden Years of South African Music
INGE ENGELBRECHT
“Die Kneg” – pastor Simon Seekoei in conversation.
SCORE-MAKERS
Score-making
off the record
BARBARA BOSWELL
Writing as Activism: A History of Black South African Women’s Writing
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
MUSIC AS THE GOSPEL OF LIBERATION: Religio-Spiritual Symbolism and Invocation of Martyrs of Black Consciousness in the Azanian Freedom Songs
IGNATIA MADALANE
From Paul to Penny: The Emergence and Development of Tsonga Disco (1985-1990s) Pt.2
ADAM GLASSER
In Search of Mr. Paljas
TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR
Censorship, Film Festivals and the Temperature at which Artworks and their Creators Burn
PATRIC TARIQ MELLET
The Camissa Museum – A Decolonial Camissa African Centre of Memory and Understanding @ The Castle of Good Hope
IKERAAM KORANA
The Episteme of the Elders
OLU OGUIBE
Fela Kuti
MICHAEL TAUSSIG
Walter Benjamin’s Grave
ANTHONY BURGESS
On the voice of Joyce
feedback
FRÉDÉRIC SALLES
This is not a burial, it’s a resurrection : Cinema without the weight of perfection.
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Social Media Responses to herri 5
the selektah
boeta gee
Hoor Hoe Lekker Slat’ie Goema - (An ode to the spirit of the drum)
PhD
MARY RÖRICH
Graham Newcater's Orchestral Works: Case Studies in the Analysis of Twelve-Tone Music
hotlynx
shopping
contributors
the back page
DANIEL MARTIN
Stuttering From The Anus
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THOMAS ROME

African Art As Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, And The Idea Of Negritude. By Souleymane Bachir Diagne.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne, currently Professor of French and of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York, is the epitome of the cross-disciplinary public intellectual, rare as that role is in the United States today. Trained in Paris by Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, and Bernard Pautrat, Diagne was early on a specialist in formal logic, the history of mathematics, and epistemology. But he has become a beacon of cross-cultural dialogue in our world of permeable physical and intellectual borders and the Internet. 

Diagne’s African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, reviewed here, was first published in English translation ten years ago. (Its original French title was Léopold Sédar Senghor: L’art africain comme philosophie.) Diagne’s more recently published autobiography, Le fagot de ma mémoire (‘The Kindling-Wood Bundle of My Memory’)(2021), vividly documents his personal trajectory from Senegal to France to the United States and his engagement with major thinkers at each stop, beginning with Senghor (1906-2001), Senegal’s ‘poet-president’ and co-founder of the immensely influential – equally controversial – Negritude movement in the 1960s.

Old World Senegal’s contributions to New World effervescence are nothing short of awe-inspiring, from the modern nation’s early days of Senghor and Mamadou Dia (who, after being jailed by Senghor, became one of Africa’s most persuasive writers on Islam and modernity, and on the application of the ideals of socialism to African societies) to the current ethos of planetary stars Youssou N’Dour or Sadio Mané. In just these past few days, there has emerged a remarkable wave of worldwide acclaim for the literary talent of the 2021 Prix Goncourt laureate, thirty-one-year-old Mohamed Mbougar Sarr.  

Through a South African lens, the Senegalese government’s instrumental role in fostering secret negotiations in Dakar during the late apartheid years that contributed mightily to the eventual transfer of state power out of the apartheid government’s hands may be ‘news’ to Born Frees but is another poignant example of the country’s longstanding soft power influence in Africa and beyond.

A singular aspect of Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s genius lies in his ‘bundling’ of the intellectual energies of a profoundly religious culture with a concomitant Senegalese zeal for universal values, for a respect of the human person. In this, he draws upon both classic Senghorian inspiration and Sufi Islam. In African Art as Philsophy, Diagne’s touchstone is the French-Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), classmate of Jean Jaurès and Émile Durkheim at France’s elite École Normale Supérieure, where Diagne also completed his philosophical studies.

Though seminal amongst some philosophers, Bergson was a somewhat forgotten figure after the Second World War in the larger academic world, until Gilles Deleuze revived interest in his work with the 1991 publication of his Bergsonism. Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s Postcolonial Bergson (2019) extended Diagne’s ideas from African Art as Philosophy. ‘Bergsonian philosophy’, he had written in the earlier work, ‘has truly marked the end of a paradigm’: namely, the model of a ‘closed world’ impervious to the flux of time that had governed Western thought since Aristotle. Impervious, also, to ‘the eye’s reason’, as Senghor framed it. Bergson’s Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1989) opened new vistas for Souleymane Bachir Diagne, who sought and found, in the linkages between Senghor and Bergson, a ‘rehabilitation of intuition’ anchored in Bergsonian conceptions of time. Diagne opines that this took on ‘crucial importance in Senghor’s thought’.

Diagne proceeds to survey a vast horizon of critical readings of Negritude, from Sartre (‘Black Orpheus’ [1948, a preface to an anthology of Black writing in French, edited by Senghor himself]) to Teilhard de Chardin, and running through the likes of Paul Valéry, and the art critic Pierre Schneider, whom Senghor had quoted approvingly to the effect that

‘[a]rt founded on intelligence identifies things; art founded on emotion identifies with things. The work of art is no longer a discourse on its object, rather, a dialogue with it’.

For all of his contradictions both as a politician and as a thinker, it is indisputable that Léopold Sédar Senghor was – and is – one of the most important African philosopher-artists in modern times.

Léopold Sédar Senghor

Souleymane Bachir Diagne writes with exhaustive erudition and an alluring verve. Here in African Art as Philosophy, he lays bare, through the uncanny intimacy of a philosophical method he seems uniquely born to have perfected vis-à-vis of a national (even Pan-African) hero, the fundamental symbiosis between art and philosophy that is unseen by most.

Translated by Chike Jeffers. Seagull Books, University of Chicago Press, 2011

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