Leopold Sedar Senghor lived a remarkable life that spanned nearly the entire twentieth hundred years and embodied many of its contradictions.

Leopold Sedar Senghor lived a remarkable life that spanned nearly the entire twentieth hundred years and embodied many of its contradictions. Combining memories of his childhood in coastal Senegal, where he was born in 1906 with the discipline of his classical French education, a passion for African saws and rhythms, and a fascination for the writings of Saint-John Perse Senghor made unique literary and philosophical contributions to the world of art. When he and Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, and a coterie of young colleagues discovered the ethnological writings of Leo Frobenius in the Paris of the 1930 recently made known life was breathed into the universal of "civilization," so central to the French cultural legacy. Their visions of Negritude became not solely the foundation of an African cultural philosophy and aesthetics further also a pathway to the redefinition of the universal in its valorization of African identity within the canons of the West. In his verse and copious critical writings, Senghor demonstrated and transcended the resonances of Negritude with an ideal of the harmony of what V Y Mudimbe, in The Invention of Africa, called a "unitary universe."

From his pivotal organizational part in the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris to his personal triumph in sponsoring the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts in Senegal, Senghor bring forward his aesthetic and cultural principles into practice as a way of developing and showcasing the arts and literature of Africa and the African diaspora. During the early years of his presidency in Senegal, he devot above a third of his nation's package to promoting the arts. Underlying this commitment was the firm belief that the dignity of a nation and its persons depended on a contribution to universal civilization end the arts.

Senghor's powerful metrical composition about African leadership, "Le Kaya-Magan," originally published in Ethiopiques in 1956 foreshadowed near of the political struggles he eventually faced. about critics have commented on the apparent contradictions between his African socialism, with its egalitarian schemes of economic relief, and the philosophy of Negritude, with its exalted ideals of cultural uplift. Senghor, however, saw his political practices and cultural philosophy as complementary extremitys of the dialectic of history and he was unwavering in his commitment to them. now he was also a man of great complexity, whose cultural and political pronouncements carried with them the hard multiple meanings of a poetic phrase, a man who in 1969 was inducted into the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences as a foreign nominee and even now was more French than many of its members.

Art criticism, for Senghor, was based in succession "idea-sentiments," combining the intellectual and the emotional, the paradigms of Cartesian reason with the harmonious flows of an idyllic Africa. In a "discours" in Le Critique africain et son peuple comme producteur de civilisation (1977) he asserted that " each true work of art, whether it is a novel, a riddle, or a caricature, is always a rhythmic image.... A work of art--poem or story, painting or statuary music or dance-these are not ideas further works of beauty. The character of criticism is not to say what it means further why and in what way it is beautiful." Senghor's approach occupies a special place in the argueed canons of African art history, and the filled impact of his theory of aesthetics is at the same time to be explored by a of the present day generation of scholars and critics.

The contributions to African art and civilization made by Leopold Sedar Senghor, who died last December 20 are celebrated here at Bennetta Jules-Rosette and Edris Makward.

BENNETTA JULES-ROSETTE is a professor of sociology and director of the African and African American Studies Research Program at the University of California at San Diego. Her publications include Black Paris (World Pres 1998) and she is publicly working on a book about the life and work of Josephine Baker. She is also a consulting member of African Arts.

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