Situating Senghor: African Hospitality and Human Solidarity Available to Purchase

This chapter situates Léopold Sédar Senghor in relation to existing scholarship and his activities during World War II. It discusses the impact that his time in German POW camps had on his writing and thinking about how African cultural specificity, transcontinental hospitality, and human solidarity are related. Through an analysis of the poems collected in Hosties Noirs, the chapter introduces Senghor’s distinctive relationship to France—a future-oriented vision of the plural society and democracy France could become rather than the imperial state it was. The chapter concludes by reading Senghor’s wartime writings in relation to Emmanuel Levinas’s and Jacques Derrida’s thinking about cosmopolitanism and hospitality.