The DFR Lettres et Sciences Humaines is organising a conference on Thursday 12 March 2020 from 6pm in amphitheatre A on the Troubiran campus, entitled "Léopold Sédar Senghor: l'héritage d'un penseur, poète et politique" (Léopold Sédar Senghor: the legacy of a thinker, poet and politician). The lecture will be given by Denis Assane Diouf, Senior Lecturer in written African literature at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar.
Poet, thinker and politician in one, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906 - 2001) lived through the twentieth century as a "sound echo" of its confrontations and transformations. His aesthetic options, marked by the seal of hybridity, his dialectical thinking - rootedness, openness and symbiosis - and his political choices as the first president of a young, newly independent nation, Senghor wanted them to be at "man's level", not just that of the black man.
In the light of current world history, and particularly that of Africa, revisiting and questioning his multi-dimensional work, "without vain sentimentality or eloquent demagoguery", as he himself would say, is of twofold interest: on the one hand, to mark out the labyrinth of globalisation with the help of "Senghor's thread", and on the other, to disseminate the thoughts and aesthetics of one of the major black writers in order to protect him against the incomprehension of contemporaries and the oblivion of generations.
A few words about the speaker
Denis Assane Diouf is a senior lecturer in written African literature in the Department of Modern Literature in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, and a member of the African Studies Laboratory in the Arts, Cultures and Civilisations (ARCIV) doctoral school.
With an initially classical academic background (Diplôme d'Études Approfondies (DEA) and Maitrise de Lettres Classiques), Mr Diouf subsequently became interested in African literature, specifically the poetry of Senghor, of which he is a specialist. He defended a doctoral thesis entitled "Léopold Sédar Senghor, poète des interchanges culturels" at the Laboratoire des Études Africaines of the École Doctorale Arts, Cultures, Civilisations.
A former boarder at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Dakar, he taught literature for over a decade at the Lycée Djignabo in Ziguinchor (southern Senegal) before becoming a travelling educational adviser and French trainer at the Centre Régional de Formation des Personnels de l'Education in the same inspectorate of the Ziguinchor Academy.
