Negritude, Universalism, and Socialism

It is important to read afresh today the meaning of the Negritude movement without reducing it, as is often the case, to a counter-es-sentialism in response to the essentialism of the discourse of coloni-alism; to realize that Senghor, Césaire, and Damas were 􀏔irst and foremost global philosophers, that is, thinkers of the plural and de-centred world that the Bandung conference of 1955 had promised. Thus, their different perspectives converge as the task of thinking a humanism for our times based on a non-imperial universal, a univer-sal of encounter and translation founded on equality. And, conse-quently, a socialism that is, in its different translations, a force of emancipation, but also of humanization and spiritualization of the earth. That task is still ours.