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Postcolonial Bergson

By (author) Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Translated by Lindsay Turner

Foreword by John E. Drabinski

Pub Date: October 8, 2019

ISBN: 9780823285822

Page Count: 144

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Description: Henri Bergson has been the subject of keen interest within French philosophy ever since being championed by Gilles Deleuze and others. Yet his influence extends well beyond European philosophy, especially within Africa and South Asia. Postcolonial Bergson traces the influence of Bergson’s thought through the work of two major figures in the postcolonial struggle, Muhammad Iqbal and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Poets and statesmen as well as philosophers, both of these thinkers—the one Muslim and the other Catholic—played an essential political and intellectual role in the independence of their respective countries. Both found, in Bergson’s work, important support for their philosophical, cultural, and political projects.

For Iqbal, a founding father of independent Pakistan, Bergson’s conceptions of time and creative evolution resonated with the need for the “reconstruction of religious thought in Islam,” a religious thought newly able to incorporate innovation and change. For Senghor, Bergsonian ideas of perception, intuition, and élan vital—filtered in part through the work of the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—proved crucial for thinking about African art, as well as foundational for his formulations of African socialism and his visions of an unalienated African future.

At a moment of renewed interest in Bergson’s philosophy, this book, by a major figure in both French and African philosophy, gives an expanded idea of the political ramifications of Bergson’s thought in a postcolonial context.
Reviews: “A truly necessary and crucial contribution to philosophical scholarship and postcolonial studies in all disciplinary manifestations.”---Donna Jones, University of California, Berkeley

“Diagne’s gift is a text like Postcolonial Bergson, a model of rigor and seriousness, but also an occasion of real interpretative playfulness and innovation. This book is full of risks in the very same moment that it displays, at every turn, fidelity to texts and their genealogies.”---John E. Drabinski, from the Foreword
Table of Contents: Foreword: Locating the Postcolonial Idea | vii
John E. Drabinski

Introduction | 1

1 Bergsonism in the Thought of Léopold Sédar Senghor | 21

2 Senghor’s African Socialism | 37

3 Bergson, Iqbal, and the Concept of Ijtihad | 57

4 Time and Fatalism: Iqbal on Islamic Fatalism | 77

Conclusion | 95

Acknowledgments | 99

Notes | 101

Index | 117
Details: ISBN-13 9780823285822
Published: 2019-10-08

Trim: 5.000in x 7.500in x 0.000in
Contributors: By (author) Souleymane Bachir Diagne
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor of French and Philosophy and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. His areas of research and publication include history of philosophy, history of logic and mathematics, Islamic philosophy, and African philosophy and literature. His latest publications in English include Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with Western Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2018); Postcolonial Bergson (Fordham University Press, 2019); In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought (with Jean-Loup Amselle, Polity, 2020); African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Other Press, 2023).
Foreword: John E. Drabinski
John E. Drabinski is Charles Hamilton Houston 1915 Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College.
Translated: Lindsay Turner
Lindsay Turner is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of two collections of poetry and has translated books by Stéphane Bouquet, Éric Baratay, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Richard Rechtman, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others.