"This landmark project represents a new opportunity for English-language readers to encounter speeches and writings the former president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor. This collection captures Senghor's evolution from a pioneering poet to a philosopher-king grappling with the complexities of postcolonial identity, governance, and cultural hybridity. Senghor's reflections on topics ranging from linguistic métissage and federalism to decolonization and Francophonie reveal his commitment to weaving African and European cultural threads into a vision of global solidarity. Along with Cesaire and Fanon, Senghor is the other major Francophone postcolonial writer of the independence era. Together, Cesaire, Senghor, and others developed the influential and perennially relevant idea of Négritude--a solidarity of Black identity across continental and diasporic African experience of Blackness. While some of Senghor's writings on this idea, along with many of his poems, have been translated into English, far fewer of his political writings have been. This collection not only expands the conceptual scope of Senghor's writing available in English but also temporal--because Senghor's best-known works are also his earliest, these essays and speeches give a fuller picture of his intellectual trajectory over time"--