In Materializing Imaginaries in Senegal, Fatoumata Seck shows how cultural revolutionary projects in Senegal and beyond in the 1960s shaped African literature, cinema, and intellectual thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. She charts an intellectual and literary history that positions Global 1968 as a defining moment in modern African literature. Seck analyzes African literature of this period through the prism of creative dissidence, revolutionary fervor, and cultural experimentation. Seck examines the role of African students and intellectuals in forging decolonizing aesthetics underpinned by pan-African and internationalist solidarities of the 1960s. She traces the presence of these revolutionary projects in African letters, illuminating how revolutionary imaginaries sediment and remain as latent possibilities, while also reframing the emergence and reception of works by figures such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop, David Mandessi Diop, Aminata Sow Fall, Ousmane Sembène, Awa Thiam, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Ken Bugul, Boubacar Boris Diop, and others. In so doing, Seck demonstrates that unfulfilled revolutions do not prevent the materialization of revolutionary imaginaries.
Format: Hardback
CONTRIBUTORS: Fatoumata Seck
EAN: 9781478034391
COUNTRY: United States
PAGES: 344
WEIGHT: 572 g
HEIGHT: 229 mm
PUBLISHED BY: Duke University Press
DATE PUBLISHED: 2026-12-08
CITY:
GENRE: LITERARY CRITICISM / African, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Cultural & Ethnic Studies / African Studies, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Activism & Social Justice
WIDTH: 152 mm
SPINE:
Book Themes:
Africa, Literature: history and criticism, Social discrimination and social justice, Ethnic studies, Political activism / Political engagement
Fatoumata Seck is Assistant Professor of French and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature at Stanford University.