In September of 1960, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001)—poet, philosopher, statesman, and cofounder of the loosely conceived Négritude movement in Paris beginning in the 1930s—became president of the newly independent Republic of Senegal. Over the next two decades, Senghor devoted considerable resources to the arts,1 including the creation of a government-supported cadre of modern visual artists known as the École de Dakar. To date, virtually all who have studied the state-funded École de Dakar, for reasons that are in many ways logical and compelling, have read its core fabric as quintessentially nationalist. This reading first became prevalent among critics who faulted Senghor for subordinating the École's production to what they saw as his Négritude philosophy-cum-nationalist ideology (Pataux 1974, Samb 1995 [1989], Ebong 1991).2 More recently it has been taken up by pioneering scholars who argue generally that École artists preserved their integrity even while relying...

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