Paper short abstract:

This paper rereads Léopold Sédar Senghor’s pastoral poetry through a “decentered” ecocritical lens, by paying attention to how land-use and commercial agricultural expansion figure in his evocation of the peasant-land relation in the Serer groundnut basin.

Paper long abstract:

This paper rereads Senghor’s pastoral poetry ("Chants d’ombre", 1956, "Nocturnes", 1961) through Francophone and Anglophone ecocritical frameworks, by paying close attention to the depicted relation of the Serer people to land and to agrarian capitalism. Specifically, I explore how President Senghor’s poetic praise of the "paysan serer" sits in tension with his abolition of Serer land tenure through "la Loi sur le Domaine National" (1964) and builds upon colonial administrative policies in the Serer groundnut basin. As such, I respond to recent calls for a “decentered ecocriticism” (Egya; 2020), by reading Senghorian poetry for its local history of the “working landscape” (capitalist agriculture, shifting land tenure, and land grabs) that subtends his romantic evocation of peasant-land unity. I begin by discussing the productive tensions that the “pastoral tradition” poses for ecocriticism, highlighting Senghor’s “ecologically ambiguous” (Thornber; 2012) attitudes towards nature: at once extractive and romantic. Thence, I demonstrate how these poems articulate divergent currents in French and Anglophone ecocriticism, principally their “deterritorialized” and “rooted” offshoots. Pairing ecopoetics’ linkage of environmental consciousness to literary aesthetics (Blanc; 2008, Garnier; 2022) with Nigerian scholars’ attention to rural locality (Iheka; 2017, Egya; 2020), I argue that Senghor’s poetics offers an unacknowledged alternative to abstract, cosmopolitan theories of modernity by renowned Senegalese thinkers writing in English (Diouf; 2000, Sarr; 2016). Finally, by integrating contemporary political economic scholarship (Oya; 2005), I consider how historic transformations in land-use relate to the future of food provisioning, exports, and agribusiness in the context of neoliberalism and accelerating climate change.