Postcolonial Bergson

A truly necessary and crucial contribution to philosophical scholarship and postcolonial studies in all disciplinary manifestations.-Donna Jones, University of California, BerkeleyDiagne'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 ForewordHenri Bergson has long been the subject of keen interest within French philosophy, yet his influence extends well beyond Europe. 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 played an essential political and intellectual role in the independence of their respective countries. Both found, in Bergson's work, important support for their philosophies.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 proved crucial for thinking about African art, African socialism, and an unalienated African future.Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor of Philosophy and Francophone Studies at Columbia University. Lindsay Turner is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver.John E. Drabinski is Charles Hamilton Houston 1915 Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College.