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Against ‘Terrenism’: Léopold Sédar Senghor, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Fear of a De-spiritualised Earth

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Abstract

In 1961 Négritude poet and Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor organised a conference entitled ‘Construire la Terre’ (Building the Earth), which was inspired by the work of the French geologist, palaeontologist, philosopher and Catholic priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. What Senghor attempted in his speech could be described as an attempt at imagining African post-independence politics through geological dimensions. This chapter looks at the political issues with Senghor’s vision of planetary development and compares it with today’s desires for ‘ancestral geographies’ across the political spectrum.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Janet G. Vaillant suggests that Dia’s rural economic reform was abandoned after Dia’s imprisonment, ‘not because it was a failure but probably because it showed signs of being too successful’ (1990: 316): it was working against Senegalese/French elite interests (see also Wilder 2015: 236).

  2. 2.

    Simone Weil attempted to draft guidelines for post-war France, which appeared as ‘The Need for Roots’ (2005).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Angela Last

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  1. Angela Last
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Correspondence to Angela Last .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Adam Bobbette

  2. Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Amy Donovan

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Last, A. (2019). Against ‘Terrenism’: Léopold Sédar Senghor, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Fear of a De-spiritualised Earth. In: Bobbette, A., Donovan, A. (eds) Political Geology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98189-5_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98189-5_7

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-98188-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-98189-5

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